Many businesses spend a considerable amount of time and money on creating content for their website. However, most of these businesses are not aware that other websites have probably copied content from their website. Does your organization have a system in place to monitor, track and resolve cases of copyright infringement? It should: From a branding, competitive and SEO standpoint, it is very important to spot instances of copyright infringement as early as possible — and settle them.

One common reason websites have their content stolen is top SEO performance for certain pages. When looking for inspiration to write website content, many copywriters, web designers and business owners search Google to find examples of quality copy. Other times, people assume your content is why your page ranks so high in Google — and then they steal your content to place on their website in an attempt to rank where your website ranks.

In this post, we are going to look at how to spot these instances of content theft, create a method to track them, and then identify the tools to get the stolen copy removed.

Spotting Copyright Infringement

The first thing you should do is visit http://www.copyscape.com/, enter the website URL for your home page and run a search.

If results come back, text may already have been stolen from your website. If no results are returned, there still may be issues with content from other pages of your website. You can check other URLs with the tool above. Focus on high-traffic and/or SEO page targets.

To get automatic alerts of possible copyright infringement, invest in a weekly subscription to Copysentry. With this tool, you can enter a list of all URLs that you want tracked. Then, each week you will get an email containing websites that have text that matches the website URLs you are tracking.

Tracking Copyright Infringement Cases

The easiest way to track copyright infringement cases is to keep a spreadsheet with the columns noted below.

When you get your weekly email from Copysentry, these are the steps you will follow:

1. Click the link in the email to visit the website and determine if the website has stolen your copy.
2. Populate the spreadsheet fields as follows:
1. Date Sent

1. Enter today’s date.

2. Date Resolved

1. Leave blank for now.

3. Resolution

1. Leave blank for now.

4. Domain

1. Enter the offending domain in the format of domain.com.

5. IP Address

1. Open a command prompt and ping the domain (ex. ping domain.com) of the offending website.
2. Enter the IP address that is returned.

6. Hosting Company

1. Visit https://www.arin.net.
2. In the top right corner, enter the IP address and click the search button.
3. Enter the hosting company that is returned.

7. Contact

1. From the same step above, look for an email address that starts with “abuse@”.
2. Enter this email as your contact for now.
3. Do a Google search for “hosting company dmca” replacing this with the actual hosting company name.
4. See if you can find a page on the hosting company’s website that describes its DMCA (Digital Millennium Copyright Act) process.
5. You should be able to find a DMCA form or page that provides the DMCA email contact it would like you to use.
6. If you find a DMCA form or specific DMCA email address, update your spreadsheet to track this info instead of the abuse@ email address.

8. Copyscape URL

1. Enter the Copyscape URL.

3. Repeat this process each week as you get a new email from Copysentry.

Resolving Copyright Infringement Cases

Once you are uncovering and tracking instances of copyright infringement, you will want to start the process to resolve these cases. There are four main scenarios that you will be dealing with:

1. Hosting Company Provides a DMCA Form

If the hosting company provides a DMCA form (example from hostgator.com), then you can easily fill out the form and submit your DMCA take down request.

2. Hosting Company Doesn’t Provide a DMCA Form

Most of the time, the hosting company will not have a DMCA form. In these cases, you will need to draft a formal DMCA take down notice and send it via email to the hosting company.

The first thing you will need is a template DMCA letter. This site provides a sample DMCA take down notice. You should create a template Word document containing the letter and then populate it each time you have a copyright infringement case. In the letter, I recommend including the offending IP address and Copyscape URL. Also, I recommend adding a screenshot of the Copyscape URL/page that highlights the stolen copy, and creating a PDF of the final document. Make sure to save copies of these documents for future reference.

Next, create a new email and attach the PDF. You will be sending it to the hosting company’s abuse@ email (or a more specific DMCA email). The subject of the email can be DMCA Take Down Notice for [domain.com]. The body of the email can simply state:

Please find a DMCA take down notice attached regarding [domain.com] hosted at [IP Address]. If you need further information, please let me know. Otherwise, I await your response.

Once you send this notice to the hosting company, you should hear back within a few days. The hosting company should then send your notice to its client and ask the client to remove the infringing content. Once the client removes the content, the hosting company will close the case and alert you. If the client does not remove the infringing content, the hosting company will disable the specific page or entire website.

3. Hosting Company Is Outside the USA

If the hosting company is outside the USA, chances are it will not honor DMCA take down requests. However, many international hosting companies do have terms posted on their websites regarding copyright infringement. You should send an email to the hosting company using the abuse@ email address. In that email, tell the hosting company who you are, the website you own, the web page URL that has your original text, along with the offending website URL and IP address. You can also include the Copyscape URL and a screenshot of the offending page. State that this is a case of copyright infringement and that you are requesting the hosting company to take down the offending page. Many international providers will work with their client to remove the infringing copy or take down the page.

4. Hosting Company Seems to be CloudFlare (or another cloud-based website security application)

If the offending IP address lookup at https://www.arin.net comes back with CloudFlare as the hosting company, you will need to complete its DMCA form to file your notice. CloudFlare is a cloud-based website security application and not an actual hosting company. One of the aspects of its service is to hide the hosting company information. By completing its DMCA form, CloudFlare will send your request to its client and the hosting company. Many times, you will need to draft a formal DMCA notice directly to this hosting company. Other cloud-based website security companies have similar methods to handle DMCA requests.

Once you receive communication from the hosting company, you can update your copyright tracking spreadsheet. As you resolve copyright issues, you should have a cycle where you go back and check old cases to make sure websites did not revert to the infringing content. You can do this by reviewing the Copyscape URLs from past cases.

Protect Your Intellectual Property: It’s Well Worth the Time

Oscar Wilde said, “Imitation is the sincerest form of flattery that mediocrity can pay to greatness.” Others have stolen your content — your intellectual property — because that content is doing a superior job of expressing your value proposition, conveying your brand identity, positioning and selling your products or services, and/or achieving high organic visibility on the Google search engine.

It may be flattering when competitors use your content against you — but it is very, very bad for business. It’s hard enough competing for sales on a level playing field, but when you have to compete against yourself, that’s an obstacle no company should endure. I hope the detailed steps outlined in this article help you protect your content, and thus keep your lead pipeline and order backlog that much fuller.

An SEO agency can become a victim of its own success. Such agencies struggle to produce SEO results as they take on a growing number of new clients and expanded campaigns from current ones. One of the big problems these agencies must solve is how to go about creating a scalable SEO workflow; when agencies lack a scalable workflow, their staff gets bogged down trying to produce work and results for new clients on top of all of their existing clients. The result of this is poor performance, client retention issues, high payroll expenses — or all three. Let’s take a look at how to create a scalable SEO workflow so your agency doesn’t get caught in this trap.

Team Structure

The first thing you need to do is make sure you have the right job roles in place to manage your clients and the workload. Without this, your workflow will fail to produce results. At a minimum, there are three job roles your agency needs to have. Job title will vary at each agency. Here is a general look at each role and the responsibilities:

1. Account Manager – client relationship, campaign goals/progress, expectation setting, content approvals, communication, meetings, reporting analysis along with obtaining access to the client’s website, Google Analytics, Google Search Console and Google My Business accounts
2. SEO Specialist – research and analysis (keywords, on-site, link profile), analytics configuration, campaign strategy, target page/keyword selection, task selection/timing, content ordering/optimization, technical optimization and selecting links for removal
3. Outreach Specialist – content asset strategy/production management, outreach communication and getting client website links published with a varying mix of brand/keyword anchor text

The First Month

To have the best chance at a successful SEO campaign, there are a number of tasks that need to get completed. The majority of these tasks can be done in tandem across different job roles, but some tasks are dependent on other tasks. Below is a list of the most important tasks that, in an ideal world, get completed within the first month of service for all new clients.

Account Manager

• Initial phone call to meet client, present questionnaire and request deliverables from client
• Get access to the client’s Google Analytics, Search Console and My Business accounts (or request the SEO Specialist to set these up if they don’t exist)
• Get access to the client website’s content management system and hosting control panel
• Kickoff presentation to walk client through your SEO process, meet the team, discuss campaign goals and set expectations
• Prepare base road map presentation for inputs that come from the SEO Specialist completing initial research and analysis work

SEO Specialist

• Complete research and analysis of on-site and link profile issues
• Fix any major on-site issues
• Send any links marked for removal to the Outreach Specialist
• Select initial page targets (probably limited to one to four pages based on client’s monthly budget)
• Complete keyword research for target pages
• Complete keyword strategy for target pages (these are your top keyword targets for each target page)
• Create a campaign strategy document
• Optimize target pages (title, meta description, header tags, body content and internal links)

Outreach Specialist

• Complete research and analysis for a content asset to use for link building (see the Content Link Building Playbook for more information on this topic)
• Work with internal or external production resources to produce the content asset
• Build a large list of target websites for outreach that may be interested in publishing the content asset with a link back to your client’s website
• Begin outreach communication immediately after the SEO Specialist has the initial page/keyword targets ready, and the content asset is complete and approved by the client (see this white paper on Outreach For SEO to learn how to improve your outreach skills)

New Client Workflow

This diagram shows the five major steps of the new client SEO workflow:

At the start of the second month of service, the goal should be to have the majority of the client budget being allocated to the Outreach Specialist job role. The focus of the campaign now should be outreaching to websites to get them to publish the content asset with a link back to the target page using a varying mix of brand/keyword anchor text. The longer it takes to get the campaign to the last step, the longer the results will take and the lower your client retention percentage will be.

Resource Utilization Model

Under the above workflow, each new client will have a short-term spike in the Account Manager’s time usage. After the initial onboarding work is complete and the road map is set with the client, the new client will continually utilize a much smaller percentage of the Account Manager. The SEO Specialist role follows the same initial spike, but the ongoing time requirement is an even smaller percentage. Unfortunately, the Outreach Specialist role has the lowest degree of scale and each new client requires an increased amount of resources. The diagram below illustrates this resource utilization model for each job role.

Over time as you continue to layer on additional clients, your resources will become maxed out and new staff will need to be hired. However, each job role has a different level of capacity and scale, so you will not need to hire each job role at the same time. The Outreach Specialist will be the first job role that needs additional resources due to low degree of scale. The next job role to be hired will be the Account Manager. Lastly, the time will come to add additional SEO Specialists, as this job role has the highest degree of scale.

Existing Client Workflow

At this point, new clients should be moving quickly through the workflow to reach the Outreach Specialist, which essentially frees up the SEO Specialist role. There are two points when an existing client would circle back and require time from the SEO Specialist:

1. Top performance has been reached for the target pages/keywords. Outreach time can now be reduced and reallocated to a new set of target pages. The SEO Specialist needs to work through steps three and four to identify and prepare the next set of target pages for the Outreach Specialist to focus on.
2. The client decides to increase the monthly budget of the SEO campaign. This allows for additional target pages to be identified, optimized and passed to the Outreach Specialist to start link building to these new page targets. Again, the SEO Specialist needs to work through steps three and four to identify and prepare the next set of target pages for the Outreach Specialist to focus on.

This diagram illustrates these two points:

The Keys to SEO Scalability: Discipline and Training

Adhering to the workflow described in this post enables an agency to produce a consistently high level of work and results in an environment of dynamic client and campaign scope growth. However, implementing this workflow — and sticking to it — is easier said than done. After having taken a number of false starts ourselves in dealing with the challenges of growth, we have found these to be the most important factors to implementing a scalable workflow:

• Discipline — Leadership must avoid temptations to skirt its workflow rules to satisfy extreme client requests or staffers who tend to veer off course. By setting a good example and making sure everyone in the agency is accountable for successful workflow implementation, agencies can avoid most of the workflow bumps in the road.
• Training — Holding everyone in the agency accountable necessitates training — asking people to do something new without giving them a solid knowledge base and project management tools to support the campaign process will only lead to frustration and mediocre execution. A bit of patience is required, too — practice makes perfect.

As a final thought, growing SEO agencies should make a point of preaching patience to clients as well as to their staffs. A major cause of inefficient campaign management is the continual revisiting of strategy, tactics and goals driven by anxious clients. But clients need to maintain confidence in the plan and be gently reminded that SEO results don’t happen overnight. When clients give successful agencies the room to be successful, that’s when clients realize the greatest success themselves.

Why Your SEO Campaign Is Failing, and How to Fix It

Time and time again, we see companies come to us with failed SEO campaigns. Some have hired SEO agencies, and others have tried to do the work in-house. The majority of these companies have been adding new content to their website, writing blog posts and posting updates to their social media sites. Some are focused on fixing on-site issues such as redirects, H1 tags, image alt text and duplicate content issues, while others are only worried about link building. They wonder why they are not seeing organic traffic increases and more sales leads or e-commerce revenue.

The reality is that they have hired an SEO agency or in-house staff that doesn’t understand how to create and execute a basic SEO production plan. Instead, they work haphazardly, making big changes and minor tweaks that lack impact because they are not orchestrated.

If you work as an SEO resource on the agency side or in-house, it is important that you understand the basics of an SEO production plan. The same holds true if you are a business owner or someone who is responsible for hiring and managing an SEO agency or in-house resources.

To begin, let’s assume we are dealing with a small business that has five services and has never done any SEO work. At a minimum, the website has a home page and a page for each service. Each of these pages has 500 to 1,000 words of content. To make things a little more interesting, let’s also assume that the business hasn’t added any new content to its website since it launched a few years ago, it doesn’t have a blog, and it hasn’t set up any social media sites.

SEO Technical Execution Explained, Without Jargon

1. Link Building Resources

Quality link building continues to drive around 90 percent of SEO results. The first thing you need to focus on: How many hours can I afford to invest in link building each month? Without the ability to allocate a large number of hours per month to link building, your SEO campaign will fail. We commonly see that building quality links can take around eight hours per published link. With an average of 22 working days per month, one skilled, full-time link building resource could build about 22 quality links per month.

2. Keyword Research

For our example business with five services, you will want to conduct your keyword research in six batches. The first batch should focus on home page keywords that describe the type of business at the highest level, while the five remaining batches should be focused on keywords for each service page of your website. Depending on the business, doing keyword research for six topics should take 9 to 12 hours. Google Keyword Planner, Moz, SEMrush and Google Search Console are all good tools to help you build big keyword lists for each topic. A keyword combiner tool also can help speed the process.

3. Keyword Strategy

Having completed keyword research, you now need a way to filter down your keyword list to allow you to choose your target keywords and map them to pages on your website. Without this step, you will be left with an unfocused SEO campaign that will struggle to produce results. Every business is unique, so this process may vary a bit, but here is a simple one that we have used with success:

1. Create a spreadsheet with a worksheet called All and two columns: Keyword and Volume. For the first batch/topic of keywords, add them to this worksheet and pull the average Google monthly search volume from the Google Keyword Planner. Sort your keywords from highest to lowest search volume. Keep either the singular or plural version of each keyword; not both. Delete any keywords with zero search volume.
2. Add a second worksheet called Volume & Intent. From your first worksheet, copy over keywords (and volume data) that have a search volume of 50 or greater. Note that you may want to adjust that number up or down depending on your business and the keyword set you are working with. The goal should be to retain fewer than 100 keywords for this list. Add another column called Intent. Here you will want to manually review and mark each keyword and confirm that the searcher’s intent for using this keyword would be to find a business like yours. General and informational keywords will not have searcher intent. If you are unsure of the intent of the searcher, do a quick Google search for the keyword and see if the majority of first-page results are competitors.
3. Add a third worksheet called Targets. Copy over all keywords from the Volume & Intent sheet that have the Intent column checked. You should be left with a keyword list of fewer than 50 keywords. Sort these keywords by highest to lowest search volume. To give you more insights into these keywords, you can add the difficulty, opportunity and potential metrics from Moz’s Keyword Explorer tool to each keyword.
4. Another thing you can do at this step in the process is take a couple of your target keywords with the highest search volume, and run them in Moz’s Keyword Explorer to find the competitor sites that rank in the first three spots in Google. Take those domains and run them through the Majestic tool and look at the number of referring domains. This will give you a general idea of how many links your competitors have and how many links you need to build to eventually move up into those ranks. At the general number of eight hours per quality link, you will be able to do the math and understand how many resource hours will need to be invested in link building. You can take that number and compare it against your monthly budget to understand how many months it will take you to reach that number of links. If this is a shocking number, you may want to modify your target keyword selection to go after keywords with less search volume, which commonly have competitors with smaller backlink profiles.
5. Each batch of keyword research/strategy should target one page of your website. Repeat this process for each batch of keyword research.

4. Keyword Implementation

Now that you have a list of target keywords for each page of your website, you need to align your on-site content and off-site link building with these keywords. Here is a general guide for implementing keywords into your target web page:

• Title Tag

• Write a new title tag.
• Limit length to fewer than 60 characters.
• Test with Moz’s title tag preview tool.
• Include your top keyword target once, at the start of your tag.
• Work in additional keywords or individual words (as the above limits allow).
• Do not duplicate any individual words.

• Meta Description Tag

• Write a new meta description tag.
• Limit length to 155 or fewer characters.
• Include your top keyword target one time.
• Write in sentence format and include a CTA.

• Headline Text

• Write a new headline to include your top keyword target.

• Body Text

• Edit existing page content to include your top keyword target and additional keyword targets up to two times per keyword.

You now need to have an anchor text plan for your link building. Here is a general guide to follow for a site that has little to no link profile established:

• 33 percent brand
• 33 percent brand + keyword
• 33 percent keyword

Varying anchor text is critical. When you are inserting the brand name, be sure to use variations such as Company Name; Company Name, Inc.; domain.com; http://www.domain.com, etc. When you are inserting the keyword into the above formula, make sure to cycle through your entire target keyword list. Do not use the same keyword every time.

5. Content Asset Creation

In order to build quality links today, you need to be creating quality content assets that you are publishing on your website. These content assets must provide valuable information to a reader. They can be in the form of infographics, guides, contests, presentations, white papers, quizzes, free tools, etc. When you publish these content assets to your website, you will want to include an embed code to make it easy for other websites to publish your content asset with a link back to your target pages, using your anchor text.

6. Link Building Production

As noted in Step 1, quality link building continues to be responsible for around 90 percent of SEO results. You need to have at least one skilled link building resource working on your SEO campaign. Link builders need to be experts in researching publisher websites, crafting personal outreach/pitch emails, tracking their outreach, following up with publishers, tracking links, etc. The single most important element of link building is securing backlinks from high-quality domains with a variation of anchor text back to your target pages that you want to rank in Google.

By creating and executing a basic SEO production plan, you will see success with your SEO campaign. While blog posts, fresh website content and social media activity are nice things to have, you will see that you really don’t need any of these activities to have a successful SEO campaign.

Further SEO Study

• For more information about content asset creation and building quality links from these content assets, check out our Content Link Building Playbook.
• For an A-to-Z discussion of successful off-site SEO, read our Outreach For SEO white paper.
• For guidance on creating meaningful and persuasive business content, read our 150 Business Jargon Fixes article.

Most serious Internet marketers look at referred traffic and direct traffic data from their websites. But do they really know exactly what those traffic numbers represent? There is much more than meets the eye in terms of how Google Analytics buckets referred and direct traffic, and in addition, a number of issues can skew the numbers in ways that make it difficult for companies to accurately assess the effectiveness of their campaigns.

In this technical article, we’ll bring clarity to what the numbers mean — and how you can make the numbers more meaningful.

1. Direct Traffic Composition

Direct traffic is made up of visitors who reach a website without a referral URL. Here are some examples of traffic that will result in a direct source:

• Typing in a website URL in your browser’s address bar
• Clicking a bookmark in your browser
• Clicking a link in a document (Word, Excel, PowerPoint, PDF, etc.)
• Clicking a link in an application (Outlook, Mail, etc.)
• Clicking a link from an instant message
• Clicking an HTTP link from an HTTPS website

The Google Analytics cookie will track the referring source of all visits you make to a website. By default, Google Analytics is set to a last non-direct click attribution model, which means the marketing channel responsible for the last non-direct click gets the credit. So, if your first visit was from Google organic, your second visit was from referral and your last visit was from direct, Google would credit Referral as the source. However, for multi-channel funnel reports, Google Analytics defaults to the first interaction model. Google Analytics has a processing flow chart that describes how the marketing source is determined.

2. Direct Traffic and HTTPS

In August 2014, Google announced that it would start to include HTTPS as an organic ranking signal. This announcement started a migration of webmasters to begin moving their websites to run on HTTPS. Prior to this, HTTPS was rarely used outside of e-commerce checkout pages and login pages protecting sensitive areas of websites. As more websites move to HTTPS, direct traffic will increase due to visitors clicking HTTP links from HTTPS websites. Normally, this traffic would have been tracked back to the referral site. Not having this referral site information is an issue for online marketing. There are a few ways for a website to get around this issue:

• Modify your web server to rewrite the referral URL
• Create a script to rewrite the referral URL
• Implement the meta referrer tag

The issue with these solutions is that the website receiving the referral traffic is the one that cares about fixing the issue, but the website sending the referral traffic is the one that needs to fix it.

3. Direct Traffic Spam

If you receive a lot of direct traffic or see a spike in direct traffic, it is worth investigating to see if you have a direct traffic spam issue. The main cause of this spam traffic is bots. In the old days, bots would not process JavaScript and therefore would not show up in Google Analytics. However, this is no longer true as bots can now process JavaScript. Spammers commonly create evil bots to either attempt to make money or to cause issues with web servers and increase costs for website owners. One study shows that these evil bots account for 29 percent of all website traffic. Here is one way to see if your website has direct traffic spam in Google Analytics:

• Go to Acquisition > All Traffic > Channels > Direct
• Click your home page for the Landing Page
• Set your Secondary Dimension to: Behavior > Page Depth

The first row should show you the number of sessions that reached your home page directly and had a bounce rate of 100 percent. If you see a high number of sessions, it is safe to say that your direct traffic metrics include spam.

Blocking direct traffic spam isn’t easy as it normally comes from multiple IP addresses in different countries, states and cities. It can also come from a variety of different service providers and user agents. Assuming you don’t want to block all traffic from certain countries, states, cities and user agents, there is little that can be done to completely fix the issue. However, there are a few things you can do to reduce spam from being counted in Google Analytics:

• Configure the option under Admin > View > View Settings > Bot Filtering, which will exclude all hits from known bots and spiders. However, we see that this rarely works to combat the traffic spam.
• Examine your web server logs or use a tool like Opentracker to identify IP addresses that are driving spam traffic. Then, block these IP addresses in Google Analytics using view filters. A better way to block IP addresses is to do it at your web server level; if you run Apache, you can do this with a .htaccess file.
• Configure an advanced segment in Google Analytics using conditions to only include traffic to your specific hostname and exclude direct traffic that is specific to outdated browser and flash versions hitting specific pages that you’ve identified as being responsible for the majority of spam.
• If all else fails, you can manually filter out all direct traffic to your home page with a bounce rate of 100 percent.

Without making direct and referred traffic data as accurate as you can, you’ll be using more guesswork than you should to understand how well your Internet marketing campaigns are working. And even if you can’t make the numbers 100 percent accurate, at least you will know what the flaws are, and interpret them in a reasonable and reasonably precise way.

In the old days of SEO, the only thing that mattered was where your website ranked for a list of keywords. It was easy, something all clients could understand and a simple report that all agencies could provide. Today, SEO reporting boils down to the campaign tasks completed along with page-level data on organic traffic and leads (or e-com transactions and revenue). While rankings can be a nice leading indicator to future traffic, chances are the ranking data you are receiving is flawed. If you are an agency sending ranking reports, you are well behind the times and need to make a change in your reporting. If you are a client receiving ranking reports, you need to understand why that data is incorrect and what you should be seeing instead.

The majority of agencies that send ranking reports to their clients are using a web-based software company they pay monthly (based on the number of keywords) to provide them with ranking data. This data can then be accessed via PDFs, spreadsheets or an API. It is white-labeled, making it look like the agency created the reports.

When you do a Google search, your location (via your IP address), device type, search history and other personalization variables are going into deciding what results Google returns — and the order of those results. When different people search Google for the same keyword, chances are they will see different results. Throughout a day for a given keyword, a website is never appearing in the same position for everyone who searches that keyword. So, to say a website is in position No. 3 for a certain date is not possible.

Why Is Google Ranking Data Flawed?

When these ranking data providers report on your website’s position in Google, they are using what they call National Results. Through the use of Google’s uule parameter, they can bypass the location associated with the IP address that their servers are using to scrape the data from Google. The problem with this is: What person searching Google actually sees National Results? The answer is almost no one. This is because Google is personalizing the results for each searcher based on location, device type, search history and other variables. As a result, when an agency (or ranking data provider) reports your website in position No. 2 for a specific keyword, you should wonder how many people actually saw your website in position No. 2 for that keyword.

It is also important to know that while some ranking data providers rely on the uule parameter, others are using proxy vendors to conduct their searchers from IP addresses all over the globe. Then, Google is personalizing those results based on the location that is tied to the IP address.

There are also a lot of agencies that report on rankings, but fail to include the monthly search volume from Google next to each keyword. They normally do this to hide the fact that the majority of the keywords they are reporting on have a very low search volume (10 searches per month, for example) or no search volume at all. If your agency is making claims of first-page results and top rankings, make sure you are seeing true keyword volume and not being shown non-competitive keywords with little to no search volume.

In addition, these ranking data providers are making money off Google data by scraping the results and selling that data. The Google APIs Terms of Service prohibit companies that use their APIs to scrape data, so the companies that sell ranking report data are not allowed to use Google’s APIs to obtain monthly search volume for keywords. In essence, these companies are forced to rely on inaccurate third-party keyword volume.

Where Can I Get Accurate Google Ranking Data?

The only place to get accurate Google ranking data is from the Google Search Console. It is a free service provided by Google that allows you to query organic search impression, click, CTR and ranking data for keywords for your website. The data normally has a couple days of delay and goes back up to 90 days. You can query data for a specific keyword across your entire website or by a specific page. Average position data is returned in decimal format. The reason for this is your website is showing in multiple positions (for the same keyword) to different searchers throughout the day. If an agency is providing you with ranking data, make sure it is in decimal format.

Remember that it is important not to get fixated on ranking data. Instead, you should be looking for SEO campaign reporting that shows campaign tasks completed along with page-level data on organic traffic and leads (or e-com transactions and revenue).

Before Google announced in early 2012 that it was changing all searches to HTTPS, analytics companies and Internet marketing agencies enjoyed having the data that was passed from the Google referral URL when a user clicked on an organic result.

Here is an example of a Google referral URL:

http://www.google.com/url?sa=t&rct=j&q=&esrc=s&source=web&cd=1&ved=0CDcQFjAA&url=http://www.domain.com/&ei=C8RwU4PCOsXy8AHdkYHgAw&usg=AFQjCNFLt0qORSFbQhakJPLp5IQ7w2ajQA&bvm=bv.66330100,d.b2U

Here is a list of the URL parameters that we would commonly see:

• hl = controls the interface language
• redir_esc = unknown
• sa = user search behavior
• rct = unknown; seems to be related to Google AdWords
• q = the query string (keyword) that the user searched
• oq = tracks the characters that were last typed into the search box before the user selected a suggested search term
• gbv = control the presence of JavaScript on the page
• gs_l = unknown; seems to be related to what type of search is being done (i.e., mobile, serp, img, youtube, etc.)
• esrc = set to ‘s’ for secure search
• frm = unknown
• source = where the search originated (i.e., google.com, toolbar, etc.)
• v = unknown
• qsubts = unknown
• action = unknown
• ct = click location
• oi = unknown
• cd = ranking position of the search result that was clicked
• cad = unknown; appears to be a referrer, affiliate or client token
• sqi = unknown
• ved = contains information about the search result link that was clicked (see https://moz.com/blog/inside-googles-ved-parameter)
• url = the URL that Google will redirect the user to after a search result link is clicked
• ei = passes an alphanumeric parameter that decodes the originating SERP where user clicked on a related search
• usg = unknown; possibly handling the encrypted search string
• bvm = unknown; possibly a location tracker
• ie = input encoding (default: utf-8)
• oe = output encoding
• sig2 = unknown

The main use of this referral URL by analytics companies and Internet marketing agencies: tracking of sales leads, e-commerce revenue and other conversions back to the Google organic marketing source.

Tip: If you are one of the companies making use of the Google referral URL for tracking purposes, keep in mind that there is a long list of Google search domains to include in your tracking system. Also, don’t forget to include all of the other search engines into your organic marketing source bucket. Here is a huge list of search engines to consider when tracking SEO conversions.

Today, as the rollout of Google’s secure search continues, we are seeing Google referral URLs that look like this: https://www.google.com/. Those URLs no longer pass any of the parameters above.

To understand the progress of this change, we ran an analysis of over 50,000 sales leads that came from Google’s organic search results between May 2014 and February 2016. Below are the results from this study.

The Presence of HTTP vs. HTTPS in the Google Referral URL

As of February 2016, we are seeing that only 14.34 percent of referral URLs includes HTTP and 85.66 percent includes HTTPS.

The Presence of Parameters in the Google Referral URL

As of February 2016, we are seeing only 16.75 percent of referral URLs includes parameters and 83.25 percent does not include any parameters.

The Presence of the Query Parameter in the Google Referral URL

As of February 2016, we are seeing an empty value assigned to the query parameter in 15.26 percent of all referral URLs analyzed. We are also seeing that the query parameter still includes a keyword in 1.52 percent of referral URLs.

Based on this data, it looks like in the near future we’ll see all Google referral URLs running on HTTPS without any parameters.

Besides addressing privacy concerns, this is a move to keep Google’s data out of the hands of companies that can monetize the data or gain other competitive insights about Google’s search results.

We’ll soon be left with the lonely secure Google referral URL (https://www.google.com), and will be missing all of the interesting data that Google once provided through the referral URL parameters.

We can only hope that Google continues to improve the data that is available through Google Search Console.

With a lead generation website, the primary job of the website is to generate a sales lead for the business. There are three simple but commonly overlooked areas where conversion improvements can be made. Getting these three things right could translate into huge gains in conversions — in both quantity and quality.

1. The Message

• The first thing you need to think about is the messaging for your primary call to action (CTA). What is the overall conversion message you are going to continually keep in front of your website visitors that is going to get them to convert into a sales lead?
• Many websites have a Contact Us page with a form, and that is their primary CTA. This is a very weak attempt to convert visitors into leads. Instead, you should be thinking along the lines of what problem your website visitors are trying to solve, what are they looking for, how can you help them, etc.
• Examples of more targeted CTA messages:
• Get a free consultation
• Request a quote
• Free trial
• Free demo
• Receive a free catalog
• Request service
• Depending on what service or product the business sells, you may have a use for more than one of these. If that is the case, it is a good thing, as you will be able to speak to prospects at different stages of the buying cycle or with different needs.

2. The Conversion: Essential Tips for Phone and Form Inquiries

• For website visitors at the end of the buying cycle and ready to reveal their personal information to start a conversation, you need to make it as easy as possible for them to do so. Every barrier you place in front of them can reduce your conversion rate.
• Here are best practices to follow when trying to get your website visitors to convert into sales leads. Some of them are common sense, but you would be amazed at how many businesses miss them.
• Phone calls
• Make your phone number very visible by placing it at the top of every page of your website.
• If your business has multiple phone numbers, only list one and then route the caller where he/she needs to go.
• Make sure someone is available at all hours during the business day to answer the phone.
• Make sure the person answering the phone has had training on proper phone communication:
• Thank the person for calling and mention the business name.
• Introduce yourself to the caller and ask how you can help the caller.
• Obtain the caller’s name and phone number (to actually capture the lead and make it easy to reconnect if the call gets disconnected).
• Do not send callers into a confusing menu system.
• Do not send callers into a full voicemail box.
• Do not make your callers wait on hold.
• Forms
• Don’t let your CRM desires drive your website form design.
• Keep your form fields to a minimum.
• Keep your required fields to the minimum amount needed to respond (e.g., name, phone, email).
• Make sure all of your form fields (including the submit button) do not extend below the fold.
• Properly size, align and label your form fields.
• Do not use syntax checking on your phone number field(s).
• Keep error validation to a minimum (like making sure the field was actually filled in).
• Keep your error message highly visible and easy to understand.
• Do not use CAPTCHAs on your forms.
• Test your forms in multiple browsers on different devices (try submitting your form without filling in any fields and see what happens).
• Make sure to follow up with every form submission as quickly as possible, ideally under 30 minutes.

3. The Leave-Behind



• Imagine your website’s average conversion rate is 5 percent. Those were the website visitors who:
• Were at the end of the buying cycle
• Connected with your primary CTA message
• Either found your phone number or the website page with the form on it
• Decided to act by calling the phone number or filling out the form
• Successfully navigated through any phone or form issues
• Reached someone at your company who could help them with their need(s)
• What happened with the other 95 percent? They left your website and never converted into a sales lead. While some of those visitors could have been people with the wrong intent (trying to sell you something, searching for a job, competitors, etc.), the majority of them were just not ready to turn over their personal information. These folks were either too early in the buying cycle or your website failed to impress them enough.
• For the visitors who were too early in the buying cycle, there are two things that you should be doing:
• Provide a download that the visitor can take with him/her. This is normally in the form of a PDF and could be something as simple as a multi-page service brochure about your business. Make sure to include your phone number in that PDF, along with links to your website’s home page and conversion form. You will be amazed by the number of downloads this type of document will receive. Make sure your website forces a download of the PDF file and does not simply link to a PDF that opens in the visitor’s browser. You want the PDF file to be downloaded to users’ desktops or documents folders. This way it becomes a file that they can print and put on their desk or give to their boss. It also becomes a file that they can email to any other decision-makers or people in need of the same service or product.
• Launch a display retargeting campaign. This will show ads to visitors who have left your website without converting and keep your business name top of mind as they browse other websites on the Internet.

These two things will go a long way toward helping you chip away at the 95 percent of visitors who don’t want to give you their name, phone or email address.

]]>

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]]> https://www.straightnorth.com/blog/what-do-after-your-website-generates-lead/ Thu, 04 Feb 2016 00:00:00 +0000 https://live-straight-north-2022.pantheonsite.io/blog/what-do-after-your-website-generates-lead/

Make Sure Your Sales Team is Following Up on Leads

as Quickly as Possible



The single most important thing to do after a lead is generated is to have a sales rep contact that prospect as quickly as possible. The faster you respond to a lead, the greater the chance of winning that business.

In order to facilitate a low response time, you will want to make sure that the sales team receives form submissions from your website via email immediately. Same with phone calls; make sure they go straight to a sales rep — and not to a voice mail system or receptionist who needs to take a message and have a sales rep return the call.

The Harvard Business Review conducted a study to examine the short life of online sales leads. It submitted a lead to 2,241 U.S. companies and measured how quickly the companies responded. Here were the findings:

• 37 percent responded within one hour
• 16 percent responded in one to 24 hours
• 24 percent responded in more than 24 hours
• 23 percent never responded at all

In another study by the Harvard Business Review, researchers found:

• “U.S. firms that tried to contact potential customers within an hour of receiving a query were nearly seven times as likely to qualify the lead (which we defined as having a meaningful conversation with a key decision maker) as those that tried to contact the customer even an hour later — and more than 60 times as likely as companies that waited 24 hours or longer.”

Chances are that even waiting an hour to respond to a lead is going to hurt your business. Every minute that goes by after a lead is generated, that prospect is becoming less and less interested in working with your company. You can expect that the prospect is contacting your competitors while he waits for you to respond to his lead. Normally, the company that responds first makes the best first impression.

Use Best Practices for Lead Tracking

In order to scale your lead generation efforts, you need to have internal systems in place to track every sales lead correctly. Without this, you will not be able to understand what marketing campaign or channel is driving the highest number of quality leads. If you don’t have this data, you will not be able to allocate your marketing resources and advertising dollars to the campaigns and channels that have the best performance.

Best practices for lead tracking include the following:

• Implement a phone call tracking system that tracks the marketing source and records all calls.
• Use a hardcoded phone number on your website to make sure you are capturing all phone calls, even the ones that come from the direct marketing source.
• All form submissions and phone calls, at a minimum, need to be tracked to a visitor referral URL and entry URL.
• Make sure your form submissions send emails directly to your sales rep(s).
• Make sure the phone calls ring directly to your sales team and one of them is always available to answer the phone.
• Feed all form submissions and phone calls directly into your CRM and marketing automation platform; have both systems continually sync with each other.
• Validate your sales leads. Make sure you are separating leads from non-leads, and updating your CRM and marketing automation platform.

With these best practices and systems in place, you will be able to capture all of your leads and report back on which marketing campaigns are working and which ones are wasting dollars.

Make sure you don’t let your internal systems get in the way of sales ability to quickly follow up on a sales lead. See our Internet Marketing Lead Generation Ecosystem for a blueprint on how to build a complete Internet marketing strategy that maximizes sales lead generation.

Implement an Email Marketing Automation Platform

Most people think the process of lead generation and sales is fairly simple: a lead is generated, a sales rep responds, a conversation and/or meeting takes place, a proposal is sent and the deal is won or lost. The reality of this situation is actually quite different:

• A high number of sales leads never respond when the sales rep reaches out via phone and email. This can happen even if the sales rep responds very quickly to the lead. Even after the sales rep makes multiple attempts to respond, the prospect never returns the correspondence.
• On top of this, the sales team may get a surprisingly large number of prospects that cannot afford your services.
• Lastly, you have the issue of deals that the sales reps lost to either a competitor or the prospect never making a decision.

When these things take place, most sales reps never hear from or communicate to these prospects again. It is a churn-and-burn model. Take a business that generates 170 leads per month. After five years, it has over 10,000 leads (and email addresses), but the sales reps just keep working on the newest leads. Who is talking to those 10,000 people? Probably your competitors.

Today, email marketing automation solutions (such as Tout) enable your sales team to continue the conversation with all of these people while they continue to work on the latest leads. Over time, as the number of email addresses grows, you will reignite old sales leads and convert them into clients. These systems take a fair amount of upfront strategy and content creation, but after that work is completed, much of the system can be automated.

Make Sure Your Marketing and Sales Efforts are Connected



One reason we created the Lead Generation Ecosystem infographic was to emphasize the interconnectivity of marketing and sales. As professional marketers, we ask companies to make a considerable investment in lead generation marketing campaigns. For companies to get the most out of their investment, the sales follow-up process must be every bit as efficient as the marketing process. Something as simple as answering phone inquiries on the first ring could make the difference between fair results and spectacular ones. Work continuously at improving marketing and sales functions, and lead generation quantity and quality will consistently improve.

]]> The single most important thing to do after a lead is generated is to have a sales rep contact that prospect as quickly as possible. The faster you respond to a lead, the greater the chance of winning that business. In order to facilitate a low response time, you will want to make sure that the sales team receives form submissions from your website via email immediately. Same with phone calls…

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]]> https://www.straightnorth.com/blog/supplementary-ppc-call-tracking-methods-lead-generation/ Thu, 07 Jan 2016 00:00:00 +0000 https://live-straight-north-2022.pantheonsite.io/blog/supplementary-ppc-call-tracking-methods-lead-generation/

The Importance of Phone Tracking



Call tracking is a critical part of a lead generation PPC campaign; without a call tracking solution, your lead tracking and ROI data will be skewed. Furthermore, any optimizations made to your PPC campaign will be based on this faulty data. Plus, phone leads are often the highest quality leads, since callers frequently have complex and/or immediate needs.

While most agencies offering PPC management services know how important call tracking is, many are not aware of issues that can cause call tracking to fail. By understanding these supplementary PPC call-tracking methods, you can improve lead tracking and capture more phone leads for clients.

Call Ad Extensions

Both Google and Bing allow call extensions on their PPC ads. These extensions permit a phone number to be included in the ad text. Most companies simply add their direct phone number to these ads, which means they will not be able to track or take credit for any calls from these campaigns. Here is what you want to do:

• Assuming your call tracking vendor offers the ability to buy one-to-one phone numbers, allocate specific phone numbers to call ad extensions.
• Be sure to acquire one phone number to use in Google and another phone number to use in Bing. This way you can include any phone calls from these specific numbers into your total lead count separated by search engine. The cost-per-lead calculation will be improved by tracking these additional leads.
• Depending on the structure and spend of your campaign, you can choose to apply the same one-to-one phone tracking method to call ad extensions at the campaign or ad group level. This more granular level of tracking will allow you to include additional phone leads into lead counts at the campaign or ad group level. You can then use these increased lead counts in your campaign optimizations, which will provide more accurate data when looking at campaign conversion data and deciding which campaigns to pause or increase/decrease bids.

For more setup details, Google discusses call extensions here, and Bing discusses call extensions here.

Landing Pages and Microsites



In lead generation campaigns, the use of a standalone landing page is very common and normally produces increased conversions over a public page on a website. Standalone landing pages are not linked from a public website or any other page on the Web. Instead, these landing pages are used only for a PPC campaign, and traffic from any other source cannot reach them. Examples of standalone landing pages include:

• A single Web page with a conversion form and phone number.
• A website page that has been copied to a standalone page and improved for conversions.
• A microsite (on another domain or subdomain separate from your website) consisting of a small set of pages (5-10) focused on a specific service offering with a goal of increasing conversions.

If you are making use of a standalone landing page, acquire a one-to-one phone number that can be tied to the PPC source. Then, hard-code this phone number into the landing page in place of your main phone number. This way, if anyone calls that specific phone number, the PPC campaign will be able to take credit for the lead. Your standard phone tracking technology will overwrite this number when better tracking is available. However, your hard-coded number will be called when issues like this occur:

• The visitor is using a browser plug-in to disable ad tracking.
• The visitor has modified his browser settings to disable JavaScript.
• The call tracking vendor has script or server issues.

The hard-coded number will be used in other similar situations, ensuring that your landing pages do not miss tracking any phone leads.

If you have a large media spend in Bing or just want improved tracking, take this one step further by duplicating your landing page in order to track Bing separately with an individual one-to-one hard-coded phone number.

Downloadable Content

Another approach to improve your phone lead counts is to make use of downloadable content. This less common method has been greatly successful.

Assuming this is a standalone landing page for your lead generation PPC campaign, figure out the conversion rate. If your conversion rate is 4 percent, 96 percent of the people who click your ads are not converting into a sales lead. One main reason for this is that many of these visitors are still in the research phase of the buying cycle. They are not ready to give up their personal information and talk to a sales rep. However, a large amount of these visitors will be willing to download something.

• Monitor the number of downloads by using Google Analytics event tracking and/or an internal script that tracks the date/time and IP address of each user who downloads the PDF.
• By using an internal script, you can take all downloads for a month and remove duplicate IP addresses. This will give a unique number of downloads for the month, which can be called secondary conversions and tied to your PPC campaign’s performance reporting.

For a lead generation campaign, we normally like using a PDF. This could be something like a condensed company brochure or a specific sell sheet on a particular service.

Within this PDF, be sure to include a phone number. You will want to acquire another one-to-one phone number that can be hard-coded into this PDF. Make sure this version of the PDF is only used on the standalone landing page. This way, any phone calls from this PDF can be traced to your PPC campaign.

If you choose to duplicate the landing page to track Bing separately, duplicate your PDF and acquire another one-to-one hard-coded number to track Bing.

The Value of Capturing Phone Lead Data



The screenshot below displays details from a client’s lead tracking report. First of all, notice how much worse the “results” would look if phone tracking were not set up properly! Many agencies undervalue their PPC services because they underreport their results — perhaps leading clients to fire them or scale back campaigns that are producing leads quite well.

In addition, note the high volume of secondary conversions. This high number is typical of what we experience, and represents a lot of opportunities for future sales — as well as adding to a client’s database for future marketing efforts.



In summary, combining a primary/secondary conversion strategy with granular, accurate phone tracking helps you produce better results and retain clients.

]]> Call tracking is a critical part of a lead generation PPC campaign; without a call tracking solution, your lead tracking and ROI data will be skewed. Furthermore, any optimizations made to your PPC campaign will be based on this faulty data. Plus, phone leads are often the highest quality leads, since callers frequently have complex and/or immediate needs. While most agencies offering PPC…

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]]> https://www.straightnorth.com/blog/huge-risk-outsourcing-your-lead-generation-forms/ Thu, 10 Dec 2015 00:00:00 +0000 https://live-straight-north-2022.pantheonsite.io/blog/huge-risk-outsourcing-your-lead-generation-forms/

For many websites, forms are the most important element. This is where user interaction, data sharing and lead capture happen. For most businesses, sales leads are the most important part of their business. Therefore, great value should be placed on a business owning the lead generation forms on its website.

Online sales, marketing and technology platforms like Salesforce, HubSpot, Marketo, Wufoo and many others attempt to take the complexities out of building lead generation forms. They tout the benefit of not needing any development knowledge to build a form for your website. Due to this, many businesses fall into the trap of thinking that it is a good idea to outsource their lead generation forms. While a small business may be able to make use of these platforms with little to no effort, medium and large businesses should steer clear. These businesses have more complex needs and should own their online forms. Making a decision to outsource these forms will most likely cause issues down the road, including the following common challenges:

1. Tracking Issues



Many platforms use hosted forms that require the form to run on a subdomain or in an iframe. Since these forms do not reside on the website’s domain, it can become difficult or impossible to configure the necessary tracking codes for Internet marketing campaigns. Without proper tracking, you cannot understand the value of your Internet marketing campaign results.

For example, if a form runs on a subdomain, a specialized setup of Google Analytics is required to properly track visitors across your website’s domain and the subdomain that hosts the form. Another example is when these forms send folks who have successfully submitted forms to confirmation pages that are not hosted on the website’s domain. Since many types of tracking code require the visitor to stay on the main domain, tracking can be broken if a visitor leaves the page/form hosted on a subdomain.

2. Integration

These platforms are very limited when it comes to integration with other systems. You are basically limited to any prebuilt integrations that already exist. Within each prebuilt integration, you are limited to the way the integration was mapped and cannot customize it. For example, say you are using a HubSpot form and would like the form data sent to Salesforce and then pushed into a CRM other than Salesforce. There is a good chance that the integration for that other CRM doesn’t exist.

There are many other reasons larger businesses need a form submission to be pushed into multiple systems like CRMs, ERPs, marketing automation, email campaigns, lead scoring/validation systems, etc. Many times, these integrations do not exist with the hosted form providers and therefore cannot be done.

3. Functionality/Customization



Web developers have full control over every element of online forms, whereas platform-based forms were created by their form builders. Each form builder is limited by the functionality and customization that was conceived when the form builder was developed. Typical limitations include:

• Available form field types.
• Design style and placement of form fields.
• Auto-population of form fields based off previously completed fields.
• Back-end functionality like checking the DNS MX record of an email address field to make sure the domain runs a mail service.
• Your ability to place conversion tracking code from Internet marketing campaigns in the correct place.
• Where your database is stored.
• Your ability to back up your database.
• The ability to capture all form submissions in a database, but only generate an email if the form passes all error validation.
• Control over file uploads, where the file is stored and what can be done with the file after it is uploaded.
• Error validation methods and the design style and placement of error messages.

As this overview shows, lead tracking issues relating to outsourced forms can cause huge issues for Internet marketing campaign management, reporting and ROI (in terms of producing and measuring ROI). While outsourcing seems like an efficient solution on the surface, integration issues can create data synchronization issues that cause errors and require manual intervention that combine to reduce the efficiency of lead generation campaigns. Finally, functionality and customization limitations can result in subpar online forms that cause businesses to incorrectly handle form submissions, discourage prospects from completing them, and in the end, lose sales leads. Creating and managing lead generation forms independently puts you in a much stronger position to maximize lead generation, efficiency and ROI.

]]> For many websites, forms are the most important element. This is where user interaction, data sharing and lead capture happen. For most businesses, sales leads are the most important part of their business. Therefore, great value should be placed on a business owning the lead generation forms on its website. Online sales, marketing and technology platforms like Salesforce, HubSpot, Marketo…

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]]> https://www.straightnorth.com/blog/3-key-things-know-about-ppc-tracking-google-analytics/ Thu, 12 Nov 2015 00:00:00 +0000 https://live-straight-north-2022.pantheonsite.io/blog/3-key-things-know-about-ppc-tracking-google-analytics/

The three key takeaways from this article:

1. Bing Ads must be carefully set up to bucket traffic correctly in Google Analytics.
2. Click attribution is handled differently in Google Analytics and Google AdWords.
3. Google Analytics, while useful, is an imperfect and incomplete tool for measuring PPC lead generation campaigns.

Key Issue 1: Bing Tagging

When results are leveling for a Google AdWords campaign, expanding with a Bing Ads campaign is a great option. (In fact, earlier in 2015, Bing achieved a 20 percent market share.)

Even though a Bing campaign is easy to set up — it can be as simple as importing your AdWords campaign — tracking conversions requires careful setup. The problem: Google Analytics will put organic and PPC traffic from Bing in a single (organic) bucket unless your Bing campaign is properly tagged.

Obviously, if Bing Ads traffic is recorded as organic, your SEO and PPC data in Google Analytics will be useless. Use the Google URL builder to tag the destination URLs of your Bing Ads campaigns, so that Google Analytics can put Bing-organic and Bing-cpc in separate buckets.

Key Issue 2: Click Attribution

Discrepancies in reporting data from AdWords and Google Analytics — sometimes significant in magnitude — occur because of differences in how the two systems treat click attribution:

1. AdWords uses “first touch click attribution.” If a Google user clicks a PPC ad, then comes back to the website two weeks later by clicking on an organic result and makes a purchase, AdWords will attribute the conversion to the PPC ad.
2. Google Analytics uses “last touch click attribution.” In the situation described above, Google Analytics will attribute the very same conversion to the organic source.

When PPC campaigns produce a high percentage of immediate conversions, discrepancies caused by this difference in attribution modeling are insignificant. However, when PPC campaign conversions follow a longer and more complex conversion path, discrepancies can be significant.

Both the first touch and last touch models provide valuable insights for an AdWords campaign — just different kinds. AdWords data is terrific for understanding conversions; Google Analytics data is great for understanding user behavior once visitors get to your website. For instance, AdWords reporting will tell you a particular landing page is producing a 2 percent conversion rate. Google Analytics will tell you 25 percent of the visitors are clicking to a particular product page — suggesting adding more product information to the landing page will improve the conversion rate.

Other causes of data discrepancies between AdWords and Google Analytics are discussed in AdWords Help (at the bottom of the page). They include date of transaction, invalid clicks, cookie expiration dates, imported goal delays, and goal or view name changes in Analytics.

Key Issue 3: Lead Tracking

While Google Analytics provides many valuable insights into the performance of landing pages for PPC campaigns, it has some issues when it comes to lead tracking.

Google Analytics only has the ability to track Goals. For a lead generation campaign, Goals are used to track submissions on a form that holds contact information like an email address or phone number. The only data you can get from Google Analytics Goals is a simple count of how many times your form was successfully submitted and your confirmation page was shown.

The issue with Goal tracking is that it is not lead tracking. You have no way to know how many Goals are truly sales leads. Because Google Analytics doesn’t store the data from the fields of your form submissions, you cannot review submissions and separate your Goals into sales leads and non-sales leads.

Furthermore, Goals are not triggered if a website visitor doesn’t successfully complete your form. You would be amazed by the number of website visitors who attempt to complete a form with 5-10 fields, receive an error, but think they’ve successfully submitted your form and then leave your website. Not only will Google Analytics not track a Goal completion, many times an email won’t even be sent from your website.

To prevent under recording of Goals — and more importantly, losing sales leads — keep your form fields to a minimum, reducing the number of your required fields and having your form send an email on all submissions (with or without errors).

Perhaps most importantly, Goals do not track phone calls, which are highly important for lead generation campaigns. Prospects with a high level of interest, who have complicated questions or needs, or who are more comfortable communicating over the phone than digitally, are likely to call in response to a PPC ad — and these people may well be your hottest, biggest prospects. With phone calls invisible on Goals, companies could grossly underestimate the effectiveness of their AdWords campaigns.

Optimize and Augment Your PPC Reporting for Clear Campaign Evaluation

As these three issues illustrate, AdWords and Google Analytics are excellent tools, but are also complex and limited. Configuring the campaign with proper tagging of Bing Ads URLs and proper setup of Google Analytics Goals will make your data from these reporting sources far more accurate. Augmenting these sources with a solid phone lead tracking system and lead validation system will fill very large reporting holes and give you a more complete picture of your PPC campaign results.

]]> The three key takeaways from this article: When results are leveling for a Google AdWords campaign, expanding with a Bing Ads campaign is a great option. (In fact, earlier in 2015, Bing achieved a 20 percent market share.) Even though a Bing campaign is easy to set up — it can be as simple as importing your AdWords campaign — tracking conversions requires careful setup. The problem…

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]]> https://www.straightnorth.com/blog/how-google-limits-seo-reporting-lead-generation/ Thu, 15 Oct 2015 00:00:00 +0000 https://live-straight-north-2022.pantheonsite.io/blog/how-google-limits-seo-reporting-lead-generation/

Over the last few years, Google has taken a series of actions that limit SEO reporting for lead generation. In this article, I’d like to share important analytics insights we’ve made over this time — insights that indicate SEO data for lead generation is becoming increasingly unreliable.

The Critical Data We Need from Google

To properly report on SEO progress, we need four critical pieces of data from Google Analytics: keywords, rankings, traffic and leads. In each of these areas, we see several deficiencies.

1. Keyword Reporting

In 2011, Google started hiding keyword data from Google Analytics; specifically, what keyword query brought each organic search visitor to a website. A tracking website, (Not Provided) Count, uses tracking data from 60 websites indicating that more than 78 percent of keywords in Google Analytics are “not provided” as of this writing. Our client data shows a much higher percentage.

Google explains the limitation on SEO keyword reporting as a necessary step in providing more privacy to its users. This explanation, however, has been poorly received within the SEO community, since keyword reporting is still available for AdWords customers. It seems to many that protecting user privacy takes a back seat to revenue collection in Google’s business priorities.

In any event, speculation abounds as to how Google’s plans for keyword reporting will unfold. Some believe Google will eventually limit keyword reporting for paid search, while others believe Google will find a way to reverse course and again provide keyword data for SEO.

Our client data and research does not suggest any reversal in trend at this point:

• While we still see some organic keyword data come from Google’s referral URL, it is usually limited to rare instances of Android search apps and other search tools, which have yet to be updated to hide the keywords.
• While there are many blog posts and tools that claim to unlock or unhide your keyword data, they simply aren’t true. Google holds all of the cards in this game and when it chooses to move to keywords that aren’t provided, everyone is on the same playing field.

The next best thing to having keyword level data from Google Analytics is to understand your landing page behavior. Since you know what keywords you are optimizing your landing pages for, you can draw a relationship between your keyword strategy and landing page activity data.

2. Rankings Reporting

Several factors that go into Google ranking data cause results to be in continuous flux, including universal search, personalization based on search history, location, and other variables. We have written about these ranking issues at length elsewhere on the Lead Generation Insights blog. The bottom line is this: Due to the fundamental nature of Google’s search engine design, rankings are relative, and cannot be used as an absolute indicator of SEO campaign performance.

To make matters worse, we see several issues that make ranking reporting, which is imprecise to begin with, even more fuzzy:

• Google Search Console and Google Analytics provide average ranking position data. You would think getting ranking data strategy from Google would be the best source. However:
• You can only obtain a small percent of your targeted keywords. Say you have 1,000 keywords in your keyword strategy — you will be lucky to see 100 of them in these reports.
• All data is an average, due to the constant flux of result positions for different searchers.
• The data reported in Google Search Console is a sliding window of data over an undocumented data range; one day you could look at the report and see your keyword’s ranking data and the next day it could be gone.
• While rankings can still provide an early signal about increases or decreases on the SERPs, the data from Google is very spotty.
• Other tools like HubSpot, Moz and Authority Labs provide ranking data from scraped Google result pages. However, data from these tools can be inaccurate and also spotty. When comparing the results from these tools against Google’s ranking data, you will see discrepancies that are sometimes very large.

The only solution here is to use both data from Google and one of these providers, compare the results against the two (where possible), and look for a trending increase in rank.

3. Traffic Reporting

Like all analytics platforms, in order to properly report on Organic Search traffic, Google Analytics uses a default search engine list.

When a visitor lands on a website with a Google Analytics tracking code, the referral URL is examined. If the visitor came from a website whose domain is on this list, Google Analytics buckets that visitor under the organic search source. If the domain isn’t on the list, it is bucketed as a Referral source.

Here are a few ways that Google Analytics has flawed traffic tracking when it comes to SEO:

• If you examine Google’s default search engine list, you will see that it is very outdated (see the next point below) and even includes domains that redirect to other sites and domains that are no longer active Web search engines. Here are a few:
http://search.netscape.com/
http://www.about.com/
http://www.alice.com/
http://www.pchome.com/
http://www.onetonline.org/
http://www.voila.fr/
http://www.najdi.org.mk/
http://www.szukacz.pl/
http://www.sesam.no/
http://www.ozu.es/
http://www.terra.com/
http://www.mynet.com/
http://www.ekolay.net
• There are hundreds of search engines across the world, and Google’s default search engine list has become very outdated over the years. Here is a huge list of search engines that we have collected over the years. For every visitor that comes from a search engine domain that Google doesn’t have on its list, all of this traffic will not count as Organic Search and instead be listed under the Referral source in Google Analytics.

One other strange issue that we have noticed in Google Analytics is that its default search engine list states “All Google Search domains (e.g. www.google.com, www.google.co.uk, etc).”



However, we see traffic from some international Google properties being bucketed under the Referral source in Google Analytics when they should be under organic search. This issue skews traffic data and reporting:



3. Leads Reporting

Google Analytics doesn’t have the ability to report on leads. Instead, it provides the ability to set up Goal Tracking, which only tracks form submissions and provides a simple count of how many forms were submitted. There is no way in Google Analytics to see the data from those form submissions or know if each form submission was a sales lead.

On top of this, Google Analytics provides no way to track leads that come in over the phone. The only way to get this data is through a third-party phone tracking vendor that integrates with Google Analytics. However, even if you have this setup, you are back to a simple count of phone calls and have no idea if each call was a true sales lead.

Furthermore, similar to the traffic tracking issues above, Google Analytics Goal Tracking runs off the same referral URL check against its default search engine list. Thus, if Google is missing a search engine on its list, the goal tracking will result in a Referral source instead of an Organic Search source.

Other Issues Affecting Tracking

Referred Traffic From Off-Site SEO Content

Since SEO campaigns create content that links to websites, there are auxiliary benefits of increased referral traffic from new sources. Being able to track the traffic and leads from these Referral sources can mean reporting some of these auxiliary benefits to clients.

The HTTP to HTTPS Shift

One other major issue that is happening today is Google’s big push for the entire Internet to move to a secure site running on HTTPS instead of HTTP.

As more and more websites make this switch, traffic and goal data in Google Analytics will become increasingly inaccurate. Today, the huge majority of websites run on HTTP, but Google has started global initiatives to reward sites that move to HTTPS. As more sites move to HTTPS, we will start seeing more traffic and goals bucketed under the Direct source. Any site running on HTTPS that links to an HTTP site will result in that traffic showing as Direct in Google Analytics instead of Referral. Also, the website that sent the traffic will not be available. You can read more about this here.

Conclusion: Emphasize Lead Reporting

If Google reverses direction and adds clarity and completeness to its organic search reporting, Internet marketing companies will be able to provide clients with far more reliable and definitive data and analysis than what can be produced currently.

However, our view is that Google will not be able to reverse direction, or at least reverse it completely. Universal search and personalization are not going away. Privacy concerns figure to grow, not go away. Finally, let’s face facts: Google is a for-profit enterprise, and as such has a built-in incentive to reward advertisers and attract new ones by providing them with precise data and limiting data transparency for organic search purposes.

If this is the case, Internet marketing companies can compensate by putting greater emphasis on lead reporting. Leads, after all, are the primary goal of every lead generation campaign, and it has always been a reporting weakness to ignore, under report, or erroneously report lead generation data. In the end, clients will not particularly care about keywords, rankings and traffic — if they are satisfied their SEO investment is paying off in the form of sales leads.

]]> Over the last few years, Google has taken a series of actions that limit SEO reporting for lead generation. In this article, I’d like to share important analytics insights we’ve made over this time — insights that indicate SEO data for lead generation is becoming increasingly unreliable. To properly report on SEO progress, we need four critical pieces of data from Google Analytics…

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