Predictive analytics has been gaining momentum as a tool that supports business objectives with respect to sales, marketing, customer support and finance. Check out this infographic to know more about the field of predictive analytics and its role in businesses.
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In order to help brands evolve more creatively, Instagram is providing a host of new tools that will give you more insight into user engagement and sentiment about your Instagram content. 
In a rollout spread over the next few weeks and months, Instagram will be making these tools available to all Instagram advertisers and their feedback will be incorporated into the product before it’s released to other brands later this year. These tools for businesses will help you understand the performance of your organic and paid Instagram content better.
According to Instagram, the tools will add value in the following areas:
Account insights – allow you to study the way you are raising awareness using impressions, reach and engagement on Instagram
SEO is an important component of most companies’ online marketing investment. But good SEO is a job half done, because it only brings in prospects. To support your SEO, you need to run Conversion Rate Optimization (CRO) initiatives to see that the prospects you have brought in actually end up doing what you want them to do – buy from you, subscribe to your email newsletter, recommend friends to buy your product, share your content, etc.
Your website SEO will get you traffic. But that’s just the beginning. There is a lot to consider after that. For example:
Here is a 6 step checklist that will help you in your CRO efforts:
It’s important to define your objectives. This is the basis for building your website to make your audience take actions that will help you achieve your objectives. Want them to buy? Set up an ecom store. Want them to leave their contact details? Provide a form for them to fill in. Align your website with your objectives.
Effective CRO requires thorough research. Understanding your audience and their online behavior is crucial for conversions. If you know what they are looking for, what the drivers of their behavior are, then you know what you need to do to get conversions. It’s important to remember that research is a continuous process and its inputs help you fine tune your initiatives to keep conversions improving.
This understanding will help build your web pages so that they contribute to more conversions. A conversion is the end result you want out of every site visit. It’s important that you determine what constitutes a conversion for you: product subscriptions, service sign-ups, collateral downloads/ subscriptions, enquiry calls etc.
The advantage is that everything that happens on your site can be tracked. This creates a wealth of data for you to analyze and see what’s working and what isn’t.
Record current statistics on number of site visits, bounce rates, conversion rates and amount of time spent on site. Mark up the landing pages that were visited the most. Nailing these details will give you a clear view of conversion goals for your website. Focus on strengthening those pages that are falling behind in contributing to conversions. The clearer the conversion goals are, the easier it is to turn traffic into conversions.
Outline your sales funnel by combining analytics, research and landing page optimization. You can visualize your sales pipeline better by knowing the landing pages that are performing the best.
Designing your website and planning the layout is crucial in the plan to lead website visitors on the path towards conversions. Your website should guide the visitor’s journey to conversion. Interlink pages so that it is easier for visitors to move from one page to another. Your CRO strategy should include a plan for developing necessary collateral that will move website visitors from being a browser, to making a choice and finally to a buyer. Your CRO and landing page optimization practices should support improvement of conversion rates.
It’s important to test your pages and see which are working best. Testing has to be continuous because what works tends to change with time and the audience. You don’t want to be in a position where your pages are not working any longer and you don’t know it. There are two important kinds of tests you can run:
Your CRO strategy can start early – even before visitors come to your site. When you integrate social efforts with CRO, you know why your audience is visiting your site and your chances of conversion are much higher than otherwise. Your social media campaigns can prime your audience and bring them to your site, ready for conversion.
What do you think helps improve conversion rates? Have you worked on your CRO? Let us know.
In a blog post on their Developers’ page, Facebook recently announced that from November 5, 2014, they will be eliminating ‘like gating’ for Facebook pages. In the near future, this might be a setback for brands that relied on fan gating to grow their fan base. However, in the long run, brands can focus on gaining relevant fans who also engage with the brand.
Brands can run Facebook campaigns that don’t require fans to like their Page in order to participate in the campaign. You may lose out a few likes by doing this, but you will gaining relevant fans who will engage much more with your content. What’s more, when you don’t insist on Page likes, you might gain other valuable information such as email addresses.
Twitter has launched the Promoted Video feature in beta.
The Promoted Video feature draws on the Twitter Amplify program and provides quality content producers a set of new video tools. According to Twitter, Promoted videos will help brands upload and share videos on the Twitter platform while also measuring reach and effectiveness better.
Twitter has also started offering the ability to run ads with a new Cost Per View (CPV) ad buying model. This means that you are charged only when a user starts playing your video. You also have access to robust video analytics including competition percentage and a breakout of organic vs. paid video views.
Coupled with the traction tweets gain, you can now also garner user attention and engage with them through Twitter videos. Promoted video can be a cost effective tool where you pay only if a user clicks on the video to play it.
What’s your take on these developments? Let us know…
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One of the biggest updates to local search was announced just over a week ago. The last local search update was on 10/2012 (65-Pack Update).
Image source: Mozcast
As Mozcast reports, there has been a decline in local search results over the last week. Linda Buquet, Google Local specialist says that this is a major update and in the future, Google’s local search will have stronger ties to web search signals.
The Pigeon update will bring in the following changes:
Image source: SearchEngineLand
This update is currently being rolled out for US English queries and is likely to be extended to other regions. A complete update of Pigeon would have knee-deep effects…
Looking at this from a SEO perspective:
Although at first glance this update might seem more relevant to B2C businesses, at Position2 we believe it will benefit B2B firms as well. To help our clients (in B2B and B2C worlds), we are rolling out many new initiatives to help with local search. Some of those include:
Have noticed changes in your site’s local search rankings? Tell us in the comments box below.
Stay tuned to Google as the update is still being rolled out!
Contributed by Chetan Rajasekaraiah, Senior SEO Specialist, SEO team
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Google is looking to close the gap between mobile browser and app users in ad targeting.
Till now, advertisers were treating the same consumers as two separate individuals depending on whether they were using mobile browsers or apps owing to disconnect between the two tracking technologies. Google is going to start testing a means of targeting tablet and smart phone users by connecting the separate tracking mechanisms for mobile browsers and apps. Google is using the cookie in a mobile browser and connecting it to a mobile app’s equivalent of a cookie.
Once this connection is established, Google can show the same ads to consumers irrespective of whether they are using mobile browsers or apps. Google can also track consumers who saw an ad in a mobile browser and show a follow-up ad on a mobile app.
This test will help advertisers to run consistent ad campaigns across mobile browsers and apps by using current anonymous identifiers while users can still keep a finger on their privacy controls on Android and iOS. With this capability, advertisers can treat their target audiences as unified groups instead of treating them as separate entities and setting up unconnected ad campaigns. An added advantage is that the capability to trace consumers from mobile browsers to apps makes use of Google’s 2 million+ strong third-party site network and mobile app ad network, AdMob, which can track users and post ads across hundreds of thousands of Android and iOS apps.
Being able to track consumers as one will help marketers target them with more relevant ads and avoid repetition. Often, it so happens that consumers would have seen a brand’s ad while browsing the web on their mobile device and later when they use an app, they end up seeing the same ad. While repetition sometimes helps in better brand retention, it can also annoy consumers.
Google’s ability to show follow-up ads can contribute to more conversions since these follow-up ads are not only new for the consumer, they also prompt them to actually take action after introducing the product to them in the previous ad.
We would like to know your thoughts on this Google move…leave your comments in the box below.
