INBOX INSIGHTS, April 7, 2021: How To Know What to Optimize and Promote - Trust Insights Marketing Analytics Consulting

How To Know What to Optimize and Promote

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How To Know What to Optimize and Promote

One of the things I see marketers do most wrong, especially when it comes to SEO and social media content sharing, is behave randomly. If you ask the average marketer what pages on their company website are most important, what pages they spend the most time optimizing for SEO and sharing on social media, more often than not the answers are either random or arbitrary.

Neither is a good strategy for driving results. Instead, what we should be doing is focusing on two complementary strategies: doubling down on what’s working, and repairing what isn’t. To do this, we need to know what is and isn’t working.

Suppose we want to rank better in Google. What pages on our website should we optimize? The answer is never to just pick a page randomly, or pick a page based on what we feel is important. No, we must make our decisions with data. What data? The simplest way to make that determination would be to look at page traffic from organic search in a tool like Google Analytics:

Simple Google Analytics Organic Search Traffic by Page

In the example above, I could start by picking pages that do well in organic search and fine-tuning them, then looking on page 2 of the results for pages that could do better and repairing/upgrading them.

This method is a great starting point. However, it ignores one critical aspect: just because a page gets a lot of search traffic doesn’t mean it’s traffic we necessarily want. A more advanced method, using machine learning, would look at the pages that nudge people towards conversions:

Above, we see pages that contribute most to conversions. The top pages are pages that I must keep in good working order, constantly upgrading them, tuning them, making sure they’re as good as can be. These are the pages I need to reshare on social media, maybe even run some ads to, because they’re effective at assisting conversions.

Towards the bottom of the chart are pages that help a little bit in conversions, but not much. You can tell by the URL structure (since I keep dates in my URLs) that some of them are older and need a refresh. My personal rule of thumb is that if a page shows up in this conversion assistance analysis anywhere and it’s older than 2 years, it needs to be refreshed.

The key takeaway here is that our optimization efforts should never be random. Using whatever analysis methods and data are available to us, we should be boosting the strong and fixing the weak to be most effective and efficient with our time and resources.

Shameless plug: if you’d like the advanced analysis run on our content, that’s something we do.

In week’s episode of In-Ear Insights, Katie and Chris discuss the similarities and differences between A/B testing and clinical trials. What aspects should marketers keep from the life or death world of healthcare, and what aspects don’t apply to the realm of marketing? Learn some best practices for A/B testing when you tune in.

Watch/listen to this episode of In-Ear Insights here »

Last week on So What? The Marketing Analytics and Insights Live Show, we explored dark website traffic and how to determine what yours was made of.

Watch/listen to this episode of So What? here »

This Thursday at 1 PM Eastern, we’re going to tackle how to analyze and improve your sales and marketing funnel, from setting it up to finding out where it’s most in need of help. Join us on our YouTube channel!

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Data Diaries - Interesting Data We Found

It’s time to see how Instagram did for brands in the first quarter of 2021. How have things changed since we last peeked in?

2021 hasn’t been kind to brands on Instagram. Over the past quarter, we’ve seen a roughly 33% decrease in engagement for brands on posts (photo, video, carousel/album, and IGTV), from a high of nearly 0.4% at the beginning of the year to a decline of 0.25% at the end of the quarter. Why? Based on the smooth, gentle decline, it’s difficult to point out any one factor; rather, it appears the Instagram feed is simply showing content that resonates less with audiences.

So what do we do about this, if Instagram is an important channel to your brand? Three different tactics are available to us.

Cross-channel promotion. This is one of the easiest tactics to pursue – simply share and promote key Instagram posts in other media to boost engagement on them. Wherever you get your highest engagement – including non-social media channels – promote key content. Here’s an example:

Catch an excerpt of our most recent podcast episode here: https://www.instagram.com/p/CNXboonqv7p/ and please like and comment if you enjoy it!

Pay to boost key posts. Also straightforward, and the intended goal of Facebook Inc., to get brands to pay to be seen.
Work with influencers, especially on channel takeovers. Channel takeovers are one of the more effective influencer marketing tactics, especially on Instagram, because it has the effect of temporarily moving an influencer’s audience onto your property. Be sure to combine normal feed posts with Stories; a Stories-only takeover tends to leave less of a permanent imprint.

Methodology: Trust Insights used Facebook’s Crowdtangle software to export 388,645 brand posts from 3,872 brand Instagram accounts. Brand accounts were identified by Facebook and appended by Trust Insights. Engagement is defined as (likes + comments) / size of following at time of posting. The timeframe of the data is January 1, 2021 – March 31, 2021. The date of study is April 7, 2021. Trust Insights is the sole sponsor of the study and neither gave nor received compensation for data used, beyond applicable service fees to software vendors, and declares no competing interests.

Do you want to understand data science better as a marketer? Would you like to learn whether it’s the right choice for your career? Do you need to know how to manage data science employees and vendors? Take the Data Science 101 workshop from Trust Insights.

In this 90-minute on-demand workshop, learn what data science is, why it matters to marketers, and how to embark on your marketing data science journey. You’ll learn:

How to build a KPI map
How to analyze and explore Google Analytics data
How to construct a valid hypothesis
Basics of centrality, distribution, regression, and clustering
Essential soft skills
How to hire data science professionals or agencies

The course comes with the video, audio recording, PDF of the slides, automated transcript, example KPI map, and sample workbook with data.

Get your copy by clicking here or visiting TrustInsights.ai/datascience101 »

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This is a roundup of the best content you and others have written and shared in the last week.

Data Science and AI

SEO, Google, and Paid Media

Content Marketing

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MarketingProfs B2B Forum, April 2021, virtual
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