Welcome to My Blog

Google has been known to change their logo in fun, surprising ways for their Google Doodles, but major changes to the actual search engine results page (SERP) occur far less often. That’s why their recent decision to remove ads from the right-hand side of their desktop SERPs making big news.

What exactly did they change? By removing ads from the right side of the results pages, they’ve decreased the maximum amount of ads you can see from eleven all the way down to seven. This means fewer clicks for folks who advertise on these pages who aren’t in one of the top three or four paid positions — and a potential impact on organic traffic for competitive auctions.

In response to this change, marketers are asking: Does it impact organic search — and if so, how? How does it influence advertising? What can marketers do about the changes?

First, let’s go over what exactly Google changed and why they changed it, and then we’ll dig into the answers to these questions.

The Change: Before vs. After

Before this big change, Google display ads used to show up in three places: above, below, and to the right of organic search results.

Now, with the recent changes, they’ve removed one of those three ad locations altogether: the one on the right side of the search engine results page.

In some cases, they also may increase the number of ads that appear above the organic search results from three to four. This only happens for what Google is calling “highly commercial queries,” which is when Google is confident a user’s intention is to make a purchase.

The ads that appear below search organic results will stay put, and aren’t affected by the change. Product Listing Ads (PLAs), though, may still stick around on the right-hand side.

Here’s an example of what a SERP looks like now:

Why Did Google Make This Change?

This move does a couple of things for Google. Mainly, it creates a cleaner user experience when someone completes a search.

By including fewer options, it also provides a more cohesive experience between mobile and desktop search — which is something Google’s been prioritizing for a while, especially with last year’s major algorithm change.

For the first time last year, mobile search queries surpassed queries coming from desktop. To stay in front of this trend, Google’s product teams often build a product starting with the mobile experience or mobile first.

The overwhelming majority of paid clicks also come from ads above organic results. By eliminating the right-side ads from the SERP, Google is able to clean up the page without removing a frequently used ad unit.

Will This Impact Marketers’ Organic Results?

Yes it will — although it’s hard to say how exactly. While fewer ads could increase organic traffic, a fourth ad above organic results could also push results down the page to a point that lowers traffic.

When you consider that the further down a result appears in SERPs, the lower the clickthrough rate it receives, it’s reasonable for us to assume there’s going to be a negative impact on organic traffic.

While some users are savvy to ads, they’re becoming more and more like organic listings; the only thing differentiating them is the small yellow “Ad” label that can be easily missed.

It’s also important to remember that this is one of many significant changes to the SERPs in the past few years. The introduction of the Featured Snippet and Knowledge Graph results created even more distractions from the traditional blue links that represent organic results. As marketers, you should be paying attention to the types of results that are being displayed in SERPs for keywords that you’re trying to rank organically for so that you can provide content that’s formatted optimally.

This is something we’ll be keeping our eye on. Regardless of the result, the need for great content and a smart keyword strategy is more important than ever.

What Can Marketers & Advertisers Do About These Changes?

Less ads above the fold mean it’s going to be harder to maintain the same amount of impressions and clicks you’re used to. It could also mean higher CPCs as bidding wars happen for those coveted top spots. If you’re bidding in a competitive auction and aren’t willing or able to achieve positions one through four you may want to ask yourself if those keywords are worth your time at all.

If you want to stay on course through these changes, here’s what we suggest:

1) Review how your ads appear in Google’s SERPs.

If you currently have live Google search campaigns preview your new results by navigating to the Tools tab and then clicking on “Ad Preview and Diagnosis”. Here you can review search results by location, language, device and domain. To learn more about how to use this tool, read these instructions from Google.

2) Review your average position in search results for a given keyword.

Keep in mind that to maintain high impressions and clicks on your ads, you’ll need an average position higher than three or four depending on the keyword. If you’re lower than three or four you’ll be pushed below organic results or worse, the “no man’s land” known as the second page results. You can find the “Avg. Pos.” metric in the Keywords tab of AdWords.

3) Increase your average position in search results for relevant keywords.

There are two main ways to increase your average position: increase your bid, or improve your Quality Score. Google determines Ad Rank based on your bid vs. the competition, everyone else bidding on that keyword, as well as Quality Score, which is based on how relevant your ad and landing page are to the search term that triggered the results. To move up fast, increase your bid and quality score.

While it’s a good idea to aim for those top spots, you shouldn’t necessarily feel pressure to achieve number one. Too high of a bid, and the resulting clicks may generate less profit for your business than the ads cost. This is bad. Always use CPA (Cost per Acquisition or Conversion) as your trump metric. Focusing on this over position or CTR will keep your campaigns profitable as you bid for those top spots. Conversion metrics always win over click metrics.

Google is pretty deliberate with these kinds of changes and consults a mountain of data before doing so. We expect the change to stick and for Google to focus on the user above all else. 

And remember, these changes have made it even more important that you’re optimizing for the top organic spot, as well as the Knowledge Graph. While ad real estate being removed from the right side could seem like a good move for marketers focused on organic search, it could also have the impact of moving organic results further down the page. Those with a top organic spot, or a spot in the Knowledge Graph, will have a better shot at those organic clickthroughs than anyone else.

What do you think about Google’s decision to remove right-side ads? Share your thoughts in the comments section below.

If you’ve ever planned an email marketing campaign, you might have wanted to pull your hair out at least once or twice.

Maybe you didn’t have enough time to properly segment your lists, so you knew your clickthrough rate was gonna totally suck. Or you were planning several email campaigns at once, so keeping track of all the details for each was kind of like trying to juggle while skateboarding while accomplishing your 50-squats-a-day goal.

Sound familiar?

Download the free email planning and tracking template here. 

Email marketing requires a lot of attention to detail. Sometimes it’s just plain tricky to stay organized, especially when you have so many tasks to keep track of and get done everyday — email campaign planning being only one of them. Keep on reading to learn how you can get your email marketing organized.

Organizing Your Email Marketing Campaign Strategy 

The best way to prevent mediocre email marketing is to get organized. When you’re having difficulty managing all the moving parts of your email campaigns, it’s hard to be proactive and strategic about what you send, which ultimately means your campaigns will be far less fruitful in terms of generating opens, clicks, and qualified leads.

The problem gets worse the more email campaigns you need to plan and send. To get organized here at HubSpot, our email marketers came up with what we think is a pretty neat email marketing planning template that helps us (and hopefully you, too) keep track of which emails you’re sending to whom, the various A/B tests you’re conducting, and the high-level results of each email you’ve sent. We use it as an all-in-one checklist, a calendar, and a communication tool.

Since it’s based in Excel, you and your team can customize it and use it with HubSpot or any other email platform.

Let’s explore how it works, shall we?

How to Plan Your Email Campaigns & Track Results 

First, you’ll want to go download your own copy of the template so you can follow along as we walk you through how it can help you be more strategic about what you’re sending.

Once you’ve downloaded and opened your Email Marketing Planning Template in Excel, you’ll notice it contains three tabs. The template itself, which we’ll explore in this post, resides in the “Email Planning Template” tab.

You’ll quickly discover that the Email Planning Template tab is divided into three sections:

1. Email Planning (green cells)
2. A/B Testing Planning & Results (red cells)
3. Email Results Tracking (yellow cells)

Each of the three sections contains columns for the 25 details you should plan for or keep track of in the planning, testing, and results stages of email marketing, which I’ll list in a second.

Keep Track of These 25 Details When Planning an Email Send

To make sure you’ve dotted all your i’s and crossed all your t’s before you press that irreversible “send” button, the planning template will help you think through the 25 details below.

Email Planning

This is where you’ll record the logistics of each email, like when it’s being sent out and who’s sending it. Here’s what you will record in this section:

1. Email Send Date: When does this email need to land in your prospects’ inboxes? In the template, Column A contains the week of the month (Week 1 – Week 4), and each week contains 3 rows to help you plan 3 email sends per week. If your company sends more than 3 emails per week, you can insert additional rows as needed.

2. Email Topic: What your email is about. Ex: New Ebook or Monthly Email Newsletter.

3. Owner: Who on your team is crafting this email?

4. Status: Ex: Not Started, In Progress, Ready to Test, Scheduled, Sent.

5. Subject Line: Which subject line are you going to use to entice recipients to open your email?

6. Email Draft Link: Copy and paste the link to your email draft here from your email software for you to keep track of or your team to review.

7. Goal: What do you hope to accomplish with this email? Ex: Lead generation, clickthroughs, event sign-ups.

8. Target Segment / Persona: Who did you create this email for? Ex: Corporate Executives in mid-sized to large companies.

9. Send List: Name of your email list, such as “Corporate Executives Interested in Social Media Topics.”

10. Suppression List(s): Names of lists you want to exclude from your send. Ex: Unengaged Leads and/or Corporate Executives from SMBs.

11. Personalization Tokens: Which elements of your email are you going to personalize for the recipient? Ex: Name, Company Name.

12. Link to Image File: Paste the link to any image file you need to use.

13. Link to Landing Page(s) or Other Assets: Which webpage(s) are you trying to drive the recipient to?

14. Mailto Link: If you’re encouraging email forwarding, then create and paste your Mailto link in the template. 

15. Social Share Links or Buttons: If you want email recipients to tweet or share an element of your email, create and keep track of the social sharing links (ex: using ClickToTweet).

A/B Testing Planning & Results

There are numerous ways to A/B test your emails. You can test your subject lines, your image, your call-to-action layout, the placement of social sharing links and buttons … pretty much any element you want. Here, you’ll record the A/B test(s) you did on each email. 

1. A/B Test Description – Describe any A/B test you’re conducting with this email send and which metrics you’ll be using to gauge success.

2. Summary of A/B Test Results – What were the results? Which variation won?

Email Results Tracking

How did your email do? You’ll record the results in this section.

1. Total Emails Sent: How many email addresses did you send your email to?

2. Total Emails Delivered: Of the email addresses you sent your email to, how many successfully landed in an inbox?

3. Total Emails Opened: Of the email addresses you sent your email to, how many were opened?

4. Total Clicks: How many unique individuals clicked a link in your email?

5. Deliverability: Automatically calculates Total Emails Delivered / Total Emails Sent. Above 95% is ideal, but hard to achieve if your list(s) are purchased. (And you shouldn’t be purchasing lists in the first place.)

6. Open Rate: Automatically calculates Total Emails Opened / Total Emails Delivered. An open rate of 20% would mean that out of every 10 emails delivered, 2 were actually opened.

7. Clickthrough Rate: Automatically calclates the percent of recipients who clicked a link in your email out of total emails opened.

8. Leads Generated: How many new potential business contacts did you get from email recipients filing out the form on your landing page?

9. Other Metric: Plug in your own metric based on your campaign goals.

Customize the Template to Fit Your Needs

We realize not every company will send email the same way. We encourage you to customize the template however you see fit for your individual needs and your organization’s goals.

Since frequency, timing, messaging, content, design, and other elements of email marketing will all vary, feel free to adjust the template by hiding certain columns if you don’t need them (as shown below), or by adding in new ones we didn’t account for.

You can also right-click on the “Email Planning Template” tab and select “Rename” to name the template after the current month.

Once a new month starts, you can duplicate the “Email Planning Template” tab by right clicking on it, selecting “Move or Copy,” selecting the “Make Copy” checkmark, and then renaming the tab for the current month.

And Voilà!

With great planning and organization, you won’t overlook major details, your team will be kept in the loop, you can better track your results, and — because you’ve thought through all you need to when planning campaigns — your emails perform better, too.

Editor’s Note: This post was originally published in August 2014 and has been updated and for freshness, accuracy, and comprehensiveness.

 

When it comes to email marketing, one of the biggest challenges that media companies face today is the ability to translate insight into action. The reason? When publishers deploy email campaigns, it’s usually to deliver some value to the advertising side of the business. There may be partners who are sponsoring newsletters, or marketing teams may be looking for added-value ways to drive more traffic to display ads.

But these systems are quickly losing their efficacy. The media industry is in flux, programmatic ad revenues are declining, and revenue teams are struggling to find new sources of profitability. They’re carving out new products for advertisers (i.e. native ads), launching creative monetization channels, and even building their own ecommerce platforms. They’re also repurposing their existing assets, like their in-house creative teams, into services-based revenue arms.

Within this context, email is a low-hanging area of opportunity that’s universally accessible to almost every media company. In addition to delivering content to and engaging audiences, this channel is an invaluable source of data that can be repurposed into new revenue initiatives. Email is one of the most direct ways for organizations to reach their audiences on a 1:1 basis, which means that it is a rich source of information for research and new product development.

3 steps to Translate Your Advertiser Data into Additional Sources of Value

1) Uncover Your Most Valuable Audiences

Connections are the currency of digital media today. Advertisers and audiences alike are looking for deeper, more positive interactions from their networks online. But it can be tough to differentiate a substantive connection from a superficial one when your success metrics are limited to pageviews, time on site, and bounce rates. That’s where email enters the picture.

Media companies can identify their most engaged audiences through their email subscriber lists. Who’s opening newsletters regularly? What content are these individuals reading? Are they clicking on ads?

The answers to these questions will give you the insights you need to generate more advertiser value. At a basic level, you can change your advertisers a premium for reaching your most engaged audiences. You can also develop and deploy custom campaigns that meet a very specific marketing goal. Because you’ll likely be marketing to the same engaged user base at multiple touch points, you’ll also create more predictability in terms of the ROI that you can expect to deliver to your advertisers.

It pays to identify—and market to—your most engaged audiences.

2) Create a Comprehensive Conversion Picture

Your email marketing data exists as part of an ecosystem with your social, mobile, and web analytics. When evaluating engagement with your newsletter, make sure that you look at the overall picture: how audiences are moving between channels and how these engagement patterns translate into results for advertisers.

This information can help your company create unique targeting and campaign concepts that stand apart from other media companies. One compelling example to model here is BuzzFeed. This publisher has created a unique UX that it uses to deliver custom native ad products. And because its model is so tailored to its content and audiences, the company is able to predict and replicate results. The company’s secret? It’s no secret at all—it’s data from its massive inventory of engaging content.

Think of your media experience as a puzzle. As important as email marketing data is, it’s only part of the overall picture. Know how everything fits together into one comprehensive conversion picture.

3) Focus on Optimizations

In addition to helping build new products and revenue streams, your email marketing data can also help you improve upon what’s already working. Use your email marketing data to study engagement on a granular level. What pieces of content are your audiences finding most helpful? How much time are they spending with it? On which social channels are your subscribers sharing your content, and how much traction is it getting?

Use this information to optimize the already-successful programs that you have in place for your advertiser programs. For instance, you could:

• Use your newsletter data to recommend content topics for your advertisers’ native ad campaigns
• Build additional targeted email lists
• Add more granularity to your audience segments
• Make improvements to your messaging
• Trigger workflows

Share this optimization data with your advertisers, and they’ll be blown away. In a media world where the majority of publishers are still dependent on clicks and eyeballs, you’ll be well positioned to offer something different and of value.

Last But Not Least

If you’re not sure where to get started or how to fully utilize your email marketing data, talk to your advertisers. Ask what solutions and optimizations they’d like to see on the market. Take this information, and evaluate where your own email marketing data fits into the picture. After all, the industry is learning, growing, and evolving together.

When is the last time you visited a website on your smartphone and had to wait for the page to load?

According to Akamai, 73% of mobile users say they’ve encountered a website that was slow to load. Many times, this happens when users aren’t on WiFi and are relying on a cellular connection.

But when it takes a few seconds for a webpage to load, time seems to slow to a crawl. The longer that website takes to load, the more frustrated we become.  And who could blame us? Shouldn’t mobile websites load just as fast as their desktop counterparts?

Yes, they should. Your mobile website included.

So, how are mobile websites performing today? To find a benchmark, HubSpot Research conducted a study analyzing the performance of over 26,000 websites. Not only does the study paint a not-so-pretty picture of how many business’ mobile websites are performing today, but it also uncovered exactly how slow loading times affect more than your bottom line — they affect the visitors’ heart rate.

Let’s dive in to some of the results from this study, why slow loading times are so bad, and how you can make your website faster.

How is Your Mobile Website Performing?

Chances are, it’s barely passing.

According to HubSpot Research’s study, most websites are not performing so well. In fact, the average load time we found in looking at these websites was almost four seconds — which, by itself, is enough to cause many visitors to bounce and look elsewhere.

There are a lot of reasons why websites got a D- grade on average for performance in the study. One of the top contributors to slow load times are images and videos. Often, it’s because images or videos have not been optimized for a webpage — and especially not for a mobile data connection.

Take a moment to think about that beautiful, high-resolution image you probably have on your website’s homepage. It’s just the perfect representation of your brand or product, isn’t it?

Well, that image probably looks great, but its large file size could be causing your website to load slowly — thereby giving your mobile visitors a poor user experience.

Why Fast Loading Times Matter

Before we get to how to make your website load faster, let’s talk a little more about why fast loading times matter.

Slow Loading Times Stress Out Your Visitors

It makes sense that slow loading time would frustrate your site visitors and affect conversion rate and brand perception. But did you know it actually leads to increased heart rate and stress levels? According to a 2016 Ericsson Mobility study, single website loading delays lead to a 38% increase in heart rate, on average.

It’s hard to quantify a 38% increase in heart rate — especially if you don’t monitor it actively. So think of the last time you did something stressful, like watching an horror movie. The delay in mobile load times is roughly equivalent to how you felt watching that horror movie.

As marketers, that’s not the way we want visitors feeling when accessing our content or evaluating our product or service.

Visitors May Blame You for Their Bad Experience

In some cases, when website visitors experience a delay in loading time, they blame their cellular provider for bad service. But the longer the delay, the more the blame for the delay turns to you: the content provider.

In the same Ericsson study, the researchers ran a Net Promoter Score (NPS) survey for customers, which asked them at what point they transfer blame from their mobile service providers to the content provider.

For customers in the study that experienced no delay loading a mobile website, their NPS score increased drastically (by 4.5 points) for their mobile service provider. But customers that experienced some delays started to place blame on the service provider; and the longer the delay, the less they blamed the actual provider, and the more they pointed a finger at the folks behind the website itself.

Slow Videos Seems to Be the Most Stressful

The use of large imagery and background video has become more common in website design lately. Videos are great assets and bring life to your content — but it turns out they can also be pretty stressful.

The researchers at Ericsson found that a YouTube video that had even a two-second delay in loading increased viewers’ stress levels by 3%; and once a video started playing, just a single pause caused stress levels to increase another 15%:

This added stress brings us right back to that horror movie — a feeling we certainly don’t want to leave visitors with.

Knowing how much load time delays can affect visitors physiologically, what can we do to make our mobile websites faster and give them a better experience?

5 Ways to Make Your Mobile Website Faster

There’s a lot that goes into website performance, but let’s cover the top five factors that play a role in your mobile website loading quickly.

1) Determine how your mobile website is setup.

Do you have a separate mobile website (such as m.exampledomain.com) or does your website use responsive design?

Google recommends using responsive design as their preferred methodology and based on how your mobile website is setup there are performance optimizations that your team can investigate. Read this blog post to learn how to test your website for mobile-friendliness.

2) Compress your images.

Remember that beautiful product or brand image I mentioned above that could actually be slowing down your website? If you compress that image, you could take seconds off your page’s load time. Because websites generally have a significant number of images, this is often the largest reason for slow load times — so we recommend addressing this first.

For example, let’s say your product image is displayed on a page as 500 x 500 pixels, but the actual size of the image file is 3500 x 3500 pixels. That image probably weighs a few megabytes (MB), and in many websites, the visitors browser will be forced to load the 3500-pixel version of the image first, and then resize it properly to its smaller version — all during the loading process. On desktop connections this happens constantly, but generally, it happens so quickly we don’t notice it.

But on mobile — especially on a cellular connection — the full-size image can take a long time to load, which can really frustrate users. To fix this, consider resizing, cropping, and then compressing your images. (HubSpot customers don’t need to worry about compressing their images — images uploaded to HubSpot’s software are automatically compressed. For non-HubSpot customers, tools like TinyPNG will help you reduce an image’s file size.)

We also recommending saving images in a format like JPG that’s relatively lightweight, good for your pages, and won’t bloat the user’s experience.

3) Minify all code, especially JavaScript.

“Minifying code” is the process of removing unnecessary characters without affecting the website’s functionality. It has a significant impact on time it takes for a website’s code to be processed, thereby making your website load faster across any device, whether desktop or mobile.

To minify your code, you’ll likely want to get someone from your website team or development team involved because it does involve directly changing the code on your website. It’s even better if you can remove some JavaScript (or other code) from the mobile versions of webpages to speed them up further. (To learn more about minifying code, check out these instructions from Elegant Themes.)

4) Load videos in the background (or not at all).

Videos are likely the largest resource on your pages, and will take the longest to load on mobile. If the video is not critical for the user experience, consider hiding it in the background — or not even loading it at all. By hiding videos in the background, they’ll loading will help with the perception of your website loading quickly but may not ultimately solve an issue of a slow-loading mobile website. 

How do you make a video load in the background? You or a member of your development team could insert some CSS into the code so that the video won’t show up at all when the visitor lands on the website.

If your website includes long videos that describe your product or service, you could try using a call-to-action instead of putting the video directly on the website so mobile-specific visitors can, for example, email the video to themselves and view it later. This saves time in the near-term, and also makes the mobile experience vastly better for visitors.

(Note: If you choose to create CTAs for mobile users, think about the spacing around your text boxes and images to make sure your webpage is legible and easy to interact with, regardless of which device your visitors are using to access your page. Buttons that are difficult to interact with on a small screen could lead to a frustrating user experience.)

5) Take advantage of the cache and speed benefits of a Content Delivery Network (CDN).

Content Delivery Networks (CDNs) help cache and load content on servers in different locations so that, no matter where on the internet the visitor is coming from and which device they’re using, they’ll have a faster — and better — user experience. If your website isn’t on a CDN, you could be missing out on a number of performance benefits that we would strongly recommend.

(HubSpot customers: The HubSpot Website Platform uses responsive design, has automatic image compression, and is backed by our CDN for loading your website really quickly — so you don’t need to worry about these things. In fact, according to Yottaa, an independent Internet Performance company websites on HubSpot load faster than on other content management systems.)

There’s a lot at stake for marketers in ensuring our websites not only look great, but function and perform great as well. A fast-loading mobile site will ensure your visitors don’t bounce from your site, and that they won’t experience levels of stress similar to watching a horror movie. You can use the tips above right away to dive in and to start improving performance of your desktop and mobile website.

Most of us know that learning to write can be a painful process.

You spend hours honing a piece that you hope and pray will be good. You get it to a point where you think it’s passable, and then pass it off to a friend or colleague for editing and feedback help. 

They send back their comments. (Sometimes, they’re harsh … but you know it’ll make you a better writer.) You make changes to your piece. Then, you rinse and repeat with new pieces until you’re consistently producing high quality work.

This whole process isn’t easy — nor is it quick. But what if technology could speed it up — without sacrificing the quality of feedback needed to grow as a writer?

That’s precisely what WriteLab is trying to build. Using algorithms and machine learning, their tool analyzes someone’s writing and gives the writer tips on how to improve it.

On this episode of The Growth Show, WriteLab’s Co-Founder & CEO Matthew Ramirez joins HubSpot’s CMO Kipp Bodnar to talk about the lessons and challenges his company has encountered when addressing such an audacious — and important — problem.

To listen to the episode, click “play” in the player below, or download the episode on iTunes:

Check out the latest recaps of The Growth Show episodes by clicking here.