I recently found myself trying to give a client a rough estimate of the value organic traffic brought them. In the process of doing so, I stumbled upon the world of paid promotion. Considering Rand's Whiteboard Friday about surviving the SEO slog, paid promotion is important to tactics that we know do provide immediate tangible value, and I wondered if there was potential for it to be a part of a wider online marketing strategy that could also enhance the work of SEO. I want to open up that world a bit and discuss what I discovered: how paid promotion can complement organic search.
First, let me define what I mean by "paid promotion." This might include typical paid search, but also display ads, remarketing, and paid ads on platforms such as Facebook and Twitter. Paid promotion comes in many forms, including sponsored images, sponsored stories, and everything else in the following image (tap/click to enlarge):
Image source: https://imgur.com/z059ueV.png
Recently, there's been lots of discussion of the decreasing organic reach on Facebook. It seems that there's been a shift in the Facebook algorithm—certain posts have seen a decrease, others an increase in organic reach. Pages with over 500,000 likes are seeing a particularly massive decrease in organic reach, perhaps in an effort to encourage them to pay for ads. Additionally, MarketingLand recently reported that Pinterest will be adding promoted pins.
The reality is, paid promotion has a lot to offer online marketing, and can really complement some of what you might be doing with search marketing and optimization. Paid promotion offers a way to test things out to make sure they're worth putting the effort and resources into, as well as add more punch to the impact that search is already making for a site. Paid promotion offers quick results you can control, making it a great complement to your overall marketing strategy.
Test things out: Use Facebook and AdWords to test your ideas
Optimizing for search and creating interesting content that will get shared requires a lot of investment. Paid promotion can be used to test recommendations and creative ideas out before investing a lot of time, energy, and resources into making them happen. It can also be used after content has been made to ensure you're using optimal headlines. Upworthy provided a really fantastic deck for how to make things go viral, and it included the recommendation of using Facebook as a means to test headlines.
Titles can be the difference, according to Upworthy, between one million views and 17 million views. That's a pretty big impact. I particularly love this deck because they use examples to illustrate how you really can't predict which titles will work with people, making it critical to test. And then test some more.
I've used Facebook ads to estimate interest in projects. Is the click-through rate (CTR) good enough to actually build out a project? If not, it's better to go back to the drawing board and make sure you'll actually have an audience. For a little more depth, this post also explains how to do what Upworthy did to optimize their headlines.
You can set up an ad campaign relatively cheaply—you can purchase over 200,000 unique impressions for around $100 on Facebook (side ads, not feed ads, which are a bit more expensive). From there, you can calculate whether there is a statistically significant difference in the CTRs of each of your variances (if you need a statistics refresher, you can easily use this fantastic spreadsheet from Visual Website Optimizer).
Image Source: Visual Website Optimizer
It can be used for determining the significance of any test by simply having two sets of conversion statistics—in this case, for "Visitors," you'd enter the number of impressions & for "Conversions" you'd enter the number of clicks. The spreadsheet provides a YES or NO about whether the difference between the two sets of numbers is significant with 90, 95 or 99% confidence, making the math super easy. If the difference between your tests isn't significant, you'll have to run them again with a larger sample, or they may be equivalently impactful, so you could use another version to test again.
Facebook has the advantage of segmentation—whatever population you want to target can be targeted—cat lovers, people who like a particular musical artist, play tennis or live in a small town, but aren't from that location. Any segmentation you can imagine, you can target.
To test for free, you can use Upworthy's trick of posting to specific cities with different headlines, but considering the recent decrease in organic reach, that may not yield the kind of results you're looking for.
AdWords can also be useful to test out titles and keywords to target, as well as viability of new products. Each of these tests will vary in price greatly depending upon the type of keywords you're targeting as well as the number of clicks you end up needing to get statistically significant results (same situation as with Facebook). Unfortunately, you won't know exactly what you need until you've got it, but if you can give yourself around $500 of budget, to test a few headlines, you may well be able to get some quality data.
Either using Facebook or AdWords to test out headlines means you need something to click to. I've found great success with LaunchRock—it's super easy to set up and either use their server or your own to point visitors to. The added bonus is that you can easily collect contact information, generating leads while you're testing things out.
AdWords can also be a great source of keyword data, in part because you can see what the conversion rates are for different keywords for your site. You could use a similar technique for Twitter, or really any other advertising platform. But these are some of the most commonly used and advertised on, and relatively easy to launch advertising for.
The advantage for SEO of testing in this way is that you can then select which keywords to target and titles to use not just based on volume of queries, but also by how conversion rates for your site are for each query. Getting 500,000 new visitors where only 5,000 turn into new clients is not as fantastic as getting 100,000 new visitors where 10,000 of them turn into new clients. The same is true, of course, for amount of revenue. Not all traffic is equal, and paid search can help SEO determine which traffic should be pursued, and which titles to use to do so.
Pack more punch: Use remarketing to convert more visitors into customers
It's great to get traffic to your site. It's even better for traffic to generate revenue. Remarketing is basically targeting previous visitors to encourage them to behave in the way you'd like—buying your product, signing up for your email list, etc. It is extremely effective (one study says an incredible 1,046% increase in trademark lift!). Remarketing is effective because, as AJ Kohn at Blind Five Year Old explains, you are marketing to people who already came to your site. Larry Kim provided an excellent case study on using remarketing to enhance the impact of SEO on Moz last fall. It's a fantastic example of how powerful remarketing can be for search, because it is a way to build brand.
There are some simple ways to do remarketing—remind a visitor to a particular product that they were looking at that exact product—but there are also some other, more inventive ways to use remarketing. Get them to join your mailing list. Offer a discount if they come back and buy. The important thing, as Larry says in his post, is to:
- Provide them a call to action ("sign up for our mailing list!")
- Include branding or images that will improve brand recall
Always do some A/B testing with your remarketing campaigns to ensure you're using the optimal ads. If your ad is in your brand voice, and has a message that fits with your brand, you will be getting value out of the ads into the future, because your ads will not only be leading to immediate action off of your call to action, but also building up the recall of your brand.
Twitter conducted a study about the impact of impressions on brand favorability and brand lift, as well as purchase intent. While this information is clearly aimed at encouraging promoted tweets, and should thus taken with a grain of salt, psychology has firmly demonstrated that familiarity breeds likability. If you want people to like your brand, they should be familiar with it. And impressions are one way to enhance familiarity.
As with testing out headlines and keywords that convert, remarketing can optimize value of the visitors search brings to a site. Reaching out to people who have visited the site, and thus clearly shown that they are interested at some level in what you're offering can turn visitors into conversions, either as customers today, or leads to nurture.
What do you think—when have you seen paid promotion complement SEO? Do you think it should be a completely distinct strategy? Let me know in the comments below!
Nice post Shannon,
A strategy i've used for some clients in the past to help compliment both organic and paid search, is to target more niche specific phrases through AdWords and work on broader phrases in organic searches. This helps bridge the gap in sales while the organic phrases are working there way up.
However, I would only recommend this for clients who have fairly expensive products to cover the costs of conversions through AdWords and still make a profit.
Regards to social media promotions, it's something i haven't tried personally, but i think i could benefit massively,
Thanks for sharing the spreadsheet, I'm sure it will come in handy.
Thanks, Rhys!
Interesting--I like that! Regarding price--yes. This definitely isn't for everyone, but for larger businesses or expensive products, I think it's so important to at least be coordinating with your paid team and consider how it might be used. Yea--the spreadsheet is a pretty nice way to easily figure out whether your results are statistically significant, which I think a lot of folks leave out.
Best of luck with the social media testing!
So true Rhys. Many advertisers fail to think in terms of actual margin dollars and it's created a defect in our industry. Clients aren't happy because we're showing them great, positive ROAS figures but at the end of the day their bottom line isn't fully getting that.
Sorry to single out one area of the comment, but you really nailed it.
And Shannon, this was a great post. Very thought-provoking stuff.
Thanks for sharing your views on using paid promotion to get optimum benefit of organic SEO activities. Here I've a query, sometimes we create special landing pages to promote a specific service/ product already listed on our website. Should we keep those landing pages open to index by Google bots.
In my opinion, its wrong as our own service page (non landing) will compete with a better designed and targeted page page focusing same keywords thus making it tough for Search Engine to figure out which page to rank on organic search results page.
I'd love to know your opinion about it.
Hi Shankar. Thanks for your question. I'm not sure I understand it exactly, but I'd recommend noindexing a page that you're using as a paid promotion landing page if it is a duplicate or might compete with another page in the main navigation.
Fantastic stuff, Shannon - I especially like the title optimization tips. I hadn't considered using paid to optimize that aspect!
Thanks for reading, Neil :-)!
I've been on the publisher side of some of those "sponsored story" services. The CTR on them can be enormous but the pay is very small. If the widget is at the bottom of the page then you are selling some of your best visitors at a very low price.
So, if you are a smart advertiser you can experiment to find sites with the right kind of traffic with the widget placed at bottom of page to grab their most engaged visitors.
I don't use them any more because I thought that those high quality visitors should be kept on my own site! But, if you can find publishers who will sell their visitors cheap you might be a big winner.
Like anything else you need to track and keep one hand on your wallet.
Right Shannon! And marketing/promotion on Facebook is the best example to prove your blog worth. Nice try Ms/Mrs. Skinner.
Thanks for this good post.
I'm bit confused.... may be because use upside method as a PPC guy .. I use organic data to improve PPC conversions.. but I don't think a normal client (who comes only for SEO) will give a budget to test & prepare for SEO. I agree how "adWords for search" can help with SEO, still it gets more complex as CTR & CPA in search advertising too depends on lots of factors..
Hey Alen! Thanks for taking the time to read and comment!
I am aiming at opening up the paid world for folks who have just done SEO and not considered how paid could be helpful to their work there. So sounds like you're ahead of the crowd if you're already using paid! Mostly, I hope people see that if they're focusing only on SEO, they should either learn when paid might help, or coordinate with their paid teams if they already have them to make sure that both SEO and paid are being used to their max.
Hi Shannon, great post and really great points made about the power of paid advertising as a means of informing SEO strategies... actually paid media is what made me make the move into SEO back in 2004 when Google kicked off in Europe with the Adwords programme. Testing reactions of target audiences with paid search programmes is definitely a efficient way to make smart, bigger SEO decisions. +1
Awesome! Glad it resonated with you, David! Thanks for reading :-)
To be honest I haven't had that much 'paid promotion' experience, however, it's something that I've recently started to get more involved with, which makes this post very timely! It's always been my opinion that PPC can compliment SEO in a myriad of ways, but most importantly for local type businesses that want to promote further outside of their local radius. Of course, there are ways to build out SEO 'landing pages' to try to rank in other areas but it's not always 100% effective.
Thank you for sharing your insights!
Hey Tim!
Thanks for reading! Yea--I totally agree about local businesses. I actually think for smaller businesses, it's probably more impactful to focus first on paid, and then perhaps grow SEO. Basic technical SEO and implementing Google Local/Places may well be worth it, but anything beyond that for a very small local business seems to have diminishing returns. I definitely see paid promotion as a way to build off of that.
Thank you, this is pure gold! A very savvy refinement of the simple method of using PPC to prepare for SEO, you've taken it several levels up here.
Thanks a lot! Glad you enjoyed & found it useful!
Wonderful post. This has been one of my "secret sauce" tactics for real world keyword research for a while.
Hey Robert,
Yea--definitely a nifty secret. If nothing else, folks should be coordinating with their paid search teams to get those data. Thanks for reading!
Hi Shannon, nice tips, thanks!
Do you have any good rebuttals for clients who may say remarketing can become an 'annoying nuisance' for their users?
some of my clients are worried remarketing will have an adverse effect on the branding process,
Hi Syed! Great question. I would refer them to this PPC hero article. The TL;DR is that remarketing works for conversions, even if people say it is annoying, though you should measure to make sure that as you show an ad repeated times, your conversion rates are staying stable. But as long as your conversions are staying the same, I'd ask that client if they would like a lower cost per conversion, and if the answer is yes, they should probably use remarketing (though it does depend some on the purpose of the campaign--ie, if they're primarily looking to do a branding campaign, other routes might be more impactful).
Love the idea of split testing headlines, if only I had the time/budget :) BTW The Guardian recently did a great article on "Upworthy style headlinges" which you might want to read :)
Link: https://www.theguardian.com/science/brain-flapping/2014/apr/08/upworthy-style-headlines-annoying-science-psychology
Thanks shannon for this comperhensive post, and well explained about paid marketing promotions
I totally agree with the title and the post. It is better to opt for paid SEO and target those who matter to your business, rather than wasting your efforts just about anywhere that won't even yield any revenue.
Shannon Skinner the paid promotion is definitely very helpful for SEO to make the audience. Paid promotion is important to tactics, that provides the organic traffic, and the promotion is wider a part of online marketing strategy that could also enhance the work of SEO. tips you share these are very helpful to get organic traffic for the website.
Well.. we would use AdWords to try it on our website, but we are against their guidelines. Anyway we never saw any benefits from Twitter or Reddit. Thank for information, we'll consider definitely. With today's algorithms and all that staff they simply encourage us to pay for targeted visits and penalize non paid.
Awesome Post Shannon. This helps us for the starters for PPC. Thanks for PPC hero article, it helped me getting out from confusions on Re-marketing:)
Thanks Shannon, for this timely post.
I also recently started doing paid promotion for one of my client & seeing some great results. Started with adwords at a very low budget but the conversions & CTR coming are totally awesome. I agree with you that people should just not rely totally on SEO & must diversify their marketing budget to other means available. You never know in SEO when Google will penalize you wipe off you from google's index.
I'm eagerly waiting to try my hands on facebook, twitter & other ads option available from advertisers round the net.
Do you have any luck with reddit ads or twitter ads?
Haven't tried Reddit or Twitter, but definitely worth a shot--depends on the audience you're looking at. Good thought. Thanks for reading!
Hi Shannon,
Thank you for an informative article in this area. You touched a very specific part of SEO.
Traffic from paid sources like ads or spending money on Google Adwords do not generally affect the page ranking of a website on the organic search results as it does not provide a direct links to the website. In a way this is good as it will not increase your unnatural links (from Google's point of view)and will only help to get more traffic to the site.
How can this effect?
Well, traffic from the ads can make or break your rank on the search results as they do bring traffic from different sources but if not planned well will increase your site's bounce rate and reduce the 'Average Visit Duration'. This will adversely affect the page ranking and might create suspicion in the eyes of Google.
But this does not mean that we should not use paid ads. The only thing that we need to concentrate on is that we do not invest in just one source. Diving and planning the paid sources is very important so that the traffic from a single source does not start slowing down after some time.
> Identify the source giving valuable traffic as not all sources would be effective for all kinds of businesses.
> Distribute the investment into multiple sources well and keep trying with the new sources.
Some other sources of paid ads could be LinkedIn and Youtube (Depending on the company type and the budget).
Plan well!
Hi Manish!
I wasn't necessarily looking at how paid search behavior impacts SEO, but interesting thought.
I would definitely recommend testing to make sure whatever you're testing is appropriate and has a high conversion rate, and to turn off any ads that don't seem to have high conversion. That will save $$ and also prevent the possibility of any effect you're referring to.
Also a great point about multiple sources--I would certainly recommend testing several different ads, as much as possible. Totally true about LinkedIn and Youtube, depending on your audience.
Thanks for reading!
Thanks for sharing your view Shannon.
Nice Blog Shannon! But I would like to add that adding the insights from SEO and paid promotion channels would be the best way to make the marketing work. One can actually identify the search queries for which page views are good enough and compare these with those from Webmaster tools and use them as potential keywords in AdWords/ Other paid target platforms and Similarly to add the converting keywords as target while devising the meta for organic landing page targets. For question from Mr. Shankar, I agree to the non-indexing suggestion of yours as we never need to get those pages accessed directly as they might compete with the ones that we have on our website.
Very simple methods of using PPC to prepare for SEO, it would help us to refine and re-market your brand.
Well.. we would use AdWords to try it on our website, but we are against their guidelines. Anyway we never saw any benefits from Twitter or Reddit. Thank for information, we'll consider definitely.