Over the two days I attended a number of seminars and panels on a number of marketing topics, but for ease of purpose I’ve split the information from the summit into three distinct categories; Marketing Technology and Innovation, Brand Marketing and Ecommerce. I have also added my own thoughts around topics to give each topic more substance. 

AD BLOCKERS

Did you know that in Australia around 46% of people browsing the Internet use an ad blocker? While it’s hard to accurately judge due to browsing styles, mobile devices and bandwidth limitations, it’s estimated that globally in 2019, around 30% of all Internet users had an ad blocker. The demand is so strong that Google released its own Chrome ad blocker in July 2019. The main takeaway from this must be that we can’t simply rely on traditional advertisements for digital marketing, as a large number of end users will never see our efforts.

As you can see, without an ad blocker, ads are clearly visible on the Daily Telegraph page. In fact, they take up the majority of screen real estate.

The same landing page with an ad blocker activated shows much more content as well as empty screen space.

Many sites require advertising revenue to operate and have taken the step of blocking people from accessing a site with an active ad blocker.

The Impact of Ad Blocking on Marketing and Advertisers

So what digital marketing strategies can we use going forward to adapt and thrive in this new digital marketing landscape? To combat this rise in ad blockers, social media marketing and related spend has increased quite a bit, as the consumers are there and the channel still works for digital marketing as there is no technology in place to block digital marketing posts as yet. That said, the most valuable thing brands can do is invest in search marketing. When a user is going to Google and doing a search they are telling a brand exactly what they are looking for. If a brands ad appears at this time they are not interrupting the user’s journey but are instead enhancing it. 75% of customers say that paid search ads made it easier to find what they were after, and 63% of Internet users have clicked on a Google ad, making it a cost effective and powerful way to develop leads and make sales.

The Google Chrome ad blocker is an interesting development as it hints at what we need to do in order for traditional advertising to be a viable digital marketing strategy again. Rather than blocking all ads, the Chrome ad blocker instead targets ads that breach the Better Ads Standards. This service has already been rolled out as part of Chrome in North America and most of Europe and will be released globally at a later date. The Standards look at the least preferred desktop and mobile advertising experiences, such as full screen scrollovers, popups with a countdown and autoplay videos with sound and set the base standard around blocking the type of ads users dislike most. This may seem rather disheartening, but it also shows that there are ads that end users actually find useful and engaging. Sticking to those types of ads could circumvent s good deal of blocking and help build a brand identity free of any ill will from aggravating ads.

CHAT BOTS

Another idea that was raised at the Summit is that responsiveness is one of the key factors in converting an inquiry into a sale. According to one of the speakers, Jethro Grainger Marsh of Alsco, 10 years ago a fast response was same day, now we expect a response same hour. At small scale it may be possible for people to respond to queries in a timely manner, but when it comes to creating a conversion strategy based around customer experience, a chat bot can be an indispensable tool for rapid response to easy queries, and with training and sufficient AI can answer more complex inquiries in a timely manner.

The simple fact is that between 35% and 50% of B2B sales go to the vendor that responds to inquiries first and the statistics for B2C sales skew even higher. Early in my career I started and ran a small inbound marketing call centre in the telco marketplace. We were very successful, but even back then, quick turnaround was key to sales conversions. Due to the small team and the nature of the work, the sales team was constantly making or taking calls so wouldn’t be able to take all incoming inquiries instantly. We responded to calls as quickly as possible, but often it wasn’t fast enough for the customer. What we discovered was that when we called the customer back, even an hour later we often found that they had already signed with another telco, or that we could not reach then when we attempted to call back and thereby lost the sale.

Given that being able to respond to a lead or an inquiry in a timely manner is key for sales conversion, what can we do to speed up the process? Kat Warboys, Head of Marketing for HubSpot suggests using live chat across key sales pages on your website and the use of chat bots to automate easy inquiries, such as answering FAQs, surface articles from the knowledge base (such as stock availability and location, opening and closing times and basic queries about products or services), assigning more complex queries to a live chat agent and pre-screening customers so the live agent can best serve them. 64% of Internet users say that 24-hour service is the best feature of chat bots, and given that online shops are always open, so taking advantage of an automated assistant that never needs sleep seems like a logical next step in any digital marketing plan.

Rather than trying to hide the fact that you’re using a chat bot by giving it a name, Kat Warboys suggests that you embrace the fact that it is a bot and let that fact be known to avoid any confusion and frustration from customers.

Offsite chat – communication not facilitated through the website directly – should also be prioritised in your digital marketing strategy. Facebook Messenger, Whatsapp, Slack and Email all play a vital role in converting leads to sales. While email allows for more personalisation in messages, creativity in design and depth of communication, messenger services such as Facebook and Whatsapp allow for fast communication turnaround through chat bots, capable of answering simple enquiries and redirecting more complex inquiries to a live agent, much like their website based counterparts. Facebook Messenger is the most widely used chat platform in the world at the moment, with around 2.5 billion users as of Q4 2019, and Whatsapp closing in fast with 2 billion users, so leveraging this massive user base into your marketing strategy can be an important step forward. Messenger can boast a massive open and clickthrough rate from both live and chat bot generated messages, eclipsing those of email.

Video Tutorial: Identifying and Compressing Large Images

When building websites or uploading content, people have a habit of simply uploading images without thinking about how the size of an image may affect the speed of their site.

While source images may be large and of high resolution or DPI, in a web environment, such large images are rarely required. High resolution or DPI images are only useful for print purposes. This needs to be taken into account with all types of images but especially photos.

Megapixels

Even the most modest of modern digital cameras on phones boast a resolution of 8-16 megapixels (MP), or 8-16 million pixels on its sensor. To put this in perspective, the resolution of a standard HDTV is around 2MP, and a 4k TV is around 8MP . Do you need an image that can be shown at full resolution on a large screen TV for your website. The answer is a firm no.

With a few simple processes you can reduce the size of images and increase the speed of your site. As we know, speed is a conversion factor, and it’s also an SEO ranking factor. Google takes site speed and user experience into account – users don’t like slow load times so they leave the site, so Google ranks the site lower because of lack of traffic.

Size Matters

There are many tools you can use to analyse images on a website. In this instance I used Screaming Frog to crawl all of the images and rank them by size.

Once the oversized images have been identified, I use Tiny PNG to compress the images. It has a simple drag and drop interface and can show some rather remarkable results without any noticeable loss of image fidelity and resolution.

SEO Tip for Image Optimisation: Add Image Dimensions

One of the most important steps to fully optimising your site’s load speed is to add dimensions to all your images. If the dimensions of an image are not defined, as the website loads, the site will also render the image and then try to fit it back into its prescribed space.

Adding image dimensions tells the site where the image sill sit, so it will pre-render the image area, speeding up the load time of the site. This is especially important when it comes to mobile optimised sites. Over 50% of web browsing is now done using mobile devices, and the restrictions on mobile bandwidth and connection speed mean that sites need to be optimised for fast, low bandwidth load times.

For more information on optimising images for UX and for SEO, you can find a very informative post from bruceclay.com.

Optimising all your images in this way can markedly speed up your site.

Romance scams are on the rise, with Australian losing over $28 million to romance scammers and catfishing in 2019 alone. One of the most common tactics employed by romance scammers is to create fake profiles on social media and dating sites designed to lure in vulnerable targets, most commonly 45-64 year old women. Although it’s not a surefire way to avoid being romance scammed, reverse image searching is an easy way to verify if a person is really who they present themselves to be.

While there are a number of apps or services that will perform reverse image searches for you, Google has a powerful image search function that will more than do the job.

Imagine you received a message from this handsome man, but wanted to make sure he was who he said he was.

Step 1: Download the image

Step 2: Head to images.google.com and click on the camera icon on the Google Search bar.

Step 3: Upload the image into the search bar either by dragging and dropping or choosing the file.

Step 4: Google will show you similar images to what you uploaded. Our handsome gentleman seems to be the face of a lot of marketing campaigns.

Step 5: Clicking on the picture collection at the top of the search opens all the related images, revealing that in this case the picture is a stock image, a definite sign that the message is a scam.

Reverse Product Search

In addition to discovering if a person is who they say they are, reverse image searching can also be used to discover the name of a product and from where it is available or even if it’s a knockoff or fake. The process for doing so is similar to performing a reverse image search.

Step 1: Take a photo or find an image of the product you’re interested in finding out more about, for example, this office chair.

Step 2: Head to images.google.com and upload the image as you would with a reverse image search.

Step 3: Once you have uploaded the image, look at the related images to see if there is a match or a similar looking image. In this case, the first image that appears looks much like the chair in our photograph.

Step 4: Clicking on the image shows us that it is a Herman Miller Sayl chair. The picture in question is for a sale in the UK, but knowing the brand and design of the chair means you can now search knowing exactly what you’re looking for.

Online Shopping Scams

Using the reverse image search, you can also pinpoint items that may be a scam. If a product seems to good to be true or is at an unbelievably cheap price, that is usually a good indicator that something may not be right, but sometimes scam sites have a very professional veneer and some even use legitimate domains with spoofed business numbers to give them that extra level of credibility.

If you’re unsure about the legitimacy of a site selling a product, a good way to get an indication of whether or not they are legit is to do a reverse image search on the images they are using to market their products. If the search returns results that show the image from a site with a good reputation or established, respected brand, there’s a good chance that the lesser known site has stolen that image to use as their own and should not be trusted.

Video Tutorial: How to Use SEOToolSet Single Page Analyzer

As the name suggests, the single Page Analyzer only looks at a single page rather than a whole website, making it invaluable for helping to understand the usage of keywords on the page being analysed, as well as title tags, meta descriptions and keywords, headings and other factors that may be affecting your site’s overall performance.

The general summary gives a dashboard overview of the page, showing page topics, links (internal and external) and recommendations for optimising or fixing the page.

Keywords

The Keywords tab shows the keywords used on the page by frequency as well as a topographical map of keywords showing their frequency and proximity in relation to each other. Invisible parts of the page, such a title and meta tags are included in the keyword analysis.

Titles, Meta Descriptions, Meta Keywords and Headings

The Tag Information tab shows how tags are used on the page – Title, Meta Description, Meta Keywords, Heading and the like. These are some of the most important factors to get right if you want your site to rank well. As you can see from the screenshot, team-bhp has the word Home preceding their actual title, muddying a title search. From a coding perspective, the title is the most important part of the page as it tells Google (and other search engines) what the webpage is about. The first word of the title being Home is not at all indicative that team-bhp.com is an Indian car website.

The Single Page Analyzer also shows that the page has no Meta Description or Meta Keywords and that the Canonical page is wrong. These problems are relatively easy fixes now that they have been identified.

Similarly the Tag information shows the headings on the page and in this case there is a major problem. <h1> is the main heading for the page and it is blank.

Speed Analysis and Optimisation

SEOToolSet Single Page Analyzer can also be used to analyse page speed, giving suggestions on how to optimise the site for better performance. Image compression is an invaluable tool for optimising images for UX and SEO.

Tutorial Video: How to Use Majestic Backlink Checker

Analysing Backlinking

The first step to analysing the backlinking of a site is to copy the URL of the site in question to the URL bar on majestic.com. Rather than using the whole URL i.e. http://www.team-bhp.com it’s better to enter a raw URL – in this case, team-bhp.com – as many of the backlinks will use the truncated URL rather than the full address.

Immediately after entering the URL you are presented with the option of either a fresh index or an historic index.

Opting for a Fresh Index limits the search parameters for Majestic’s web crawlers, giving a recent snapshot of the site’s performance and popularity, whereas an Historic Index sends the crawlers searching wider and deeper to find performance details throughout the site’s history.

No matter what option is chosen, the first two analytics that are shown are Trust Flow and Citation Flow.

Trust Flow

Trust Flow is a score out of 100 and indicates how far in links the analysed website is from one of the websites hand-picked by Majestic to be trusted sources. Trustworthy sites are more likely to link to other trustworthy sites, so the higher the Trust Flow the more trusted the site is. Typically scores from 11-49 are considered average and 50+ is great, but areas outside of the main Google territories – the United States and UK – often index a little lower than expected.

Citation Flow

Citation Flow is an indicator of how influential a site might be given the number of other sites linking to it. As with Trust Flow, a score of 11-49 is usually considered average and 50+ great.

Referring Domains

The next key indicator to look at is the number of domains linking to the website. As a rule of thumb, the bigger the number the better but keep in mind that the more specialised a website is, the fewer domains there are likely to link to it.

Anchor Text

Anchor Text refers to text that is linking back to the website. Ideally you want to see your top 10 anchor text populated mostly with either brand based or non-keyword rich results. In the screenshot you can see the various permutations of team-bhp making up most of the list. This is excellent. The #7 entry – Auto Lighting Thread is a less desirable piece of anchor text as it is entirely keyword based and not brand or URL linked.

Backlink History

Backlink History shows how and when other sites have linked to the URL. Using the daily view it’s possible to see when spikes have occurred, giving you the opportunity to analyse what happened on that day to see if the traffic was anomalous, due to an event or occasion separate from the site or because of some particular content.

A cumulative view of Backlink History gives an indicator of how backlinking has been tracking over time.

You can also compare your site with competitors by adding their URLs to the search.