Atomic Media

7 useful Excel formulas and functions for PPC

Written on August 24, 2022 at 12:31 pm, by admin

My approach to PPC is analytical. I realized early in my career that if I focused on developing my ability to manipulate and interpret performance data, the optimizations become obvious.

Leaning into Excel skills can help you become a more efficient worker and improve the quality of your analyses.

One of my favorite parts about Excel is that I continuously find ways to be more efficient. Several functions and formulas can help expedite PPC tasks.

What follows are seven Excel tips to help you quickly identify high-impact PPC optimizations that will move the needle for your brand or client.

Excel 101: Foundational formulas

These are the Excel skills I first introduce to new hires who are expected to take on performance reporting and bulk sheet builds. 

If you find yourself in a similar role or feel that those tasks are cumbersome, try incorporating the following into your process.

Delta

Simply put, a delta is a rate of change. For performance marketers, that is half the battle associated with our jobs. We need to have an acute understanding of the changes we see to develop effective optimizations. 

Notice how large the Click Conversion Delta is in the example calculation above. Nominally, a drop from 5% to 3% could be overlooked. However, using the delta calculation, it becomes clear that click conversion needs to improve, to enhance the campaign CPA. 

Incremental impact

The insights received from the incremental impact calculation will align with the insights from the performance deltas – big deltas will have big incremental impacts. Don’t expect to get any new insights when using these formulas in conjunction.

This formula is handy when developing a performance narrative. It helps answer the “so what” question that all stakeholders understand. Incorporate callouts such as “an X% drop in CTR results in Y fewer clicks” or “an X% increase in CPCs drove $Y more spend” to add more color to the narrative. 

One important caveat is that this formula assumes that all else is constant. As marketers, we know that these metrics are all interconnected.

If impressions increase by 50%, CTR will likely decrease. Use deltas first to understand performance changes comprehensively, and only leverage this calculation when it makes logical sense.

Concatenate

In terms of impact on day-to-day tasks, if CONCATENATE is not a part of your process when creating bulk sheets, this likely will be the most impactful takeaway from this article. This function allows users to combine the contents of multiple cells together in a single text string. Think of it like a glue that can be used to connect cells. 

The applications of this function are far-reaching. One important note – the function is not limited to cells. Text/characters can be incorporated as fields within the formula using quotation marks around the text. Example 2 illustrates the incorporation of text into a CONCATENATE formula. 

---

---

Excel 201: Preparing datasets for analysis

Pivot tables are a PPC marketer’s best friend. However, to best leverage pivot tables, you must invest time to ensure the integrity and granularity of the dataset.

The following functions/formulas included here are most impactful when preparing a dataset for analysis, but the applications are far-reaching.

VLOOKUP

Some may argue that this is the most useful function for search marketers, and I would not put up a huge fight. VLOOKUP is a critical function for search marketers to master, as it’s common that datasets need to be augmented or modified with data from other platforms.

If “source of truth” reporting sits outside of the PPC platforms, you are likely familiar with the challenges of combining datasets. In addition, VLOOKUP is an easy way to add macro-level filters to a granular dataset.

A best practice I recommend is pulling data at the most granular level possible and using VLOOKUP to add filters easily. Start your analysis at higher levels and drill down to the biggest drivers of a change. 

For example, if stakeholders ask for a breakdown of geographic performance, pull at the city level, build a table associating the cities to states and regions, and add two columns for State and Region to the dataset using VLOOKUP. 

Transform date to week

This IF statement is particularly helpful for PPC because weekly reporting options can be limited when pulling reports directly from the platform.

For brands or clients that do not have a traditional Monday to Sunday schedule, pull data at the day/date level. Then add a column to the dataset for Week using this formula.

Note that standard settings in Excel indicate 1=Sunday, 7=Saturday. In Example 2, I have used Tuesday as the start of the week.

Note that the day of week indicator needs to be updated in both the IF statement logic, as well as the returned value if false. 

Excel 301: Tools for large-scale datasets

Categorization based on text

While it might be complex at first glance, this formula is very practical for search marketers. It allows users to search a cell of text for a particular word or phrase. 

If the cell meets the criteria, the formula will return text inputted in the ‘text if true’ field. Based on the previous formula we covered, I bet you can guess what happens if it does not match.

The formula has many applications within search marketing. However, categorization is rarely binary – meaning you are not categorizing entities into one of 2 options.

Example 2 shows how multiple logical tests can be stacked on each other. This is referred to as a nested IF statement. To create a nested IF statement, you repeat the IF statement logic in the ‘text if false’ field with different search criteria.

Essentially, this tells Excel to search for the first phrase/text. If it does not find it, search for the second phrase/text. Using nested IF statements, advertisers can quickly categorize data at scale.

Joining complex datasets

Finally, I want to highlight how the techniques described previously can be leveraged collectively to enhance the quality of analysis.

If you’re following the best practice of pulling platform data at the most granular levels, it’s common for data to contain multiple segmentations (a.k.a., attribute columns in the dataset). 

When combining data between two platforms, the datasets must have the same level of granularity. Otherwise, data that you pull into your original dataset will be inaccurate. 

To join complex datasets, use CONCATENATE to create an additional column that joins together all segmentations in the original dataset. This should be replicated in the second dataset, using the same order in the concatenation. See Step 1 for an example. 

The newly formed column now serves as the connector between the two datasets. Using the VLOOKUP function, search for this newly created column in the second dataset and designate which column of data you’d like to append to dataset #1. Double check the VLOOKUP worked correctly by comparing the sum of the newly imported data to the original table it was imported from.

Happy number crunching!

There’s a lot of information to digest here. Yet, we’ve only scratched the tip of the iceberg here.

Don’t give up if you’re struggling with Excel. It takes time to learn the functions and their capabilities. Search for some videos that walk you through live examples – those were particularly effective for me. 

The post 7 useful Excel formulas and functions for PPC appeared first on Search Engine Land.

Courtesy of Search Engine Land: News & Info About SEO, PPC, SEM, Search Engines & Search Marketing

White label link-building services: How to do it right

Written on August 24, 2022 at 12:31 pm, by admin

If you’re a marketing or digital agency, you’ll know that link building is the most important part of search engine optimization (SEO), but it’s also extremely time-consuming. That’s where white label link building comes in.

You’ll also know just how time-consuming and resource-intensive it is.

Just building a single half-decent link can take hours of phone calls, planning, writing and follow-ups. 

Unfortunately, your client probably hasn’t asked for just one link. They need tens or even hundreds.

If this happens and you don’t have a dedicated in-house team, link building can quickly start to drain your resources.

White label link-building services are a great way to overcome this. 

At LinkBuilder.io, we’ve developed a process to help some of the world’s best SEO agencies deliver powerful links to their clients to ultimately accelerate their results. 

You’ll place high-quality links quicker, and you’ll be able to spend more time keeping your clients happy.

Key takeaways  White label link building services help agencies to build high-quality links without a dedicated in-house team.Outsourcing link building puts it in the hands of specialists and allows agencies to provide clients with more and better quality links.Agencies should be wary when seeking a white label link builder. There are lots of link-building scams looking to make a quick buck off of inexperienced people.White label link building services use HARO, guest blogs, PR links and linkable assets to place high-quality links.

What is white label link building?

White label link building refers to the practice where a digital marketing agency subcontracts out link building to a specialist agency.

The customer agency presents the links to their client as if they had built them.

White label link building is a common practice because link building forms an essential part of most SEO campaigns. However, it requires specialized skills that many digital marketing or SEO agencies don’t have. 

You should consider using white label link building services if:

Your agency has been asked to build quality links by a client, but you don’t have the in-house skills to do so. 

You have an in-house link-building team but it cannot satisfy the high demand.

You want a low-risk way to test offering link-building services.

You want to offer link building but can’t afford to employ people to do so.

Why use a white label link-building service?

At LinkBuilder.io, we work with some of the world’s leading SEO and content marketing companies to provide incredible backlinks for their clients. 

Some benefits of working with a white label link-building service include:

Access to highly-experienced professionals

Specialist agencies are staffed by people who have been building links every day for years. They instinctively know how to place great links and they can do it fast.

Less investment required

It takes many years to nurture an effective link-building team. Learning to do it yourself or teaching others takes a lot of time and hiring an in-house link-building team is expensive. Using a white label service takes away these issues.

Ready-made infrastructure

Link building involves contacting other quality websites, finding the right person to speak to, negotiating prices, and pitching ideas. This is hard work that takes time. Specialist link-building companies are already set up to do these things. For example, they have relationships in place with major websites. And if they don’t, they have people dedicated to forming those relationships quickly and successfully.

There when you need it.

Employing in-house link-building specialists isn’t worth it unless you have a constant stream of work to keep them busy. Using white label link-building experts allows you to access experts as and when you need them.

High-quality backlinks.

Good link-building agencies get business based on their reputation. Because of this, they only use techniques that adhere to Google’s guidelines. They strive to generate high-quality backlinks that will improve your rankings and last a long time. 

You focus on what you do best.

Paying someone else to do link building for you gives you more time to focus on your core role. You’ll have more time to keep clients happy.

Scalable

White label link building allows you to take on as many new link-building projects as you like. It also makes it easier to deal with surprise requests from clients. 

Full-service

Subcontracting specialisms like link building allows you to provide clients with a broader range of services, making you more valuable to them.

Agency or freelancer?

Link building agencies aren’t the only option for providing a white label service. You could also hire a freelancer. 

Hiring a freelancer has both advantages and disadvantages compared to working with an agency.

Here are the pros and cons of using a freelance link builder:

Pros:

Cheaper.

More flexible.

Cons:

Hard to gauge quality.

Limited expertise and resources.

A good freelancer can guide you through the link-building process in the same way that an agency would. 

If you want to assess freelance link builders, websites like Fiverr and Upwork are great places to start.

How to choose a white label link-building agency

Here are three steps for finding a good quality white label link-building service.

1. Understand link building.

A good link-building agency will do everything for you. But it’s still important to understand the basic ideas and processes behind link building. 

This way, you can communicate better with the agency and your client. You’ll also be able to tell if you are getting value for money. 

You should understand how the following terms are relevant to link building:

Domain Authority.

Organic traffic.

Site relevance.

Search intent.

Nofollow/dofollow.

Quality/poor quality links.

2. Check that your client is ready.

Before you contact a link-building agency, you need to be clear about what you and your client want to achieve. You need to have a clear SEO strategy and know how your link-building efforts will contribute to it.

It’s also useful to understand why your client’s site isn’t ranking higher. Reasons for this could include:

• Their content is good but needs to attract more links.
• Their competitors have higher Domain Authority and they need an alternative way to rank.
• The pages that rank above them have more links.

If most of your client’s content ranks outside the top 100 pages on search engines, this is a sign that it is too early for link building. 

There are two things you could do to help them in this situation.

Improve their existing content: Do this by seeing what content currently ranks for the keywords they want to target. Try to work out why Google likes this content and then work out how your own website can improve on this.

Find better search terms through keyword research: Use an SEO tool and do keyword research to find high-traffic, low-competition search terms. Produce content that targets these keywords. It takes around six months for content to rank properly on search engines, so it’s important that your clients don’t expect instant results.

3. Find a good link-building agency.

Next, we’re going to look at some of the key criteria for finding a good link-building agency.

Case studies

Does the agency have a proven track record of placing high-quality links?

At LinkBuilder.io, we showcase some incredible link-building case studies and have a Clutch profile with verifiable reviews from clients.

It’s important to select a company not just based on cost, but someone who can deliver exceedingly high-quality links that you’re proud to show off to your clients. 

It’s imperative to ensure that your partner has a tried & tested link-building process when it comes to delivering links for your clients. 

Real-time reporting

If you’re trusting another agency to produce work for your clients, then you need a way of checking in on them. The best white label link-building agencies provide reporting systems that demonstrate the value of links built so far and provide progress updates. 

End-to-end service

A good white label link building service should be able to take all aspects of link building off your hands—from strategy and research to placing links and reporting their value. 

Good links pointing to their own website

Link-building agencies should practice what they preach. They should have many quality niche-relevant links pointing to their domain. You can check this by using an SEO tool like Ahrefs and looking at the number of referring domains they have.

Realistic guarantees

A good white label link-building agency can rely on its process to build links. They should guarantee a minimum number of quality backlinks per month. But be wary of agencies that promise to place links on certain websites or whose guarantees seem too good to be true.

Demonstrates best practices

Take a look at the agency’s blog and check that they are writing about the latest link building tactics and best practices. 

Realistic prices

Link building services are expensive. If a link builder’s prices seem too good to be true then they probably are. A reasonable cost per link is between $300 and $500.

Beware of scams

Link building services are one of the most effective ways of improving a website’s search rankings. 

Because of this, there are lots of link-building scams looking to make a quick buck off of inexperienced people. 

Here are some common tactics from low-quality link builders:

Public Blog Networks (PBNs): These are networks of websites used to generate a large number of links to sites.

Link farms: These are websites that exist only to host links that people pay for. They are usually low-quality and full of irrelevant content.

Directory, comment or forum links: These kinds of links usually have no impact on your client’s rankings. They won’t harm it, but they’re certainly not worth paying for. 

Fake guest post services: These services build links by placing guest posts on PBNs and link farms. 

Conclusion

White label link building is a great way for agencies to outsource this key SEO component without having to manage it all in-house. 

It can make your agency’s workload more manageable and allows you to focus on keeping clients happy. 

The post White label link-building services: How to do it right appeared first on Search Engine Land.

Courtesy of Search Engine Land: News & Info About SEO, PPC, SEM, Search Engines & Search Marketing

How to manage SEO campaigns during economic downturns

Written on August 24, 2022 at 12:31 pm, by admin

Economic downturns create uncertainty and changes in user behavior that impact markets and forecasts. They also affect the approach and resources allocated to marketing activities.

Because no two recessions are the same, marketers operate in uncharted waters every time it happens.

This article can help marketers manage SEO campaigns and show the value of their efforts despite a recession.

Doing business during a recession

Consumers will naturally reduce their spending during economic downtimes and establish more stringent priorities. 

When sales decline, businesses begin to reduce expenses, lower prices and delay making new investments. Unfortunately, marketing expenditures are often the first to get cut. This approach to cost reduction is ineffective and should be avoided.

Clients often judge SEO and paid search as independent channels. SEO can be seen as “OK to turn off for a bit,” while a brand rests on its laurels on the assumption that the current performance won’t worsen during the downturn.

But SEO isn’t the only channel that may see issues here. In 2009, the entire U.S. ad market saw a decline of 13%. This was predominantly driven by radio and magazines, which saw declines of 22% and 18%, while “online” only declined by 2%.

---

---

The argument for not reducing spending

It might be a good idea to keep costs down when entering a recession. But if you fail to support brands or examine how your core customers’ needs evolve, you will likely jeopardize your medium to longer-term performance.

Organizations and trade bodies such as the Institute of Practitioners in Advertising (IPA) refer to this as losing the “share of mind.” In the United Kingdom, the IPA has publicly advertised warning brands not to reduce marketing spend in the months ahead.

Reading through research papers and thought leadership content from the International Journal of Business and Social Science, Harvard Business Review, and specialists from the Economist and Financial Times, five key marketing objectives for a recession begin to emerge.

These themes are:

• Smarter spending and investment.
• Retention of the existing customer base should be prioritized.
• Leverage your competitor’s weaknesses.
• Monitor the market and adjust spend targeting segments based on their behaviors.
• Maintain your current spending at a minimum, just spend smarter.

How to keep your SEO efforts going during a downturn

The general message is “do not reduce spending.” That’s great. 

But when defending our retainer or contract renewal, businesses want to know how their SEO spend will tangibly impact the bottom line.

To address this, we can look to the 2008 recession and the recent pandemic – when other businesses pivoted and changed messaging across their digital marketing. 

Let’s apply the learnings to help our clients or employers power through an economic downturn without pausing their SEO efforts. 

Review your TAM and messaging

A total addressable market, or TAM, can be defined in several ways. 

The most common is to define it as the total number of people who could possibly use a product or service. For example, the TAM for a new smartphone might be the total number of people who own a cell phone.

Despite its limitations, TAM can be a helpful metric for investors to assess a company’s growth potential. Companies with large TAMs can be desirable to investors because they have the potential to generate a lot of revenue.

During a recession, businesses (in B2B) and consumers will react differently depending on their economic stability.

Depending on your TAM, you may need to pivot your messaging and value propositions. This then ties into your SEO strategy. Align activities to these messaging goals, depending on whether your product is deemed essential, luxury, postponable or expendable.

Essential products are often price-sensitive during a downturn. You may want to highlight the value proposition further for less economically stable consumers.

For those in your TAM who are better off, you should continue awareness campaigns (i.e., top and middle of the funnel activities).

By comparison, luxury products can be communicated as being precisely that – a luxury/treat to be consumed as a reward for austerity in other areas. They can also induce dopamine reactions and raise morale.

The other two categories, postponables and expendables are the most difficult to pivot for.

An example of a postponable is a TV streaming service or magazine subscription. Users ahead of postponing may research cheaper alternatives to avoid missing out. During this research phase, you must be visible and fight to retain your existing users. 

For other goods that can be postponed (such as servicing a vehicle, replacing a tire, or updating home security systems), messaging should focus on the long-term financial and opportunity costs of not performing these actions now and providing support messaging.

Expendable products and services will likely impact local SEO more than other sectors. Rather than hire a gardener or decorator, consumers will choose to perform the maintenance and upgrades themselves.

This is both an opportunity and a threat to sell to consumers by enabling them or working to remain visible as a company and build trust.

Smarter opportunity analysis and competitor targeting

Most businesses are focused on maintaining and retaining market position during a recession. It’s an excellent time to identify consumers they currently hold and work to leverage them toward your products and services.

Competitive targeting should be a staple of an SEO campaign anyway.

But during a downturn, when sensitivity to price and value is heightened, your messaging and content can focus on pain points that consumers may have with competitor products and services.

Turn these into a competitive advantage to create a conversation with new prospects. You can produce competitor comparison content and highlight the competitor’s weak spots as non-issues or strengths with your product.

For example, if you’re providing a rotating proxy service and you know that your competitor, Bob’s Proxies has issues with uptime, then make sure your content highlights that your service has no such problems.

Positioning for post-recession

SEO is a long-term strategy, but you must focus on the longer-term and the short-term during an economic downturn.

Typically, consumer trust and spending recover within one to two years of a recession. When consumers return to post-downturn spending levels (or establish new market norms), you want to ensure you’re prominent and visible in the vertical.

You can do so by maintaining a certain level of activity toward establishing and maintaining top-of-vertical awareness and remaining competitive for bottom-of-funnel, conversion-focused queries.

Conclusion

During a recession, marketing may seem like more of a challenge than usual. Customers’ spending habits often change, and you may have to go against your instincts.

It’s essential to optimize your budget and be strategic about your priorities. You can continue marketing your products or services while providing for your customers’ needs. A recession can be an opportunity to build customer loyalty.

During a downturn, SEO can alleviate direct cost channels (such as paid) and offer long-term benefits and short-term stability.

Google and the other search engines will continuously update during this period. Competitors who remain stagnant and withdraw resources will suffer in the medium to long-term, costing more in the future to regain lost performance and the opportunity cost of lost visibility.

The post How to manage SEO campaigns during economic downturns appeared first on Search Engine Land.

Courtesy of Search Engine Land: News & Info About SEO, PPC, SEM, Search Engines & Search Marketing

Google Performance Max self-upgrade tool for Local campaigns is now available

Written on August 23, 2022 at 9:28 am, by admin

Google has just announced the Performance Max self-upgrade tool for Smart Shopping and Local campaigns.

How to self-upgrade. You can self-upgrade your Smart Shopping and Local campaigns by navigating to the notification in your ads dashboard, the Recommendations page, or the Campaign page.

Preserving historical data. When your campaigns are self-upgraded, all historical campaign performance from your previous campaigns will carry over, eliminating the need to go back into the dreaded learning phase. Campaign settings such as budget, creatives, goals, and bid strategy will also carry over.

Automatic upgrades are coming. The self-upgrade tool is available to all eligible advertisers and will continue to roll out throughout the remainder of August and into September. Google recommends using the self-upgrade tool to upgrade your campaigns as soon as possible, “ahead of the holiday season.”

If your campaigns are not eligible for self-upgrade and you are not notified about an automatic update, your Local campaigns will not be upgraded to Performance Max until 2023. If you have access to the self-upgrade tool and do not upgrade your campaigns by the end of September, you’ll continue to have access to the self-upgrade tool until auto-upgrades kick in in 2023.

---

---

What happens to the old campaigns. After you upgrade to Performance Max, your previous Local campaigns will be set to “Removed” status. You won’t be able to edit or reactivate these campaigns or create new Local campaigns once your campaigns begin to auto-upgrade. Historical data will continue to be available from the Campaigns page or Overview page in Google Ads.

Best practices. Google lays out five best practices to ensure advertisers are getting the most out of their Performance Max campaigns.

1. Use the Performance Planner to plan holiday budgets and assets and assess how budget changes can impact performance.
2. Start your holiday campaigns 2-3 weeks in advance, then refresh creative to focus more on specific goals versus generic store ads.
3. Set a value for each conversion action. For example, a ‘phone call’ click is worth $3, a ‘form fill’ is worth $5, and a ‘store visit’ could be worth $10.
4. Set one call-to-action per asset group. (While Local campaigns support multiple custom call-to-actions per ad group, Performance Max campaigns support one predefined call-to-action per asset group. During the upgrade, up to five customer call-to-actions will be upgraded and supported as read-only in Performance Max.)
5. Turn off ad scheduling and/or geo-targeting

Read the Google Ads Help doc. You can learn more about auto and self-updates and read the full help doc here.

Why we care. Automatic updates aren’t fun for anyone. If you’re running a Smart Shopping or Local campaign and you’re eligible to migrate to Performance Max, you should do so as soon as possible. Waiting until the holiday season could leave you in a bad spot if they stop performing. It’s much better to update the campaigns on your own terms so you have time to make adjustments if you need to.

The post Google Performance Max self-upgrade tool for Local campaigns is now available appeared first on Search Engine Land.

Courtesy of Search Engine Land: News & Info About SEO, PPC, SEM, Search Engines & Search Marketing

3 valuable Google Analytics 4 reports for SEOs

Written on August 23, 2022 at 9:28 am, by admin

As an analyst, marketer, or SEO, you probably have some go-to reports you are used to looking at in Google Analytics. You may have them bookmarked or have memorized the three or four clicks you need to get the right report from Universal Analytics. 

Now that it will soon become Google’s default analytics tool, let’s look at how to create three common and useful reports for SEO in Google Analytics 4.

1. Traffic acquisition report

This one is quick and straightforward – only one click in the GA4 interface will get you the Traffic acquisition report, aka the session acquisition report (there is acquisition by both user and session in GA4).

Here’s where you can quickly analyze the different channels bringing traffic to your site.

In the reporting UI, you’ll find this report under Life cycle > Acquisition > Traffic Acquisition.

Note that this report initially defaults to use the Session default channel grouping as the primary dimension. Still, you can change this to a different view of traffic acquisition if preferred. 

For example, you can select Session source / medium which was a default report in the UA navigation.

You can also break this report down by additional dimensions, including custom dimensions.

Let’s say you collect custom dimensions on your blog for things like article title, article tag, article date, and so on. This then gives me the ability to analyze article performance by channel.

Finally, you can use the filter box above the table if you want to filter this report for just Organic Search as a channel. 

Note that the filter box currently references both the primary and secondary dimensions. Unlike UA, there is not (yet) the ability to filter on a single dimension in a table.

---

---

2. Google Search Console reports

If you are using the Google Search Console integration (and you should be!), you will have a new collection of reports available to publish to your reporting navigation menu.

Once you have this setup, you’ll see two reports: 

• The Google organic search traffic report.
• The Queries report. 

Note that in my screenshot below, I’ve renamed these reports (via the customization feature) to be a bit more meaningful to me, so they are called “SC: Organic Keywords” and “SC: Landing Page.”

These reports show pretty much what you’d expect. The Landing page report displays SEO-specific metrics such as:

• Organic Google search clicks.
• Organic Google search impressions.
• CTR.
• Avg Position.

The Queries/keyword report shows the same metrics against the actual search query (as opposed to the Landing page in the previous report).

While these reports won’t replace your GSC data, they are a nice addition to GA4, especially when you add secondary dimensions of web traffic when analyzing organic search data.

For example, I can break down my search queries by Device category.

3. SEO landing page report 

I saved the best for last – building a customized SEO landing page report.

In a previous article, I covered a quick 10-step process for creating a landing page report in GA4. The landing page dimension is available out of the box, but there isn’t (yet) an out-of-the-box report specifically for landing pages, so you’ll need to create it yourself. 

Now, I want to show you how to tailor your landing page report to just show organic traffic.

Sure, you could just add either default channel grouping or source / medium to your current landing page report. But taking a few moments to further customize will save you that click and allow you to then break down your SEO landing page report by an additional dimension in the reporting UI.

Step 1: Via the Library section, create a new detail report.

Step 2: Next, you’ll need to choose a template to start from. You can select a blank template or one of the pre-populated templates. These will all start as a copy of the basic report for the subject area. 

For example, the Traffic acquisition template will be a copy of the Traffic acquisition report. For this scenario, we’ll start with the Pages and screens template.

Step 3: Once in the report template, click on the Dimensions tile in the upper right corner to select additional dimensions to add to the primary dimension column.

Then click Add dimension.

From the dropdown list, choose Landing page.

Step 4: Once you’ve added the Landing page dimension, you’ll want to make it the primary dimension in the report.

To do so, click the three dots menu and select Set as default. Then click Apply to save changes.

Step 5: Now comes the fun part (everything up until now was just a walk-through of making the landing page report from scratch!).

We’re going to use a brand new feature in GA4 called Report filter to filter this landing page report to only show us data that came from organic traffic.

Step 6: When you click the Add filter button, you’ll find a condition builder for your filter settings. For this particular filter, we want to:

• Choose Include, which acts as an include-only operator.
• Select the dimension we want to filter on. In this case, the Session default channel grouping. Then select from a dropdown list which channels to include. We’ll choose only Organic Search. 

Hit OK and apply. 

This will now filter the landing page report to only show traffic that has come from organic search. 

A couple of other quick things I like to do with custom reports is to change the visuals. I prefer to hide the scatter plot and change the bar chart to a line graph. You can do this in the Charts section of the editor. 

Once you’re done, save the report and give it a name. I’ll call this one my “SEO Landing Pages report.”

You’ll also know this is a filtered report because it shows a little filter icon in the upper left-hand corner of the report.

Don’t forget to add this new report to one of your report collections in the Library so it will appear in your left-side navigation bar.

Hopefully, these quick examples of common SEO reports are a helpful way for you to get more familiar and comfortable with GA4.

The post 3 valuable Google Analytics 4 reports for SEOs appeared first on Search Engine Land.

Courtesy of Search Engine Land: News & Info About SEO, PPC, SEM, Search Engines & Search Marketing

Debunking the 4 myths of consumer data privacy that are holding marketers back

Written on August 23, 2022 at 9:28 am, by admin

Four years after the launch of GDPR and one year after Apple’s App Tracking Transparency release, marketers are still grappling with the reality of the privacy-first era as it turns the marketing “best practices” of the last decade on its head and exposes a level of uncertainty.

In this on-demand webinar, BlueConic’s COO and President, Cory Munchbach, was joined by Forrester Analyst and guest speaker, Stephanie Liu, to debunk 4 myths of consumer data privacy that are holding marketers back.

The presentation covers:

• The spectrum of consumer preferences about their data privacy
• What you can change about your marketing operation to adapt
• How marketers use a customer data platform (CDP) to support a mutual value exchange between the business and the consumer

Access the recording here.

The post Debunking the 4 myths of consumer data privacy that are holding marketers back appeared first on Search Engine Land.

Courtesy of Search Engine Land: News & Info About SEO, PPC, SEM, Search Engines & Search Marketing

How Google uses NLP to better understand search queries, content

Written on August 23, 2022 at 9:28 am, by admin

Natural language processing opened the door for semantic search on Google.

SEOs need to understand the switch to entity-based search because this is the future of Google search. 

In this article, we’ll dive deep into natural language processing and how Google uses it to interpret search queries and content, entity mining, and more.

What is natural language processing?

Natural language processing, or NLP, makes it possible to understand the meaning of words, sentences and texts to generate information, knowledge or new text.

It consists of natural language understanding (NLU) – which allows semantic interpretation of text and natural language – and natural language generation (NLG). 

NLP can be used for:

• Speech recognition (text to speech and speech to text).
• Segmenting previously captured speech into individual words, sentences and phrases.
• Recognizing basic forms of words and acquisition of grammatical information.
• Recognizing functions of individual words in a sentence (subject, verb, object, article, etc.)
• Extracting the meaning of sentences and parts of sentences or phrases, such as adjective phrases (e.g., “too long”), prepositional phrases (e.g., “to the river”), or nominal phrases (e.g., “the long party”).
• Recognizing sentence contexts, sentence relationships, and entities.
• Linguistic text analysis, sentiment analysis, translations (including those for voice assistants), chatbots and underlying question and answer systems.

The following are the core components of NLP:

• Tokenization: Divides a sentence into different terms.
• Word type labeling: Classifies words by object, subject, predicate, adjective, etc.
• Word dependencies: Identifies relationships between words based on grammar rules. 
• Lemmatization: Determines whether a word has different forms and normalizes variations to the base form. For example, the base form of “cars” is “car.”
• Parsing labels: Labels words based on the relationship between two words connected by a dependency.
• Named entity analysis and extraction: Identifies words with a “known” meaning and assigns them to classes of entity types. In general, named entities are organizations, people, products, places, and things (nouns). In a sentence, subjects and objects are to be identified as entities.

• Salience scoring: Determines how intensively a text is connected with a topic. Salience is generally determined by the co-citation of words on the web and the relationships between entities in databases such as Wikipedia and Freebase. Experienced SEOs know a similar method from TF-IDF analysis.
• Sentiment analysis: Identifies the opinion (view or attitude) expressed in a text about the entities or topics.
• Text categorization: At the macro level, NLP classifies text into content categories. Text categorization helps to determine generally what the text is about.
• Text classification and function: NLP can go further and determine the intended function or purpose of the content. This is very interesting to match a search intent with a document.
• Content type extraction: Based on structural patterns or context, a search engine can determine a text’s content type without structured data. The text’s HTML, formatting, and data type (date, location, URL, etc.) can identify whether it is a recipe, product, event or another content type without using markups.
• Identify implicit meaning based on structure: The formatting of a text can change its implied meaning. Headings, line breaks, lists and proximity convey a secondary understanding of the text. For example, when text is displayed in an HTML-sorted list or a series of headings with numbers in front of them, it is likely to be a listicle or a ranking. The structure is defined not only by HTML tags but also by visual font size/thickness and proximity during rendering.

The use of NLP in search

For years, Google has trained language models like BERT or MUM to interpret text, search queries, and even video and audio content. These models are fed via natural language processing.

Google search mainly uses natural language processing in the following areas:

• Interpretation of search queries.
• Classification of subject and purpose of documents.
• Entity analysis in documents, search queries and social media posts.
• For generating featured snippets and answers in voice search.
• Interpretation of video and audio content.
• Expansion and improvement of the Knowledge Graph.

Google highlighted the importance of understanding natural language in search when they released the BERT update in October 2019.

“At its core, Search is about understanding language. It’s our job to figure out what you’re searching for and surface helpful information from the web, no matter how you spell or combine the words in your query. While we’ve continued to improve our language understanding capabilities over the years, we sometimes still don’t quite get it right, particularly with complex or conversational queries. In fact, that’s one of the reasons why people often use “keyword-ese,” typing strings of words that they think we’ll understand, but aren’t actually how they’d naturally ask a question.”

BERT & MUM: NLP for interpreting search queries and documents

BERT is said to be the most critical advancement in Google search in several years after RankBrain. Based on NLP, the update was designed to improve search query interpretation and initially impacted 10% of all search queries.

BERT plays a role not only in query interpretation but also in ranking and compiling featured snippets, as well as interpreting text questionnaires in documents.

“Well, by applying BERT models to both ranking and featured snippets in Search, we’re able to do a much better job helping you find useful information. In fact, when it comes to ranking results, BERT will help Search better understand one in 10 searches in the U.S. in English, and we’ll bring this to more languages and locales over time.”

The rollout of the MUM update was announced at Search On ’21. Also based on NLP, MUM is multilingual, answers complex search queries with multimodal data, and processes information from different media formats. In addition to text, MUM also understands images, video and audio files.

MUM combines several technologies to make Google searches even more semantic and context-based to improve the user experience. 

With MUM, Google wants to answer complex search queries in different media formats to join the user along the customer journey.

As used for BERT and MUM, NLP is an essential step to a better semantic understanding and a more user-centric search engine.

Understanding search queries and content via entities marks the shift from “strings” to “things.” Google’s aim is to develop a semantic understanding of search queries and content. 

By identifying entities in search queries, the meaning and search intent becomes clearer. The individual words of a search term no longer stand alone but are considered in the context of the entire search query.

The magic of interpreting search terms happens in query processing. The following steps are important here:

• Identifying the thematic ontology in which the search query is located. If the thematic context is clear, Google can select a content corpus of text documents, videos and images as potentially suitable search results. This is particularly difficult with ambiguous search terms.
• Identifying entities and their meaning in the search term (named entity recognition).
• Understanding the semantic meaning of a search query.
• Identifying the search intent.
• Semantic annotation of the search query.
• Refining the search term.

---

---

NLP is the most crucial methodology for entity mining

Natural language processing will play the most important role for Google in identifying entities and their meanings, making it possible to extract knowledge from unstructured data. 

On this basis, relationships between entities and the Knowledge Graph can then be created. Speech tagging partially helps with this. 

Nouns are potential entities, and verbs often represent the relationship of the entities to each other. Adjectives describe the entity, and adverbs describe the relationship.

Google has so far only made minimal use of unstructured information to feed the Knowledge Graph. 

It can be assumed that:

• The entities recorded so far in the Knowledge Graph are only the tip of the iceberg.
• Google is additionally feeding another knowledge repository with information on long-tail entities.

NLP plays a central role in feeding this knowledge repository.

Google is already quite good in NLP but does not yet achieve satisfactory results in evaluating automatically extracted information regarding accuracy. 

Data mining for a knowledge database like the Knowledge Graph from unstructured data like websites is complex.

In addition to the completeness of the information, correctness is essential. Nowadays, Google guarantees completeness at scale through NLP, but proving correctness and accuracy is difficult. 

This is probably why Google is still acting cautiously regarding the direct positioning of information on long-tail entities in the SERPs.

Entity-based index vs. classic content-based index

The introduction of the Hummingbird update paved the way for semantic search. It also brought the Knowledge Graph – and thus, entities – into focus.

The Knowledge Graph is Google’s entity index. All attributes, documents and digital images such as profiles and domains are organized around the entity in an entity-based index.

The Knowledge Graph is currently used parallel to the classic Google Index for ranking.

Suppose Google recognizes in the search query that it is about an entity recorded in the Knowledge Graph. In that case, the information in both indexes is accessed, with the entity being the focus and all information and documents related to the entity also taken into account.

An interface or API is required between the classic Google Index and the Knowledge Graph, or another type of knowledge repository, to exchange information between the two indices.

This entity-content interface is about finding out:

• Whether there are entities in a piece of content.
• Whether there is a main entity that the content is about.
• Which ontology or ontologies the main entity can be assigned to.
• Which author or which entity the content is assigned.
• How the entities in the content relate to each other.
• Which properties or attributes are to be assigned to the entities.

It could look like this:

We’re just starting to feel the impact of entity-based search in the SERPs as Google is slow to understand the meaning of individual entities.

Entities are understood top-down by social relevance. The most relevant ones are recorded in Wikidata and Wikipedia, respectively.

The big task will be to identify and verify long-tail entities. It is also unclear which criteria Google checks for including an entity in the Knowledge Graph.

In a German Webmaster Hangout in January 2019, Google’s John Mueller said they were working on a more straightforward way to create entities for everyone.

“I don’t think we have a clear answer. I think we have different algorithms that check something like that and then we use different criteria to pull the whole thing together, to pull it apart and to recognize which things are really separate entities, which are just variants or less separate entities… But as far as I’m concerned I’ve seen that, that’s something we’re working on to expand that a bit and I imagine it’ll make it easier to get featured in the Knowledge Graph as well. But I don’t know what the plans are exactly.”

NLP plays a vital role in scaling up this challenge.

Examples from the diffbot demo show how well NLP can be used for entity mining and constructing a Knowledge Graph.

NLP in Google search is here to stay

RankBrain was introduced to interpret search queries and terms via vector space analysis that had not previously been used in this way. 

BERT and MUM use natural language processing to interpret search queries and documents. 

In addition to the interpretation of search queries and content, MUM and BERT opened the door to allow a knowledge database such as the Knowledge Graph to grow at scale, thus advancing semantic search at Google. 

The developments in Google Search through the core updates are also closely related to MUM and BERT, and ultimately, NLP and semantic search.

In the future, we will see more and more entity-based Google search results replacing classic phrase-based indexing and ranking.

The post How Google uses NLP to better understand search queries, content appeared first on Search Engine Land.

Courtesy of Search Engine Land: News & Info About SEO, PPC, SEM, Search Engines & Search Marketing

Google’s helpful content update: What should we expect?

Written on August 22, 2022 at 6:18 am, by admin

The new helpful content update sounds like a big deal.

Google has given us a list of questions to consider to determine whether our sites are designed to help people, or rather, created to do well on search engines.

If the latter is the case, you may find yourself hit with a sitewide signal that makes it difficult to rank.

If this update has a strong impact, which I believe it will, we may be in for another shakeup in the world of SEO like we had following the launch of Penguin 10 years ago. 

If you have focused more on SEO efforts than creating content for humans to benefit from, this could strongly affect your site. It still remains to be seen how powerful this ranking signal is.

Does it affect all sites that use SEO? 

Google was careful to note in their blog post that this update does not invalidate following SEO best practices.

They say, “SEO is a helpful activity when it’s applied to people-first content” and link to their SEO starter guide. Google is not against search engine optimization.

This update is geared toward sites that have gamed the system, creating content that isn’t super helpful to people but still ranking well because of SEO rather than on the merit of the content on the site.

Is it a penalty?

Google is careful in its wording regarding whether this is a penalty. 

It’s not a manual action. You won’t see it listed in Google Search Console. It’s not a spam action. 

We are to call it a “signal”. This is one of the many ranking signals Google describes in their documentation on How Search Works.

If that signal is applied to your site, it likely will feel like a penalty.

The good news is that you can get this classification removed from your site if you can improve your content. 

The part of Google’s algorithm that classifies sites for this update will be running continuously. 

If the algorithms see that your site’s content has shifted to be helpful to searchers, the strength of the signal may be reduced, or even lifted completely.

This announcement reminds me of the early days of Google’s Penguin and Panda algorithms.

Today these algorithms are baked into the core algorithm, but initially, they were filters that were applied to affected sites. 

Sites with unnatural links (Penguin) or low-quality content (Panda) would have a filter applied that suppressed ranking.

If those sites cleaned up their link profile or improved the quality of their content then they had a chance at seeing recovery the next time Google ran a Penguin or Panda update.

It sounds like the helpful content classifier will have a similar effect in that sites affected will suffer some degree of sitewide ranking suppression and eventually can have that suppression lifted. But there are some significant differences:

• The helpful content classifier runs in real-time, continually. This means that new sites created just for SEO should have the signal applied right from the start. Also, existing sites can be affected when the amount of content created for SEO purposes exceeds a threshold.
• Sites will be impacted over the course of a few months and to different degrees depending on the amount of unhelpful content found. Google won’t run specific updates during which sites recover. Rather, if the classifier determines that content has changed to now be deemed helpful to searchers and has remained that way for a few months, the weight of the deranking signal will be reduced or even lifted.

What is people-first content? 

This is what Google wants us to focus on. But what is it?

I’ll share my thoughts on each of the questions they say to ask ourselves about our content.

“Do you have an existing or intended audience for your business or site that would find the content useful if they came directly to you?”

Something I’ve often said to clients when trying to explain content quality is, “Would this content still exist if it wasn’t for search engines?” 

A local business would still want to educate its customers on their services. 

The National Kidney Foundation would still publish content to educate patients and doctors.

Would you still create the content you are creating if search hits from Google did not exist? 

“Does your content clearly demonstrate first-hand expertise and a depth of knowledge (for example, expertise that comes from having actually used a product or service, or visiting a place)?”

This should not be new to us!

Google’s blog post on what site owners should know about core updates has a whole section of questions to ask ourselves in regards to expertise.

Knowing your topic is important. 

I feel Google has started to promote first-hand expertise with recent product review updates.

Many that were affected by the July 2022 product review update were sites that lacked legitimate first-hand expertise in using the products they were recommending.

For the majority (if not all) of the sites I reviewed that were affected by this update, there was a sitewide demotion. 

“Does your site have a primary purpose or focus?”

The search quality evaluator guidelines teach Google’s quality raters that it is important to determine a page’s purpose. 

Is it designed to share information? Or to sell products? Or perhaps to entertain?

Why does your site exist? How are you trying to help people?  

It is important that the purpose of your content’s existence is clear.

I think that many people who have created sites that are created with SEO efforts foremost in mind will rationalize that their content is created to inform people. 

If you’re unsure, I encourage you to review the next two questions:

• After reading your content, will someone leave feeling they’ve learned enough about a topic to help achieve their goal?
• Will someone reading your content leave feeling like they’ve had a satisfying experience?

Google wants to present searchers with information that fully meets their needs. 

How do I know if my content is built for search engines first?

Once again, Google has given us some questions to ask.

When I read these, it feels to me that this update could have a large impact on what we see in the search results. 

If these questions apply to your content, you may find that your site is classified sitewide as being created primarily for search engines.

“Is the content primarily to attract people from search engines, rather than made for humans?”

I expect some content may lie on a spectrum. Google says the signal is weighted and that “[s]ites with lots of unhelpful content may notice a stronger effect.” 

Super spammy sites with little actual benefit to searchers should be hit strongly. 

Sites with some content created primarily with SEO in mind that also have content that is helpful will be impacted, but not as strongly.

It is important to remember that the sitewide effect means the good content on your site will also be affected by this update if Google deems you worthy of the classification.

“Are you producing lots of content on different topics in hopes that some of it might perform well in search results?”

Many of the sites affected by the July 2022 product reviews update were review sites that reviewed almost any product out there. There was little focus other than “we review products.”

I expect we’ll see declines in many sites because they are writing on as many topics as they can rather than focusing on what is important to their users.

“Are you using extensive automation to produce content on many topics?”

I wonder whether this line is geared toward sites writing their content mostly with AI content-generating tools.

AI-generated content can often rank well because it contains many of the words search engines use to determine relevancy. 

But a person can usually tell when content is AI-written and not created by an actual human. If you are creating content by automated means, you may find yourself on Google’s radar. 

“Are you mainly summarizing what others have to say without adding much value?”

This makes me think about review sites that aggregate Amazon listings and slightly re-word them. It will be interesting to see if other types of aggregator sites are hit as well.

“Are you writing about things simply because they seem trending and not because you’d write about them otherwise for your existing audience?”

I do think that it is still acceptable to write on trending topics provided they are what your audience wants to read. 

But if the focus of your site is simply to capitalize on new trends, I expect you may be affected. 

“Does your content leave readers feeling like they need to search again to get better information from other sources?”

The quality rater guidelines instruct the raters to determine to what extent content meets a searcher’s needs:

It is becoming increasingly more important to determine what your readers’ intent is when they come to your site. 

And are you fully satisfying their needs? Would they need to go elsewhere for more information after reading your content?

“Are you writing to a particular word count because you’ve heard or read that Google has a preferred word count? (No, we don’t).”

I have seen blog posts that advise that content below a certain word count will be considered thin by Google which is not the case. Sometimes short content actually helps the searcher more. 

I suppose this question is written to dissuade sites from writing massive articles covering everything there is to know about a topic on one single page (unless it is meeting the need of searchers who want to read a thorough essay on a subject). 

This may seem like it contradicts Google’s advice to fully meet the needs of a searcher. 

If tasked with creating content on buying a lawn mower, many SEOs are conditioned to produce the most thorough article on lawn mowers possible.

Let’s say a searcher typed, “best lawn mower.”

Do they really need an article that explains “What is a lawn mower?,” “Types of lawn mowers” and also “How to start a lawn mower”?

Having those words on the page historically has helped search engines understand that the page is relevant to lawn mowers. 

However, the searcher’s intent, in this case, is to get help in deciding which mower to buy, not to learn everything there is to know on the subject. 

A shorter article may be what is more helpful to a searcher in this situation.

“Did you decide to enter some niche topic area without any real expertise, but instead mainly because you thought you’d get search traffic?”

I’ve seen a real rise lately in discussions about operating “niche sites.” 

I do think some of these will survive, provided the writer really is passionate about the niche and can write on relevant topics from a point of personal experience. 

But if you’ve picked a niche primarily based on your ability to rank for that content, rather than out of a passion for covering that topic, you may find Google does not reward you.

“Does your content promise to answer a question that actually has no answer, such as suggesting there’s a release date for a product, movie, or TV show when one isn’t confirmed?”

This seems like a specific question and is pretty straightforward.

Is recovery possible?

If your site is classified as being built primarily for search engines, you will likely see a significant decline in search traffic over the next few months. 

Google says that sites that are affected will indeed be able to work to get the classifier removed and possibly recover their rankings.

It is important to remember that if Google sees enough SEO content on your site, the sitewide signal will also impact the remainder of the content on your site as well. 

As such, you will need to identify where the problems are and work aggressively to repair them if you want to rank at all.

Here is what I will be recommending to sites that come to us for help after being affected by this update although we’ll adapt our advice as more information becomes available:

• Identify which content on the site could be construed as being created for search engines rather than humans.
• Determine whether that content can be improved upon to Google’s satisfaction, or whether it should be noindexed/removed from the site.
• Find ways to produce content that goes above and beyond when it comes to being helpful to searchers. This may include adding more user-generated content, first-hand photos or videos, etc.
• Compare competitor pages that continue to rank well to see if we can understand what content Google is rewarding as inspiration on how to improve our content. 
• Work on improving E-A-T for the site to help make it more obvious to Google’s algorithms that the site has and also is known for having expertise on the topics it covers.
• Clarify what the purpose or focus of each page is (and ensure that this purpose is first and foremost meant to help people).
• In some cases, know when to cut losses and move on. I believe that some sites that are hit by this update may not be able to recover without extensive and possibly unattainable changes.

Conclusions

Prior to the launch of this update, Google reached out to several SEOs, myself included, to discuss its release. They wanted to make it clear that this is not an attack on SEO.

Good SEO can help people-first content perform even better.

It sounds to me like there is the potential for this update to have a strong impact on many sites that have invested heavily in SEO.

I am looking forward to participating in and watching the discussions on changes that the SEO community is seeing once this update is live. I hope you fare well!

The post Google’s helpful content update: What should we expect? appeared first on Search Engine Land.

Courtesy of Search Engine Land: News & Info About SEO, PPC, SEM, Search Engines & Search Marketing

Cookieless case studies: How brands are seeing a 9X lift in CTR

Written on August 22, 2022 at 6:18 am, by admin

The cookieless future is here (despite what Google says). If you haven’t found an identity solution, it’s time.

We’re doing our part at Lotame, to ensure marketers, agencies and publishers are prepared and ready to conquer the cookieless future. With hundreds of campaigns launched across the globe, Lotame’s identity solution, Panorama ID, is proving that advertising on the open web is sustainable, profitable, and privacy safe.

“We’ve done our due diligence and trust Lotame Panorama ID. The predictive cookieless solution is delivering fantastic results for our leading brand portfolio in terms of scale across the open web and cost-efficiency. We’re well-positioned to grab the cookieless future by the horns — in fact, we already are!” – Miles Pritchard, managing partner, OMD – EMEA.

See the results for yourself in this collection of cookieless case studies. Access it now to see the success stories of marketers and agencies around the world including how:

• Banana Boat achieved 94% VCR in first cookieless video vampaign
• Luxury car brand saw 2X more cost-efficient engagement
• Dr. Martens sees 9X increase in CTR

Access the collection of Cookieless Case Studies Around the World now!

The post Cookieless case studies: How brands are seeing a 9X lift in CTR appeared first on Search Engine Land.

Courtesy of Search Engine Land: News & Info About SEO, PPC, SEM, Search Engines & Search Marketing

How GA4, data modeling and Google Ads work together

Written on August 22, 2022 at 6:18 am, by admin

There’s a lot going on in the world of Google Analytics 4 right now, as July 1 continues to get closer.

Earlier this month, Google introduced a new, more flexible tag built to work seamlessly with GA4 and Google’s suite of ad platforms, including Google Ads.

Google might have indirectly acknowledged that advertisers have a lot to process when it recently announced that cookies will have a longer shelf life on Chrome than previously reported. 

This article will break down how paid search marketers need to approach the analytics shift:

• The philosophy.
• The differences and how to adjust.
• The timing for migrating.
• And a reporting workaround to replace some insights you’d otherwise lose in moving from UA to GA4.

A new age of marketing analytics

iOS14, CCPA, GDPR – all of these acronyms have put fear in the hearts of marketers over the past few years.

Collectively, they’ve moved the marketing world into an age of user privacy by severely reducing things like automatic cookie tracking and in-app activity tracking in marketers’ data portfolios.

To make up for losing reliable data collection mechanics and tying actions back to specific users, Google is moving quickly to a future of data modeling. 

Essentially, the search engine uses AI to fill in data gaps left by privacy regulations, browser limitations and obscured cross-device behavior. 

Data modeling in GA4 doesn’t include any offsite data unless you take the effort to implement it (more on that in a bit), but it does include all sources of traffic and engagement, not just Google sources.

One attribute of Google’s analytics shift is that it’s designed to be flexible and should be relatively easy to adapt depending on how the landscape shifts. 

GA4 relies heavily on first-party data, which is something you own and will always be able to access.

It’s a more flexible, customizable reporting setup than UA (which is both good and bad in that you need more resources to set it up, but it’s got a lot more potential for rich insights).

Combine that with the new tag, which doesn’t require nearly as much code or customization, and you can see that Google is setting up a future where marketers will be able to self-serve to get all kinds of data that can help them optimize their campaigns.

One big data difference: Events vs. Goals

If you’re making Google Ads decisions based on data like sessions and pageviews, it’s time to shift your strategy. 

GA4 is replacing those with Events, which means secondary metrics like bounce rate (as we know it), time on site, and pages per session won’t be available to you for much longer.

Instead, GA4 is introducing new metrics including “Engaged sessions”, which at this point can mean anything from a session longer than 10 seconds to a session that ended in a conversion to a session where the user bounced back and forth between screens. 

As I see it, that can be directionally useful in determining whether a channel has a relatively high or low proportion of engaged users. 

Another new metric, which I consider about as significant, is “User engagement,” which Google describes as “the average length of time that the app was in the foreground or the website focused on the browser.”

Other differences in data

When you’re preparing to migrate your audiences from UA to GA4, know that not all dimensions will translate. 

For instance, “session”-related dimensions like next page path won’t port over because GA4 is measuring sessions differently. 

That said, GA4 is built to let you customize the dimensions you find important, so you’ll be able to recreate those insights on your own.

One more change to note, while we’re on the topic of audiences, is that GA4 is limiting each property to 100 audiences, a huge reduction from UA’s cap of 2,000. 

I’ve personally never pulled more than 200 audiences per property, but if you have, say, a ton of remarketing audiences built around GA metrics, you may have to consider paying for GA360. (If I had to guess, I’d say this won’t be a widespread issue, or Google wouldn’t have been so aggressive about curtailing the limit.)

Next steps: 3 things paid search marketers can do now

1. Decide on a full data picture

Overall, marketers should be orienting their analytics around business outcomes, not just a conversion firing on a page. 

It’s smart to start measuring in terms of things like revenue and how much you can attribute to advertising.

For that, no matter how good your setup in either GA4 or Google Ads, you need to integrate offline conversion data and make sure your CRM data is part of the puzzle. 

I’m currently setting up testing how effective it is to import offline conversion data into GA4 via device ID or user ID.

My suspicion is that it won’t be perfect yet, and there will be data gaps, but the exercise of setting up the different data sources will pay off over time as the data modeling improves.

2. Get your migration on 

Marketers don’t like change any more than the average bear, but there’s no sense in putting off the inevitable.

The sooner you set up GA4, the sooner you’ll be able to get a relatively clean year-over-year comparison in 2023. 

The issue won’t rear its head immediately. You want to set it up now so you won’t have a data gap for Q4 2023. 

You could still compare GA4 to UA data next year if you really found yourself in a pickle, but you’d have to do a lot of work in Data Studio, and it wouldn’t be apples to apples.

So set it up now to get all the Q4 data for YoY’s sake.

3. Set up new reporting

One benefit of digging into GA4 now is that you’ll be able to scope out the reports you need to re-build. 

I noticed pretty quickly, for instance, that you can’t create rules in GA4 to remove non-Google UTM tracking (like HubSpot parameters), so you need to get Data Studio involved to clean up a landing page report so you’re not muddling through thousands of rows (each unique parameter breaks out a page).

GA4 won’t let you strip tracking info from URLs and then calculate CVR, whether based on users or views. But doing this cleanup allows you to see top-converting LPs, for paid traffic or all traffic.

So instead of this legacy view:

…you get something a lot more useful:

To create the clean landing page view:

1. Select Add Dimension > Create Field.
2. RegEx and enter REGEXP_REPLACE(Page path + query string,'\\?.+', '') in the formula field.
3. Pull in Views and Conversions.
4. Create a calculated field for your conversion rate. I used Views and Conversions (Conversions/Views).

I guarantee that’s the tip of the iceberg… the more we play around, the more we’ll realize we’re either missing or have the opportunity to improve in GA4.

The saga continues…

As you can tell, we’re still learning about the full capability of GA4 and how to reflect it in Google Ads campaigns. 

Over the coming months, as the July 1, 2023 deadline approaches and more marketers muster up the courage to start the transition to GA4, I expect more best practices to circulate. 

The post How GA4, data modeling and Google Ads work together appeared first on Search Engine Land.

Courtesy of Search Engine Land: News & Info About SEO, PPC, SEM, Search Engines & Search Marketing