Google has defined a set of metrics site owners should focus on when optimizing for page experience. Core Web Vitals metrics are part of Google’s page experience factors that all websites should strive to meet.

Users’ expectations for web experiences can vary according to site and context, but some remain consistent regardless of where they are on the web.

Specifically, Google identifies the core user experience needs such as loading speed, interactivity, and visual stability.

What Are Core Web Vitals Scores?

Google recommends site owners have CWV metrics under the ‘good’ threshold specified below:

Anything in between good and poor is considered as moderate, which should be improved.

Google explains why these three metrics, in particular, are so important:

“All of these metrics capture important user-centric outcomes, are field measurable, and have supporting lab diagnostic metric equivalents and tooling.

For example, while Largest Contentful Paint is the topline loading metric, it is also highly dependent on First Contentful Paint (FCP) and Time to First Byte (TTFB), which remain critical to monitor and improve.”

How Google Measures Core Web Vitals

Google CrUX report uses Chrome data when users browse websites to gather real-world user data from their devices. At least 75% of pageviews to the site should have ‘good’ scores for the website to meet CWV thresholds.

Please note it uses 75% of pageviews of the entire site, which means pages with poor CWV and less traffic will not impact the overall website score.

This is why you may find that websites with a ‘good’ score have pages with terrible CWVs and vice versa.

This method of measuring ensures that a low number of percentage visits due to slow network conditions doesn’t take down the entire website’s ‘good’ score.

Here’s how those metrics can be measured.

How To Measure Core Web Vitals

Google incorporates Core Web Vitals measurement capabilities into many of its existing tools.

Core Web Vitals can be measured using these free tools:

Let’s dive into how to use each of these free SEO tools to measure Core Web Vitals.

PageSpeed Insights

PageSpeed Insights allows you to measure Core Web Vitals with both lab and field data included in the reports.

The lab section of the report provides data gathered from real users’ devices in all geos and different network conditions, whereas the field section shows data from simulated devices using just one device.

If your pages have few visits or are new, there might be insufficient historical data for field data to show a report. In that case, the average field score for the entire website will be used as a fallback if available; otherwise, it will show no data.

Once you run reports you will have a list of recommendations on how to improve your scores underneath. You can read our guide on the PageSpeed Insights report to learn how to use it.

Web Vitals Extension

Using the PageSpeed Insights tool is always a great way to debug and audit performance, but it is often not convenient. You have to open a new tab in your browser and navigate away from the page, which is distracting.

Fortunately, there is an extension available to install from the Chrome Web Store that measures Core Web Vitals metrics in real-time during your browsing and also loads field data if available.

Besides this standard UI, this addon also offers more granular debugging opportunities via the browser DevTools ‘console’ tab. Here is a quick video guide on how to do that.

Debugging the Interaction Next Paint metric is quite challenging as it may degrade at any point during the user interaction journey. In PageSpeed Insights, you get only an average value across all interactions, not which interaction on the specific element on the page was slow.

By using this extension, you can interact with the page and identify elements that degrade the INP metric by checking the console logs. For example, you can click on buttons and check the console to see how long the interaction took.

As soon as you identify which element is slow to respond, you can check your JavaScript code to see if any scripts are blocking the interaction.

Lighthouse

Lighthouse is an open-source tool you can use to audit your webpage’s performance, which is also available in Chrome’s DevTools.

All of the reports that Lighthouse powers are updated to reflect the latest version.

One caveat to be aware of is that when running Lighthouse in your browser, it also loads many resources from your Chrome extensions, which can affect your metrics in the Lighthouse report.

That’s why I suggest using Chrome Canary for debugging as a good practice. Chrome Canary has an isolated installation from your regular Chrome browser where you can access experimental features. This allows you to test your website with features that will be included in future Chrome releases.

I ran a quick experiment to see how drastically Lighthouse page speed scores can vary in the Canary clean installation vs. your browser with add-ons enabled.

One important feature that Lighthouse enables is measuring scores while interacting with the webpage and measuring how certain interactions affect your scores, especially the Interaction to Next Paint (INP) metric.

I suggest you dive deep and master how to use Lighthouse by reading our guide written by the two of most experienced technical SEO experts in the world.

CrUX Dashboard

CrUX report is a public dataset of real user experience data on millions of websites. The Chrome UX report measures field versions of all the Core Web Vitals, which means it reports real-world data rather than lab data.

With PageSpeed Insights, Lighthouse, or the Web Vital add-on we have discussed, you now know how to measure individual URL performance. But how do you see the whole picture for a website with thousands of URLs? What percentage of URLs have ‘good’ scores or scores from a few months ago to compare against?

This is where Google’s CrUX free Looker Studio dashboard helps. You can check segments and see your historical data.

To do that, simply copy and paste your domain into the CrUX dashboard launcher.

Then, enjoy beautiful reports for free. Here is an example report for Search Engine Journal in case you want to explore a real dashboard.

In this dashboard, you can find much more besides the CWV metrics. If you fall short of CWV ‘good’ scores but lab data shows you are meeting all thresholds, it may be because your visitors have a bad connection.

This is where the connection distribution report is highly valuable: it can help you understand if your scores’ poor performance is due to network issues.

Unfortunately, this dashboard doesn’t give you a breakdown of CWV metrics by country, but there is a free tool, treo.sh, which you can use to check performance metrics by geos.

Search Console

GSC is another tool to see how your overall website CWV metrics.

The report identifies groups of pages that require attention based on real-world data from the Chrome UX report. If you open the report by clicking on the top right corner link, you will see a breakdown of your issues.

With this report, be aware that it pulls data from CruX, and URLs will be omitted if they do not have a minimum amount of reporting data, which means you may have pages with poor CWV metrics that are not reported here.

Web-Vitals.JS And GA4

web-vitals.js is an open-source library that accurately measures CWV metrics the same way Chrome or PageSpeed Insights does. The web vitals extension we discussed above actually uses this library for reporting and logging.

However, you can integrate it with Google Analytics 4 to get a detailed performance report at scale on a website with many pages. Below is a code sample for GA4’s gtag integration.

In the code sample, ‘value’ is a built-in parameter, and ‘metric_id’, ‘metric_value’, ‘metric_delta’, ‘metric_rating’, and ‘debug_target’ are optional custom dimensions you may want to include per your needs.

If you want to see these dimensions in GA4’s exploration reports, you need to add them in GA4’s admin of custom definitions. Otherwise, if you decide to send these parameters and not add them via admin you can access raw data via BigQuery only. This provides much more flexibility but requires SQL expertise.

If you decide to include ‘metric_id,’ which, in the case of websites with a lot of traffic, will have an indefinite number of unique values, it may cause cardinality issues in exploration reports.

So, you may want to enable those additional custom parameters for a short period to gather sample data for troubleshooting.

To send CWV metrics data via Google Tag Manager, refer to this guide created by Google’s marketing solution team. As a best practice, you should use GTM integration, and the code above (which is fully functional) demonstrates the fundamental mechanics of CWV data collection and reporting.

Other than what we have discussed, freemium or paid tools such as Debugbear, treo.sh, Oncrawl, Lumar, or Semrush may help you identify your scores on all pages at a scale in real time.

However, I would like to note that from the listed tools, Debugbear and treo.sh are highly specialized in CWV metrics and provide high-granularity insights with advanced segmentations.

What About Other Valuable Metrics?

As important as the Core Web Vitals are, they’re not the only page experience metrics to focus on.

Ensuring your site uses HTTPS, is mobile-friendly, avoids intrusive interstitials, and maintains a clear distinction between the website are crucial parts of page experience ranking factors.

So think of it also from a user-centric point of view, and not only because it is a ranking factor.

For example, from a conversions perspective, if you have a slow ecommerce website, your potential customers may churn, and it will cause revenue losses.

More resources: 

Featured Image: BestForBest/Shutterstock

Every week, we feature fresh job listings for martech-ers, so make sure to bookmark this page and check back every Friday. If you’re looking to hire, please submit your listing here — please note: We will not post listings without a salary range.

Newest jobs in martech:

ABM Manager @ Aerospike (U.S. remote)

Salary: $120,000 – $140,000

Develop and drive the global one-to-many and one-to-few ABM strategies, including program creation aligned to the company’s strategic priorities.

Oversee the planning, execution and optimization of digital marketing campaigns across multiple channels, including SEM, paid social and display.

Senior Manager, Marketing Technology @ Unlock Technologies, Inc. (U.S. remote)

Salary: $106,000 – $125,000

Manage and maintain the martech stack and ensure optimal setup, configuration, performance, reliability and scale.

Collaborate with marketing, sales, product and other departments to ensure alignment on a scalable technology strategy and support the execution of marketing and sales activities.

Executive Director, Chief Product Owner, Marketing Automation @ Novartis (U.S. remote)

Salary: $233,600 – $350,400

Establish and lead the development of a comprehensive Salesforce ecosystem product strategy inclusive of a three-year product roadmap for marketing automation.

Serve as single point of contact, managing stakeholders and representing the product line at Product Council, Steering Committee and Customer Advisory Board meetings.

Lead Lifecycle Marketing Manager @ Course Hero (U.S. remote)

Salary: $114,000 – $154,000

Collaborate cross-functionally with product managers, creative teams and engineers to develop and execute on strategies to drive user engagement and product adoption.

Create scalable multi-channel marketing campaigns. Establish foundational infrastructure for expansion into new marketing channels such as web push, content cards or in-browser notifications.

Senior Strategist, Enterprise Tech Strategy and Design @ Shift Paradigm (U.S. remote)

Salary: $125,000 – $165,000

Assess and map client marketing and sales technologies. Lead strategy project planning and scoping exercises.

Conduct in-depth discovery. Lead client meetings. Architect growth and efficiency technology and data solutions.

Data Operations Lead @ Tinuiti (U.S. remote)

Salary: $110,000 – $120,000 (U.S. remote)

Work with a distributed Data Operations team with a heavy focus on data sourcing, availability, timeliness and reliability.

Lead the monitoring and alerting of data issues and their resolution, including identifying areas of improvement.

Performance/Growth Marketing Manager @ Apartment List (U.S. remote)

Salary: $119,000 – $144,000

Drive new renter growth by managing and optimizing paid social campaigns, with a primary focus on Meta and YouTube, continuously refining strategies to maximize ROAS.

Identify and develop new marketing channels from 0 to 1, expand reach and diversify the acquisition mix. Design and execute A/B tests. Analyze data to uncover growth opportunities.

Marketing Operations Strategist @ Directive Consulting (U.S. remote)

Salary: $70,000 – $90,000

Serve as both staff augmentation and strategic advisor for marketing operations processes for B2B Tech and SaaS clients.

Identify and communicate opportunities to grow our business with clients in the Marketing Operations line of business and other lines of business.

Associate Director, Digital Transformation @ Merkle (U.S. remote)

Salary: $110,000 – $125,000

Conduct audits to deliver assessments of the organization’s digital marketing and analytics infrastructure, processes, strategies and readiness to expand.

Analyze data collection methods, technology stack and data quality to gauge effectiveness and identify areas for improvement. Develop and deliver transformation priorities and roadmap goals.

Business Development Vice President, Sales — Retail Vertical @ Epsilon (U.S. remote)

Salary: $170,000 – $190,000

Identifies and leads the pursuit of the targeted new business opportunities within major retail accounts. Leverages a client-diagnostic sales strategy and consultative approach to uncover client-specific issues and/or opportunities.

Manages resources to develop proposals that position the full range of Epsilon’s capabilities and solutions to solve client challenges.

Are you getting the most from your stack? Take our brief 2024 MarTech Replacement Survey

Director roles:

Executive Director, Digital Marketing @ Revance (U.S. remote)

Salary: $195,800 – $280,060

Execute commercial strategies for growth, including, but not limited to, sales enablement, digital marketing, account-based marketing and experiential activities.

Oversee all organic and paid digital marketing channels, leading a cross-functional team of subject matter experts to deliver highly optimized digital marketing programs, all to achieve business goals and annual targets.

Director of Brand Marketing @ The Black Tux (U.S. remote)

Salary: $185,000 – $210,000

Concept and execute comprehensive brand marketing campaigns that resonate with our target audience and drive brand awareness and loyalty.

Own The Black Tux’s brand identity, ensuring consistency across all touchpoints and communication channels.

Director, CRM Marketing @ Transformco (U.S. remote)

Salary: $150,000 – $160,000

Formulate and execute a comprehensive customer acquisition and retention strategy for Home Appliances and Services, utilizing email, SMS, direct mail and retargeting channels.

Design and implement cohesive CRM content and offer strategies that enhance customer experiences across all touchpoints, including phone interactions, communications, in-home services and digital platforms.

Director of Digital Customer Engagement Delivery Strategy & Self-Service Success @ The Cigna Group (U.S. remote)

Salary: $152,300 – $253,300

Stand up and lead a dynamic new team, playing a key role in defining and evolving the customer engagement delivery operating model.

Implement quick wins and execute on a high-level roadmap toward an end-state in which there is an automated method by which enterprise customers are personally targeted for communication, ensuring the interoperability between those communications and digital experiences.

Senior roles:

Senior Director, Digital Marketing @ Dropbox (U.S. remote)

Salary: $206,100 – $278,900

Define annual and quarterly plans that outline the media mix investment allocations and expected outcomes across Marketing channels, routes to market, and product.

Drive cross-functional alignment across key stakeholders, including Finance, Analytics, Growth, Product, Sales, and Integrated Campaign, to align on business objectives, resource allocation, efficiency goals, and revenue and engagement targets.

Senior/Lead B2C Lifecycle Marketing Specialist @ Credit Acceptance (U.S. remote)

Salary: $117,000 – $150,000

Develop a multi-channel consumer lifecycle marketing strategy to maximize customer LTV by driving customer activation, engagement and retention.

Use qualitative and quantitative data and customer insights to proactively identify opportunities to improve the customer experience and drive toward solutions.

Marketing Technology Applications Principal Architect @ Vail Resorts (U.S. remote)

Salary: $99,000 – $140,000

Build and oversee tool integrations expanding the go-to-market construct (media, email, push, SMS and digital personalization) transforming the data-driven roadmap through the use of real-time data access, a fully implemented CDP and customer journey orchestration tool and various direct end points for individual channel execution.

Learn about and grow applications with a six-month lens on what investments will be needed for operational support after implementation.

Senior Engineering Manager, Marketing Platform @ Upstart Network, Inc. (U.S. remote)

Salary: $180,600 – $250,000

Design and build technology for serving marketing content to users via scalable and personalized landing pages, emails, push notifications and in-product content.

Work with cross-functional partners including product managers, designers, research scientists and marketing managers to design and deliver high-quality products to be served across various marketing channels.

Associate roles:

Digital Marketing Manager @ WIN (U.S. remote)

Salary: From $75,000

Oversee the CRM system, including data management, segmentation and automation.

Collaborate with sales and customer success teams to ensure smooth communication and information flow. Develop and implement email marketing campaigns, newsletters and customer engagement strategies.

Research Analyst – Consumer Insights @ Dumbstruck Inc. (U.S. remote)

Salary: $60,000 – $75,000

Communicate with clients to gather information about project objectives

Develop survey questions that help achieve project objectives

The post The latest jobs in martech appeared first on MarTech.

Having a website that doesn’t convert is a little like having a bucket with a hole in it. Do you keep filling it up while the water’s pouring out — or do you fix the hole then add water? In other words, do you channel your budget into attracting people who are “pouring” through without taking action, or do you fine-tune your website so it’s appealing enough for them to stick around?

Our recommendation? Optimize the conversion rate of your website, before you spend on increasing your traffic to it.

Here’s a web design statistic to bear in mind: you have 50 milliseconds to make a good first impression. If your site’s too slow, or unattractive, or the wording isn’t clear, they’ll bounce faster than you can say “leaky bucket”. Which is a shame, because you’ve put lots of effort into designing a beautiful product page and About Us, and people just aren’t getting to see it.

As a digital web design and conversion agency in Melbourne, Australia, we’ve been helping our customers optimize their websites for over 10 years, but it wasn’t until mid-2019 that we decided to turn the tables and take a look at our own site.

As it turned out, we had a bit of a leaky bucket situation of our own: while our traffic was good and conversions were okay, there was definitely room for improvement.

In this article, I’m going to talk a little more about conversions: what they are, why they matter, and how they help your business. I’ll then share how I made lots of little tweaks that cumulatively led to my business attracting a higher tier of customers, more inquiries, plus over $780,000 worth of new sales opportunities within the first 26 weeks of making some of those changes. Let’s get into it!

What is conversion?

Your conversion rate is a figure that represents the percentage of visitors who come to your site and take the desired action, e.g. subscribing to your newsletter, booking a demo, purchasing a product, and so on.

Conversions come in all shapes and sizes, depending on what your website does. If you sell a product, making a sale would be your primary goal (aka a macro-conversion). If you run, say, a tour company or media outlet, then subscribing or booking a consultation might be your primary goal.

If your visitor isn’t quite ready to make a purchase or book a consultation, they might take an intermediary step — like signing up to your free newsletter, or following you on social media. This is what’s known as a micro-conversion: a little step that leads towards (hopefully) a bigger one.

A quick recap

A conversion can apply to any number of actions — from making a purchase, to following on social media.

Macro-conversions are those we usually associate with sales: a phone call, an email, or a trip to the checkout. These happen when the customer has done their research and is ready to leap in with a purchase. If you picture the classic conversion funnel, they’re already at the bottom.

Micro-conversions, on the other hand, are small steps that lead toward a sale. They’re not the ultimate win, but they’re a step in the right direction.

Most sites and apps have multiple conversion goals, each with its own conversion rate.

Micro-conversions vs. macro-conversions: which is better?

The short answer? Both. Ideally, you want micro- and macro-conversions to be happening all the time so you have a continual flow of customers working their way through your sales funnel. If you have neither, then your website is behaving like a leaky bucket.

Here are two common issues that seem like good things, but ultimately lead to problems:

High web traffic (good thing) but no micro- or macro-conversions (bad thing — leaky bucket alert)

High web traffic (good thing) plenty of micro-conversions (good thing), but no macro conversions (bad thing)

A lot of businesses spend heaps of money making sure their employees work efficiently, but less of the budget goes into what is actually one of your best marketing tools: your website.

Spending money on marketing will always be a good thing. Getting customers to your site means more eyes on your business — but when your website doesn’t convert visitors into sales, that’s when you’re wasting your marketing dollars. When it comes to conversion rate statistics, one of the biggest eye-openers I read was this: the average user’s attention span has dropped from 12 to a mere 7 seconds. That’s how long you’ve got to impress before they bail — so you’d better make sure your website is fast, clear, and attractive.

Our problem

Our phone wasn’t ringing as much as we’d have liked, despite spending plenty of dollars on SEO and Adwords. We looked into our analytics and realized traffic wasn’t an issue: a decent number of people were visiting our site, but too few were taking action — i.e. inquiring. Here’s where some of our issues lay:

Our site wasn’t as fast as it could have been (anything with a load time of two seconds or over is considered slow. Ours was hovering around 5-6, and that was having a negative impact on conversions).

Our CTA conversions were low (people weren’t clicking — or they were dropping off because the CTA wasn’t where it needed to be).

We were relying on guesswork for some of our design decisions — which meant we had no way of measuring what worked, and what didn’t.

In general, things were good but not great. Or in other words, there was room for improvement.

What we did to fix it

Improving your site’s conversions isn’t a one-size-fits all thing — which means what works for one person might not work for you. It’s a gradual journey of trying different things out and building up successes over time. We knew this having worked on hundreds of client websites over the years, so we went into our own redesign with this in mind. Here are some of the steps we took that had an impact.

We decided to improve our site

First of all, we decided to fix our company website. This sounds like an obvious one, but how many times have you thought “I’ll do this really important thing”, then never gotten round to it. Or rushed ahead in excitement, made a few tweaks yourself, then let your efforts grind to a halt because other things took precedence?

This is an all-too-common problem when you run a business and things are just… okay. Often there’s no real drive to fix things and we fall back into doing what seems more pressing: selling, talking to customers, and running the business.

Deciding you want to improve your site’s conversions starts with a decision that involves you and everyone else in the company, and that’s what we did. We got the design and analytics experts involved. We invested time and money into the project, which made it feel substantial. We even made EDMs to announce the site launch (like the one below) to let everyone know what we’d been up to. In short, we made it feel like an event.

We got to know our users

There are many different types of user: some are ready to buy, some are just doing some window shopping. Knowing what type of person visits your site will help you create something that caters to their needs.

We looked at our analytics data and discovered visitors to our site were a bit of both, but tended to be more ready to buy than not. This meant we needed to focus on getting macro-conversions — in other words, make our site geared towards sales — while not overlooking the visitors doing some initial research. For those users, we implemented a blog as a way to improve our SEO, educate leads, and build up our reputation.

User insight can also help you shape the feel of your site. We discovered that the marketing managers we were targeting at the time were predominantly women, and that certain images and colours resonated better among that specific demographic. We didn’t go for the (obvious pictures of the team or our offices), instead relying on data and the psychology of attraction to delve into the mind of the users.

We improved site speed

Sending visitors to good sites with bad speeds erodes trust and sends them running. Multiple studies show that site speed matters when it comes to conversion rates. It’s one of the top SEO ranking factors, and a big factor when it comes to user experience: pages that load in under a second convert around 2.5 times higher than pages taking five seconds or more.

We built our website for speed. Moz has a great guide on page speed best practices, and from that list, we did the following things:

We optimized images.

We managed our own caching.

We compressed our files.

We improved page load times (Moz has another great article about how to speed up time to first Byte). A good web page load time is considered to be anything under two seconds — which we achieved.

In addition, we also customized our own hosting to make our site faster.

We introduced more tracking

As well as making our site faster, we introduced a lot more tracking. That allowed us to refine our content, our messaging, the structure of the site, and so on, which continually adds to the conversion.

We used Google Optimize to run A/B tests across a variety of things to understand how people interacted with our site. Here are some of the tweaks we made that had a positive impact:

Social proofing can be a really effective tool if used correctly, so we added some stats to our landing page copy.

Google Analytics showed us visitors were reaching certain pages and not knowing quite where to go next, so we added CTAs that used active language. So instead of saying, “If you’d like to find out more, let us know”, we said “Get a quote”, along with two options for getting in touch.

We spent an entire month testing four words on our homepage. We actually failed (the words didn’t have a positive impact), but it allowed us to test our hypothesis. We did small tweaks and tests like this all over the site.

We used heat mapping to see where visitors were clicking, and which words caught their eye. With this data, we knew where to place buttons and key messaging.

We looked into user behavior

Understanding your visitor is always a good place to start, and there are two ways to go about this:

Quantitative research (numbers and data-based research)

Qualitative research (people-based research)

We did a mixture of both.

For the quantitative research, we used Google Analytics, Google Optimize, and Hotjar to get an in-depth, numbers-based look at how people were interacting with our site.

Heat-mapping software shows how people click and scroll through a page. Hot spots indicate places where people naturally gravitate.

We could see where people were coming into our site (which pages they landed on first), what channel brought them there, which features they were engaging with, how long they spent on each page, and where they abandoned the site.

For the qualitative research, we focused primarily on interviews.

We asked customers what they thought about certain CTAs (whether they worked or not, and why).

We made messaging changes and asked customers and suppliers whether they made sense.

We invited a psychologist into the office and asked them what they thought about our design.

What we learned

We found out our design was good, but our CTAs weren’t quite hitting the mark. For example, one CTA only gave the reader the option to call. But, as one of our interviewees pointed out, not everyone likes using the phone — so we added an email address.

We were intentional but ad hoc about our asking process. This worked for us — but you might want to be a bit more formal about your approach (Moz has a great practical guide to conducting qualitative usability testing if you’re after a more in-depth look).

The results

Combined, these minor tweaks had a mighty impact. There’s a big difference in how our site looks and how we rank. The bottom line: after the rebuild, we got more work, and the business did much better. Here are some of the gains we’ve seen over the past two years.

Our dwell time increased by 73%, going from 1.5 to 2.5 minutes.

We received four-times more inquiries by email and phone.

Our organic traffic increased despite us not channeling more funds into PPC ads.

We also realized our clients were bigger, paying on average 2.5 times more for jobs: in mid-2018, our average cost-per-job was $8,000. Now, it’s $17,000.

Our client brand names became more recognizable, household names — including two of Australia’s top universities, and a well-known manufacturing/production brand.

Within the first 26 weeks, we got over $770,000 worth of sales opportunities (if we’d accepted every job that came our way).

Our prospects began asking to work with us, rather than us having to persuade them to give us the business.

We started getting higher quality inquiries — warmer leads who had more intent to buy.

Some practical changes you can make to improve your website conversions

When it comes to website changes, it’s important to remember that what works for one person might not work for you.

We’ve used site speed boosters for our clients before and gotten really great results. At other times, we’ve tried it and it just broke the website. This is why it’s so important to measure as you go, use what works for your individual needs, and remember that “failures” are just as helpful as wins.

Below are some tips — some of which we did on our own site, others are things we’ve done for others.

Tip number 1: Get stronger hosting that allows you to consider things like CDNs. Hiring a developer should always be your top choice, but it’s not always possible to have that luxury. In this instance, we recommend considering CDNs, and depending on the build of your site, paying for tools like NitroPack which can help with caching and compression for faster site speeds.

Tip number 2: Focus your time. Identify top landing pages with Moz Pro and channel your efforts in these places as a priority. Use the 80/20 principle and put your attention on the 20% that gets you 80% of your success.

Tip number 3: Run A/B tests using Google Optimize to test various hypotheses and ideas (Moz has a really handy guide for running split tests using Google). Don’t be afraid of the results — failures can help confirm that what you are currently doing right. You can also access some in-depth data about your site’s performance in Google Lighthouse.

Tip number 4: Trial various messages in Google Ads (as a way of testing targeted messaging). Google provides many keyword suggestions on trending words and phrases that are worth considering.

Tip number 5: Combine qualitative and quantitative research to get to know how your users interact with your site — and keep testing on an ongoing basis.

Tip number 6: Don’t get too hung up on charts going up, or figures turning orange: do what works for you. If adding a video to your homepage slows it down a little but has an overall positive effect on your conversion, then it’s worth the tradeoff.

Tip number 7: Prioritize the needs of your target customers and focus every build and design choice around them.

Recommended tools

Nitropack: speed up your site if you’ve not built it for speed from the beginning.

Google Optimize: run A/B tests

HotJar: see how people use your site via heat mapping and behaviour analytics.

Pingdom / GTMetrix: measure site speed (both is better if you want to make sure you meet everyone’s requirements).

Google Analytics: find drop-off points, track conversion, A/B test, set goals.

Qualaroo: poll your visitors while they are on your site with a popup window.

Google Consumer Surveys: create a survey, Google recruits the participants and provides results and analysis.

Moz Pro: Identify top landing pages when you connect this tool to your Google Analytics profile to create custom reports.

How to keep your conversion rates high

Treat your website like your car. Regular little tweaks to keep it purring, occasional deeper inspections to make sure there are no problems lurking just out of sight. Here’s what we do:

We look at Google Analytics monthly. It helps to understand what’s working, and what’s not.

We use goal tracking in GA to keep things moving in the right direction.

We use Pingdom’s free service to monitor the availability and response time of our site.

We regularly ask people what they think about the site and its messaging (keeping the qualitative research coming in).

Conclusion

Spending money on marketing is a good thing, but when you don’t have a good conversion rate, that’s when your website’s behaving like a leaky bucket. Your website is one of your strongest sales tools, so it really does pay to make sure it’s working at peak performance.

I’ve shared a few of my favorite tools and techniques, but above all, my one bit of advice is to consider your own requirements. You can improve your site speed if you remove all tags and keep it plain. But that’s not what you want: it’s finding the balance between creativity and performance, and that will always depend on what’s important.

For us as a design agency, we need a site that’s beautiful and creative. Yes, having a moving background on our homepage slows it down a little bit, but it improves our conversions overall.

The bottom line: Consider your unique users, and make sure your website is in line with the goals of whoever you’re speaking with.

We can do all we want to please Google, but when it comes to sales and leads, it means more to have a higher converting and more effective website. We did well in inquiries (actual phone calls and email leads) despite a rapid increase in site performance requirements from Google. This only comes down to one thing: having a site customer conversion framework that’s effective.

Many businesses found early success with marketing automation platforms. But as marketing needs evolve, a question arises: Is it time for a change?

Join us for Stuck on Autopilot? Upgrade Your Marketing Automation where we’ll explore:

The signs it’s time to make a change

How to evaluate different platforms

Strategies for a smooth migration

A real-world example of a successful transition

Don’t let outdated technology hold you back! Sign up today to learn how to future-proof your marketing automation and unlock new opportunities.

The post Could your marketing automation be doing more? appeared first on MarTech.

Reaching your B2B audience gets challenging each year as competition increases and digital trends evolve. New technologies and changing buyer behaviors demand that marketers stay adaptable and innovative. For small teams, account-based marketing (ABM) simplifies targeting and maximizes budget impact.

The benefits of programmatic ABM for small B2B marketing teams

ABM presents multiple benefits for small B2B marketing teams striving to optimize resources and drive engagement.

Targeted campaigns: Focusing on specific accounts ensures marketing efforts resonate with each client’s unique needs.

Personalized engagement: Using tailored messaging addresses specific challenges, increasing the likelihood of conversion.

Sales and marketing alignment: ABM fosters stronger collaboration between sales and marketing teams, aligning them toward common goals.

Efficient use of resources: By prioritizing quality over quantity, ABM reduces wasted marketing spend and drives a greater return on investment.

Real-time optimization: Leveraging technology and data analytics, ABM enables real-time tracking and optimization of campaigns, boosting effectiveness in a competitive landscape.

What type of ABM targeting strategy is best for a small marketing team?

Marketing teams can choose from various ABM strategies, so it’s important to pick the one that best fits your business goals:

1:1 ABM strategy 

The 1:1 approach focuses on individual accounts, delivering highly personalized marketing messages and experiences tailored to a single target company. It often requires significant resources for effective execution. 

Because maintaining a 1:1 strategy requires more resources, marketing teams typically target only one to five high-value accounts at a time with extremely personalized messaging.

1:few ABM strategy

The 1:few strategy targets a small group of similar accounts, offering some personalization while still benefiting from addressing multiple accounts together. 

Because the same personalized messaging can be used across several dozen accounts, a 1:few strategy requires fewer resources in the long term.

1:many ABM strategy

The 1:many strategy automates the targeting process across a broader set of accounts (100s or even 1,000s of accounts), leveraging data and technology to deliver customized advertisements to numerous decision-makers in real time. 

The 1:few ABM strategy is ideal for small marketing teams due to its balanced approach between personalization and efficiency. By targeting a small group of similar accounts, teams can create tailored messages that resonate with multiple clients without the heavy resource demands of a 1:1 strategy. This approach helps small teams run effective, scalable campaigns without overwhelming their resources.

How to identify target accounts for ABM

Identifying the right accounts is crucial for ABM’s success. It ensures your marketing efforts are focused on high-value targets that align with your business objectives. Here’s how to effectively identify and select these key accounts.

Understand your total addressable market and ICP

Before launching your ABM campaign, you must understand your total addressable market (TAM) and establish a clear ideal customer profile (ICP). An ICP acts as the company counterpart to an individual buyer persona, outlining the characteristics that define the organization most suited for your products or services. This includes factors like industry, company size and location. Develop your ICP by combining insights from your sales team with data about your current customers from your CRM.

Dig deeper: How to find your next, best customers with ABM

Collaborate with sales teams

Work closely with your sales team to identify segments or specific accounts showing interest in your products or services. Regular discussions with sales reps provide valuable insights into customer preferences, behaviors, and challenges. They also reveal shifts in market demand and highlight key topics in conversations with target accounts. 

These insights help refine your target list, allowing you to focus on prospects with a higher chance of converting. Sharing this information helps you create a more effective strategy and messaging that aligns with potential customers’ needs, driving better results. Ensure your sales and marketing teams communicate regularly and collaborate for a successful ABM strategy.

Analyze existing customers and data

Analyzing your current customer base reveals common traits among high-value clients, such as industry, company size and pain points. Identifying patterns in buying behavior and demographics lets you tailor marketing campaigns effectively.

Data analytics tools like Google Analytics and CRM systems provide valuable insights into potential accounts and customer relationships. It enables you to create personalized strategies that enhance lead conversion and foster customer loyalty.

By analyzing the data and collaborating with the sales team, you can identify distinct categories of target accounts to pursue and the specific accounts within those categories that will be included in your 1:few ABM campaign.

Developing resources for your 1:few ABM campaign

As a small team, you might lack the resources for a large-scale campaign. However, using customized ads, optimized landing pages and a targeted email strategy lets you create an effective 1:few ABM campaign to engage your audience and prepare them for your sales team.

Customized ads to engage your audience

Creating custom ads for your ABM campaign involves leveraging the insights gathered from your sales team and previous data analyses to craft messaging that addresses each target segment’s specific pain points and interests. Incorporating industry-specific language, relevant case studies and personalized calls to action (CTAs) significantly enhances engagement. Also, testing different ad formats and placements will help you identify what works best for your target audiences, maximizing the effectiveness of your campaign while driving higher conversion rates. 

When deciding where to run ads for your ABM campaign, consider where your audience spends the most time and align this with your budget. If resources allow, a multi-channel strategy is highly effective for B2B ABM, incorporating LinkedIn Ads, Google Ads and display ads through platforms such as Demandbase, Rollworks or Terminus. However, if adding another marketing technology solution isn’t feasible within your current budget, focus on prioritizing account and contact targeting on LinkedIn and using customer match targeting in Google Ads.

Dig deeper: Maximizing your B2B spend: Is account-based marketing worth it?

Dedicated landing pages serve as the focal point of your campaign

A dedicated landing page is essential for the success of your 1:few ABM campaign, as it serves as the focal point for engaging your target accounts. When designing this page, ensure that it aligns closely with the personalized ads that brought users there, maintaining consistent messaging and visuals for a seamless user experience. 

Begin by highlighting the specific pain points and solutions relevant to that particular audience segment, using tailored language that speaks directly to their needs. Incorporate trust signals, such as testimonials, case studies or industry certifications, to reinforce credibility. 

Make the call to action prominent and aligned with the user’s journey, guiding them toward the next step in your sales process. By crafting a landing page that resonates with your account targets, you significantly enhance engagement and improve conversion rates, ultimately contributing to the overall success of your campaign.

Engage target contacts with automated email nurturing

An effective automated email nurturing campaign is crucial for maintaining engagement with targeted contacts throughout the ABM campaign. Craft customized messages that address each segment’s unique challenges and objectives, showcasing valuable insights, relevant case studies and exclusive resources that speak directly to their needs and are relevant and timely. The messaging in your emails should reflect the same messaging used across the ads and dedicated landing pages you have created. 

Are you getting the most from your stack? Take our brief 2024 MarTech Replacement Survey

With a series of well-timed emails, you gradually educate and inform contacts at your target accounts, fostering trust and rapport over time. To effectively guide contacts through the marketing funnel with your email nurturing strategy, ensure your messaging centers around a single, clear CTA. Avoid overwhelming recipients with excessive information at once.

Initially, focus the first few emails on top-of-funnel content that showcases your company’s industry expertise rather than promoting your product. Examples include key blog posts, industry reports or guides that help contacts better understand their pain points. 

Next, follow up with a couple of emails that include middle-of-funnel content resonating with your target segments, such as webinar invitations, case studies or guides that clarify the solutions available to address their challenges. 

Finally, the last emails in your automated nurturing sequence should contain a clear CTA, encouraging recipients to schedule a consultation or engage with the sales team when they feel ready.

Developing a customized email nurturing strategy engages your targeted accounts and sets the stage for fruitful conversations with your sales representatives. If you already have a list of contacts from these accounts who have opted in to receive information, enroll them in this automated nurturing process at the beginning of your campaign. As more contacts opt-in through your targeted advertising efforts, you can easily add them to the nurturing sequence.

How to measure the success of your ABM strategy

To measure the success of a 1:few ABM campaign, it’s essential to track key performance indicators (KPIs) tailored to the specific goals of your campaign. Follow these tactics to determine the success of your ABM campaign:

Engagement rates

Start by assessing engagement metrics, such as email open and click-through rates, to evaluate how effectively your content resonates with individual accounts.

Conversion rates

Monitor conversion rates from your calls-to-action and dedicated landing page to determine how many contacts progress through the marketing funnel and eventually engage with your sales team. 

Account-specific metrics

Tracking the growth of account-specific metrics, such as pipeline value and sales opportunities generated from targeted accounts, will provide insight into the direct impact of your ABM effort.

Collect feedback 

Collect qualitative feedback through surveys or conversations with sales representatives. This provides valuable insights into the perceived value of your communications and the overall effectiveness of your approach. 

Launch your ABM journey

If your team is new to ABM, adopting a 1:few ABM strategy is likely the most effective approach, especially for smaller marketing teams. This strategy excels in personalizing outreach while maximizing limited resources.

By focusing on a select group of high-value accounts, teams can craft tailored content and communications that resonate more deeply, enhancing engagement and building stronger relationships. Ultimately, embracing a 1:few ABM strategy empowers your smaller team to compete effectively, drive meaningful results and achieve sustainable growth in a competitive landscape.

The post The small B2B marketing team’s guide to ABM appeared first on MarTech.

In today’s episode of Whiteboard Friday, Tom Capper walks you through a problem many SEOs have faced: cannibalization. What is it, how do you identify it, and how can you fix it? Watch to find out! 

Click on the whiteboard image above to open a larger version in a new tab!

Video Transcription

Happy Friday, Moz fans, and today we’re going to be talking about cannibalization, which here in the UK we spell like this: cannibalisation. With that out of the way, what do we mean by cannibalization?

What is cannibalization?

So this is basically where one site has two competing URLs and performs, we suspect, less well because of it. So maybe we think the site is splitting its equity between its two different URLs, or maybe Google is getting confused about which one to show. Or maybe Google considers it a duplicate content problem or something like that. One way or another, the site does less well as a result of having two URLs. 

So I’ve got this imaginary SERP here as an example. So imagine that Moz is trying to rank for the keyword “burgers.” Just imagine that Moz has decided to take a wild tangent in its business model and we’re going to try and rank for “burgers” now.

So in position one here, we’ve got Inferior Bergz, and we would hope to outrank these people really, but for some reason we’re not doing. Then in position two, we’ve got Moz’s Buy Burgers page on the moz.com/shop subdirectory, which obviously doesn’t exist, but this is a hypothetical. This is a commercial landing page where you can go and purchase a burger. 

Then in position three, we’ve got this Best Burgers page on the Moz blog. It’s more informational. It’s telling you what are the attributes to a good burger, how can you identify a good burger, where should you go to acquire a good burger, all this kind of more neutral editorial information.

So we hypothesize in this situation that maybe if Moz only had one page going for this keyword, maybe it could actually supplant the top spot. If we think that’s the case, then we would probably talk about this as cannibalization.

However, the alternative hypothesis is, well, actually there could be two intents here. It might be that Google wishes to show a commercial page and an informational page on this SERP, and it so happens that the second best commercial page is Moz’s and the best informational page is also Moz’s. We’ve heard Google talk in recent years or representatives of Google talk in recent years about having positions on search results that are sort of reserved for certain kinds of results, that might be reserved for an informational result or something like that. So this doesn’t necessarily mean there’s cannibalization. So we’re going to talk a little bit later on about how we might sort of disambiguate a situation like this.

Classic cannibalization

First, though, let’s talk about the classic case. So the classic, really clear-cut, really obvious case of cannibalization is where you see a graph like this one. 

So this is the kind of graph you would see a lot of rank tracking software. You can see time and the days of the week going along the bottom axis. Then we’ve got rank, and we obviously want to be as high as possible and close to position one.

Then we see the two URLS, which are color-coded, and are green and red here. When one of them ranks, the other just falls away to oblivion, isn’t even in the top 100. There’s only ever one appearing at the same time, and they sort of supplant each other in the SERP. When we see this kind of behavior, we can be pretty confident that what we’re seeing is some kind of cannibalization.

Less-obvious cases

Sometimes it’s less obvious though. So a good example that I found recently is if, or at least in my case, if I Google search Naples, as in the place name, I see Wikipedia ranking first and second. The Wikipedia page ranking first was about Naples, Italy, and the Wikipedia page at second was about Naples, Florida.

Now I do not think that Wikipedia is cannibalizing itself in that situation. I think that they just happen to have… Google had decided that this SERP is ambiguous and that this keyword “Naples” requires multiple intents to be served, and Wikipedia happens to be the best page for two of those intents.

So I wouldn’t go to Wikipedia and say, “Oh, you need to combine these two pages into a Naples, Florida and Italy page” or something like that. That’s clearly not necessary. 

Questions to ask 

So if you want to figure out in that kind of more ambiguous case whether there’s cannibalization going on, then there are some questions we might ask ourselves.

1. Do we think we’re underperforming? 

So one of the best questions we might ask, which is a difficult one in SEO, is: Do we think we’re underperforming? So I know every SEO in the world feels like their site deserves to rank higher, well, maybe most. But do we have other examples of very similar keywords where we only have one page, where we’re doing significantly better? Or was it the case that when we introduced the second page, we suddenly collapsed? Because if we see behavior like that, then that might,  you know, it’s not clear-cut, but it might give us some suspicions. 

2. Do competing pages both appear? 

Similarly, if we look at examples of similar keywords that are less ambiguous in intent, so perhaps in the burgers case, if the SERP for “best burgers” and the SERP for “buy burgers,” if those two keywords had completely different results in general, then we might think, oh, okay, we should have two separate pages here, and we just need to make sure that they’re clearly differentiated.

But if actually it’s the same pages appearing on all of those keywords, we might want to consider having one page as well because that seems to be what Google is preferring. It’s not really separating out these intents. So that’s the kind of thing we can look for is, like I say, not clear-cut but a bit of a hint. 

3. Consolidate or differentiate? 

Once we’ve figured out whether we want to have two pages or one, or whether we think the best solution in this case is to have two pages or one, we’re going to want to either consolidate or differentiate.

So if we think there should only be one page, we might want to take our two pages, combine the best of the content, pick the strongest URL in terms of backlinks and history and so on, and redirect the other URL to this combined page that has the best content, that serves the slight variance of what we now know is one intent and so on and so forth.

If we want two pages, then obviously we don’t want them to cannibalize. So we need to make sure that they’re clearly differentiated. Now what often happens here is a commercial page, like this Buy Burgers page, ironically for SEO reasons, there might be a block of text at the bottom with a bunch of editorial or SEO text about burgers, and that can make it quite confusing what intent this page is serving.

Similarly, on this page, we might at some stage have decided that we want to feature some products on there or something. It might have started looking quite commercial. So we need to make sure that if we’re going to have both of these, that they are very clearly speaking to separate intents and not containing the same information and the same keywords for the most part and that kind of thing.

Quick tip

Lastly, it would be better if we didn’t get into the situation in the first place. So a quick tip that I would recommend, just as a last takeaway, is before you produce a piece of content, say for example before I produced this Whiteboard Friday, I did a site:moz.com cannibalization so I can see what content had previously existed on Moz.com that was about cannibalization.

I can see, oh, this piece is very old, so we might — it’s a very old Whiteboard Friday, so we might consider redirecting it. This piece mentions cannibalization, so it’s not really about that. It’s maybe about something else. So as long as it’s not targeting that keyword we should be fine and so on and so forth. Just think about what other pieces exist, because if there is something that’s basically targeting the same keyword, then obviously you might want to consider consolidating or redirecting or maybe just updating the old piece.

That’s all for today. Thank you very much.

Video transcription by Speechpad.com. 

This is a short blog with a simple message: Opportunities are all around you, but you have to be looking for them in order to take advantage of them. Here is a 30-second video that illustrates this point.

Joe’s Perspective: I can’t state it any better than she did. “That’s how opportunities work. When you go through life and you are not looking and you are not aware, opportunities just pass you by and you don’t even notice. Anything can turn into an opportunity, but you have to be aware and you have to keep looking.” So, keep your eyes open and be open to new opportunities. This reminds me of a great quote, “Instead of waiting for your boat to come in, swim out to it.” No line is going to form in front of you that says, “Opportunities here, come and get it.” If you want to be successful, you have to be your own advocate. Be willing to take the bull by the horns. Seize the day. Take some risks.

Your Turn: What are your thoughts on today’s blog and how can it positively impact your life?

]]> https://playwithperks.com/the-red-car-theory/feed/ 0 https://playwithperks.com/create-an-effective-sales-call-to-action-for-videos/ https://playwithperks.com/create-an-effective-sales-call-to-action-for-videos/#respond Mon, 19 Aug 2024 13:32:32 +0000 https://playwithperks.com/?p=72365

I have to be honest.  I have no idea who this guy is. My guess is he is a special forces guy in the military. My guess is he is part of an elite fighting force. My guess is he has had more training and leadership development than any of us will ever receive.

Given all that, he says there are three things that he looks for in a teammate. 1) Dependability – be where you say you are going to be when you say you are going to be, 2) Skilled – that you are very good at completing the task that you are charged to do, & 3) Selflessness – making sure the needs of others are taken care of before you take care of your own.

And, the one he says is the hardest to do and the most important to do is selflessness. Putting the needs of others before yourself – not once in a while or when it is convenient, but when it matters.

Your Turn: On a scale of 1-10, how selfless are you? How well and how often do you put the needs of your teammates/classmates/friends/family ahead of your own?

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