SEO

7 Ways To Segment Your Audience For Successful Retargeting

Published

3 years ago

February 2, 2022

7 Ways To Segment Your Audience For Successful Retargeting

If marketing is the art of persuasion, then retargeting is that art at its finest.

A user that has expressed interest in our brand, products, or services can be considered a warm lead. Therefore, you can expect that – with the right approach – our chances to convert are greater than when marketing a cold lead.

However, no matter how warm our lead might be, the strategic approach is key to closing the deal.

This is where it’s essential that you use all available information about the users and how he/she has interacted with your brand.

Why We Segment Audiences For Retargeting

Information such as demographic, which channel was the source of the lead, whether the interaction was on-site or off-site, and the level of interaction are just a few examples of the data that you can use to segment your audience.

This enables you to cluster users into different lists in order to maximize your chances to convert.

The above is also critical in order to be able to choose the most appropriate time and location for when to re-engage, and for the right messaging.

Think about it – marketing leverages psychological triggers to get people to take the actions you want them to take.

Remember some time ago when Google used to talk about micro-moments?

Retargeting means personalization that makes a connection in those micro-moments.

Understanding our users’ needs and motivations helps us to successfully use all of the above signals and give our retargeting campaigns the best chances to succeed with more personalized ads and experiences.

Let’s have a look at some easy-to-implement, practical examples of how you can segment our audiences into successful retargeting lists.

First, What Not To Do

To start, you must begin with the most obvious and avoid common mistakes that will sabotage your best efforts.

Too often, advertisers create a one-size-fits-all retargeting strategy that doesn’t acknowledge any of the information they have about the users and how they have interacted with the brand. They use the same generic messaging for all.

They might even land them all onto the homepage!

The most obvious place to start is segmenting our audience based on where and how they have interacted with our assets.

If that is on-site, you can create different lists based on the web pages they have visited and how far into the conversion path they went.

Those using Google Analytics with EEC (Enhanced Ecommerce) will find that the platform does the heavy lifting for them straight out of the box.

Different lists are automatically created to split users that have visited a product page from those that have gone a step further and added to the cart, or those who dropped at the checkout.

Here, the retargeting strategy should address any possible barrier for which users have dropped out and consider the appropriate messaging/possible incentive(s) required to get the user to convert.

Now that we’ve covered the basics, let’s have a look at something a little bit more creative, exciting, and sophisticated!

1. Don’t Think Channels; Think Users, Instead

Advertisers tend to think too much in terms of channels and in that way, they compartmentalize their strategy.

The reality is that things are much simpler. This is even more so in the case of retargeting, as you shouldn’t think about channels but focus on your users instead.

If you can overcome that default channel-based mindset, you start opening up to endless possibilities.

For example, you can run retargeting campaigns across multiple channels.

It is quite normal when setting things up to have Facebook prospecting and retargeting campaigns.

But why limit it to that?

It’s easy and quick to create lists of website users based on the source of the traffic.

In Google Analytics, for example, you can do that by selecting Traffic Sources and then Source, Medium, and Campaign as required.

Screenshot from Google Analytics, January 2022

In my example, you have created a list of users that have visited your website after clicking on a Facebook ad, advertising a Valentine’s Day promo.

What this means is that you can not only retarget those users within the Facebook network (Facebook, Instagram, Messenger, etc), but you are also able to amplify our reach and re-engage with those users across Google Display Network, YouTube, and more properties.

In a similar way, you could retarget users that have clicked on an email or have been referred by an affiliate site.

2. Flirting With Our Competitors’ Users

Now, this could be a bit controversial.

You’ll often see advertisers going to the extent of setting up campaigns that target their competitors.

If you are okay with bidding on your competitors, why stop there?

It’s not often that they follow up and continue engaging with those users that have clicked on their ads.

Most of the time, competitor campaigns are judged by impression share or direct conversions.

But if you’ve started flirting with your competitor’s audience and they have shown interest, you should really make the effort to continue engaging with them.

Additionally, you can use RLSA (Remarketing Lists for Search Ads) in Google to target users that have been on your website but are now searching for your competitors. Try to stop them before it’s too late!

3. Using Sequential Messaging And Storytelling For Engagement

We often think of ad campaigns as a one-dimensional interaction.

Our target audience shows interest in our ads by clicking on them or engaging with them, and marketers consider the job done.

But what about developing a series of ads that are all linked to one another?

For example, you could have the first ad setting up the story.

A number of ads follow, either in a linear way (i.e. ad 2 follows ad 1, and it is then followed by ad 3, ad 4, etc) or with a few alternative follow-ups that keep the story open and engaging.

Although this would require some creative effort to set up the ads in a storytelling sequence, from an audience perspective it’s actually quite simple.

Segments can be created to feed on each other with the trigger being whether the user has clicked, seen, or engaged with the previous ads.

4. Broaden Your Strategy By Targeting Life Events

Use business knowledge and data to create new segments to target audiences based on life events.

While these are generally readily available for prospecting campaigns, you can create your own audience segments for your retargeting ads.

For example, removalists, storage, and utility companies are likely to want to target people that are actively looking to buy a property, since they could also be interested in their services.

Creating a new audience with the targeting criteria as per below will help reach out and engage with website visitors that are on the move.

Screenshot from Google Analytics, January 2022

Why is this important?

Because knowing the why – the reason why someone is interested in our products or services – allows us to greatly refine our messaging strategy and personalize the user experience.

Continuing with our example, and assuming you run a storage company, you could retarget your in-market audience with a message like this:

Image created by author, January 2022

5. Contextual Retargeting

Continuing from the idea of retargeting users based on the moment they are in, something similar you can do is to create audiences based on social and demographic profiling.

For example, you could segment avid TikTok or Instagram users and retarget them based on the context they are in.

A higher education provider such as a University or College could create ads and campaigns that are triggered when their users are in a specific location or attending an event of public interest – when they are in the proximity of a campus or attending an Open Day, for example.

Here, the profiling and segmentation of our audience is key to the success of the ads as you must understand our target users and their expected behavior.

6. Retargeting Users That Have Run A Site Search But Not Transacted

An often underutilized resource, site search can be turned into a powerful way to gather valuable information about our website visitors, especially those that haven’t converted.

Going back to Google Analytics, you could create a new audience by selecting the following criteria to segment our audience.

First, you need to specify the conditions which will define our filter, so after going into Audience Builder you choose Conditions, and select Site Search Status equals to Visits With Site Search.

After that, you can add an additional condition and select AND Days Since Last Session is equal or less than 2, if you want to focus on retargeting warm leads.

For the last condition, you also add the AND operator and select Transactions (per user) are equal to 0.

Now you can save the filter and create the audience.

For a practical example, imagine being a florist in the business of selling online fresh flowers delivered locally and nationally.

It is sometimes impractical to have a website that can cover every possible flower type with a dedicated page, or at times availability could be scarce and the stock quickly sells out.

So it is common for users to use the site search.

In this case, you could retarget our new audience with display ads as soon as stock is back on sale, or offer an alternative arrangement.

7. Retargeting Our Most Valuable Audience Segments Through (Buying) Personas

The concept of personas has been around since the beginning of marketing.

But we often think about them as a complicated piece of work that requires a lot of time and effort to put together.

In reality, anyone with access to website analytics is likely to be able to at least create a simplified version of personas.

For example, in Google Analytics, it’s easy to identify the gender, age, location of our most valuable customers.

But not only that – you can see what device they use, the model and OS, when they are most likely to be active on our site, and much more – including what they are (broadly) interested in and even what they are looking to buy (in-market).

With that information, you can create audiences based on the same exact traits and specifically retarget them after they have visited our site.

The advantage is that you can create ads and campaigns that specifically talk to them and in the way that is most likely to resonate with them.

See How to Use Website Traffic Analysis for Persona Development to learn more.

Final Thoughts

For many years now, we’ve been told personalization is key in all things marketing.

With increasing channels, competition, and the difficult markets we may now find ourselves operating in, it is certainly important.

Retargeting is often be overlooked and underutilized but as we’ve discussed, it doesn’t have to be a complex undertaking.

You know your customers and no doubt have the information you need.

Investing a bit of time and using the points above, you can convert more of those warm leads with smarter segmentation for your retargeting campaigns.

Not only will you add incremental value but you will also engage more personally and successfully with your customers, creating better experiences with your brand.

And that’s a win.

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WordPress Insiders Discuss WordPress Stagnation

Published

5 hours ago

August 31, 2024

Max

WordPress Insiders Discuss WordPress Stagnation

A recent webinar featuring WordPress executives from Automattic and Elementor, along with developers and Joost de Valk, discussed the stagnation in WordPress growth, exploring the causes and potential solutions.

Stagnation Was The Webinar Topic

The webinar, “Is WordPress’ Market share Declining? And What Should Product Businesses Do About it?” was a frank discussion about what can be done to increase the market share of new users that are choosing a web publishing platform.

Yet something that came up is that there are some areas that WordPress is doing exceptionally well so it’s not all doom and gloom. As will be seen later on, the fact that the WordPress core isn’t progressing in terms of specific technological adoption isn’t necessarily a sign that WordPress is falling behind, it’s actually a feature.

Yet there is a stagnation as mentioned at the 17:07 minute mark:

“…Basically you’re saying it’s not necessarily declining, but it’s not increasing and the energy is lagging. “

The response to the above statement acknowledged that while there are areas of growth like in the education and government sectors, the rest was “up for grabs.”

Joost de Valk spoke directly and unambiguously acknowledged the stagnation at the 18:09 minute mark:

“I agree with Noel. I think it’s stagnant.”

That said, Joost also saw opportunities with ecommerce, with the performance of WooCommerce. WooCommerce, by the way, outperformed WordPress as a whole with a 6.80% year over year growth rate, so there’s a good reason that Joost was optimistic of the ecommerce sector.

A general sense that WordPress was entering a stall however was not in dispute, as shown in remarks at the 31:45 minute mark:

“… the WordPress product market share is not decreasing, but it is stagnating…”

Facing Reality Is Productive

Humans have two ways to deal with a problem:

Acknowledge the problem and seek solutions
Pretend it’s not there and proceed as if everything is okay

WordPress is a publishing platform that’s loved around the world and has literally created countless jobs, careers, powered online commerce as well as helped establish new industries in developing applications that extend WordPress.

Many people have a stake in WordPress’ continued survival so any talk about WordPress entering a stall and descent phase like an airplane that reached the maximum altitude is frightening and some people would prefer to shout it down to make it go away.

Acknowledging facts and not brushing them aside is what this webinar achieved as a step toward identifying solutions. Everyone in the discussion has a stake in the continued growth of WordPress and their goal was to put it out there for the community to also get involved.

The live webinar featured:

Miriam Schwab, Elementor’s Head of WP Relations
Rich Tabor, Automattic Product Manager
Joost de Valk, founder of Yoast SEO
Co-hosts Matt Cromwell and Amber Hinds, both members of the WordPress developer community moderated the discussion.

WordPress Market Share Stagnation

The webinar acknowledged that WordPress market share, the percentage of websites online that use WordPress, was stagnating. Stagnation is a state at which something is neither moving forward nor backwards, it is simply stuck at an in between point. And that’s what was openly acknowledged and the main point of the discussion was understanding the reasons why and what could be done about it.

Statistics gathered by the HTTPArchive and published on Joost de Valk’s blog show that WordPress experienced a year over year growth of 1.85%, having spent the year growing and contracting its market share. For example, over the latest month over month period the market share dropped by -0.28%.

Crowing about the WordPress 1.85% growth rate as evidence that everything is fine is to ignore that a large percentage of new businesses and websites coming online are increasingly going to other platforms, with year over year growth rates of other platforms outpacing the rate of growth of WordPress.

Out of the top 10 Content Management Systems, only six experienced year over year (YoY) growth.

CMS YoY Growth

Webflow: 25.00%
Shopify: 15.61%
Wix: 10.71%
Squarespace: 9.04%
Duda: 8.89%
WordPress: 1.85%

Why Stagnation Is A Problem

An important point made in the webinar is that stagnation can have a negative trickle-down effect on the business ecosystem by reducing growth opportunities and customer acquisition. If fewer of the new businesses coming online are opting in for WordPress are clients that will never come looking for a theme, plugin, development or SEO service.

It was noted at the 4:18 minute mark by Joost de Valk:

“…when you’re investing and when you’re building a product in the WordPress space, the market share or whether WordPress is growing or not has a deep impact on how easy it is to well to get people to, to buy the software that you want to sell them.”

Perception Of Innovation

One of the potential reasons for the struggle to achieve significant growth is the perception of a lack of innovation, pointed out at the 16:51 minute mark that there’s still no integration with popular technologies like Next JS, an open-source web development platform that is optimized for fast rollout of scalable and search-friendly websites.

It was observed at the 16:51 minute mark:

“…and still today we have no integration with next JS or anything like that…”

Someone else agreed but also expressed at the 41:52 minute mark, that the lack of innovation in the WordPress core can also be seen as a deliberate effort to make WordPress extensible so that if users find a gap a developer can step in and make a plugin to make WordPress be whatever users and developers want it to be.

“It’s not trying to be everything for everyone because it’s extensible. So if WordPress has a… let’s say a weakness for a particular segment or could be doing better in some way. Then you can come along and develop a plug in for it and that is one of the beautiful things about WordPress.”

Is Improved Marketing A Solution

One of the things that was identified as an area of improvement is marketing. They didn’t say it would solve all problems. It was simply noted that competitors are actively advertising and promoting but WordPress is by comparison not really proactively there. I think to extend that idea, which wasn’t expressed in the webinar, is to consider that if WordPress isn’t out there putting out a positive marketing message then the only thing consumers might be exposed to is the daily news of another vulnerability.

Someone commented in the 16:21 minute mark:

“I’m missing the excitement of WordPress and I’m not feeling that in the market. …I think a lot of that is around the product marketing and how we repackage WordPress for certain verticals because this one-size-fits-all means that in every single vertical we’re being displaced by campaigns that have paid or, you know, have received a a certain amount of funding and can go after us, right?”

This idea of marketing being a shortcoming of WordPress was raised earlier in the webinar at the 18:27 minute mark where it was acknowledged that growth was in some respects driven by the WordPress ecosystem with associated products like Elementor driving the growth in adoption of WordPress by new businesses.

They said:

“…the only logical conclusion is that the fact that marketing of WordPress itself is has actually always been a pain point, is now starting to actually hurt us.”

Future Of WordPress

This webinar is important because it features the voices of people who are actively involved at every level of WordPress, from development, marketing, accessibility, WordPress security, to plugin development. These are insiders with a deep interest in the continued evolution of WordPress as a viable platform for getting online.

The fact that they’re talking about the stagnation of WordPress should be of concern to everybody and that they are talking about solutions shows that the WordPress community is not in denial but is directly confronting situations, which is how a thriving ecosystem should be responding.

Watch the webinar:

Is WordPress’ Market share Declining? And What Should Product Businesses Do About it?

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SEO

Google’s New Support For AVIF Images May Boost SEO

Published

1 day ago

August 31, 2024

Max

Google's New Support For AVIF Images May Boost SEO

Google announced that images in the AVIF file format will now be eligible to be shown in Google Search and Google Images, including all platforms that surface Google Search data. AVIF will dramatically lower image sizes and improve Core Web Vitals scores, particularly Largest Contentful Paint.

How AVIF Can Improve SEO

Getting pages crawled and indexed are the first step of effective SEO. Anything that lowers file size and speeds up web page rendering will help search crawlers get to the content faster and improve the amount of pages crawled.

Google’s crawl budget documentation recommends increasing the speeds of page loading and rendering as a way to avoid receiving “Hostload exceeded” warnings.

It also says that faster loading times enables Googlebot to crawl more pages:

Improve your site’s crawl efficiency

Increase your page loading speed
Google’s crawling is limited by bandwidth, time, and availability of Googlebot instances. If your server responds to requests quicker, we might be able to crawl more pages on your site.

What Is AVIF?

AVIF (AVI Image File Format) is a next generation open source image file format that combines the best of JPEG, PNG, and GIF image file formats but in a more compressed format for smaller image files (by 50% for JPEG format).

AVIF supports transparency like PNG and photographic images like JPEG does but does but with a higher level of dynamic range, deeper blacks, and better compression (meaning smaller file sizes). AVIF even supports animation like GIF does.

AVIF Versus WebP

AVIF is generally a better file format than WebP in terms of smaller files size (compression) and image quality. WebP is better for lossless images, where maintaining high quality regardless of file size is more important. But for everyday web usage, AVIF is the better choice.

Is AVIF Supported?

AVIF is currently supported by Chrome, Edge, Firefox, Opera, and Safari browsers. Not all content management systems support AVIF. However, both WordPress and Joomla support AVIF. In terms of CDN, Cloudflare also already supports AVIF.

I couldn’t at this time ascertain whether Bing supports AVIF files and will update this article once I find out.

Current website usage of AVIF stands at 0.2% but now that it’s available to surfaced in Google Search, expect that percentage to grow. AVIF images will probably become a standard image format because of its high compression will help sites perform far better than they currently do with JPEG and PNG formats.

Research conducted in July 2024 by Joost de Valk (founder of Yoast, ) discovered that social media platforms don’t all support AVIF files. He found that LinkedIn, Mastodon, Slack, and Twitter/X do not currently support AVIF but that Facebook, Pinterest, Threads and WhatsApp do support it.

AVIF Images Are Automatically Indexable By Google

According to Google’s announcement there is nothing special that needs to be done to make AVIF image files indexable.

“Over the recent years, AVIF has become one of the most commonly used image formats on the web. We’re happy to announce that AVIF is now a supported file type in Google Search, for Google Images as well as any place that uses images in Google Search. You don’t need to do anything special to have your AVIF files indexed by Google.”

Read Google’s announcement:

Supporting AVIF in Google Search

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SEO

CMOs Called Out For Reliance On AI Content For SEO

Published

2 days ago

August 30, 2024

Max

CMOs Called Out For Reliance On AI Content For SEO

Eli Schwartz, Author of Product-Led SEO, started a discussion on LinkedIn about there being too many CMOs (Chief Marketing Officers) who believe that AI written content is an SEO strategy. He predicted that there will be reckoning on the way after their strategies end in failure.

This is what Eli had to say:

“Too many CMOs think that AI-written content is an SEO strategy that will replace actual SEO.

This mistake is going to lead to an explosion in demand for SEO strategists to help them fix their traffic when they find out they might have been wrong.”

Everyone in the discussion, which received 54 comments, strongly agreed with Eli, except for one guy.

What Is Google’s Policy On AI Generated Content?

Google’s policy hasn’t changed although they did update their guidance and spam policies on March 5, 2024 at the same time as the rollout of the March 2024 Core Algorithm Update. Many publishers who used AI to create content subsequently reported losing rankings.

Yet it’s not said that using AI is enough to merit poor rankings, it’s content that is created for ranking purposes.

Google wrote these guidelines specifically for autogenerated content, including AI generated content (Wayback machine copy dated March 6, 2024)

“Our long-standing spam policy has been that use of automation, including generative AI, is spam if the primary purpose is manipulating ranking in Search results. The updated policy is in the same spirit of our previous policy and based on the same principle. It’s been expanded to account for more sophisticated scaled content creation methods where it isn’t always clear whether low quality content was created purely through automation.

Our new policy is meant to help people focus more clearly on the idea that producing content at scale is abusive if done for the purpose of manipulating search rankings and that this applies whether automation or humans are involved.”

Many in Eli’s discussion were in agreement that reliance on AI by some organizations may come to haunt them, except for that one guy in the discussion

Read the discussion on LinkedIn:

Too many CMOs think that AI-written content is an SEO strategy that will replace actual SEO

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