SEO
The Complete Guide To Lifecycle Advertising
Advertising has always been considered a valuable marketing tool for businesses of all shapes and sizes.
While advertising methods and mediums have evolved over the years, the goal is always the same: to reach your audience and make them aware of your product or service.
While most marketers agree that advertising is essential, many have differing views on structuring ad campaigns.
So today, we’re here to discuss lifecycle advertising — delivering the right message, to the right person, at the right time.
What Is Lifecycle Advertising?
Before we move forward, let’s take a quick look at the difference and relationship between a “customer journey” and a “customer lifecycle.”
- The “customer journey” is a series of actions (stages) your customers go through from the moment they start interacting with your business.
- The ”customer lifecycle” is a series of categories (segments) you apply to your customers for multiple purposes, including sales, marketing, and customer service.
Although different, it’s important to know that the segments within the customer lifecycle should correspond with the customer journey stages.
Once you have the full picture, you can begin to advertise accordingly (also known as “lifestyle advertising”).
Ultimately, the goal is to create thoughtful, intentional interactions that lead potential customers further along their journey to not only purchase a product or service from you but turn them into lifetime loyal customers.
The best way to accomplish this goal is to identify your customer’s needs at each stage, then deliver messaging that responds to their needs at the right time.
The Customer Journey Stages
While every business has its own unique lifecycle – some can be days long, others can be years – they all are characterized by the same stages:
- Awareness: When a potential customer first learns about your company.
- Engagement: When a potential customer begins interacting with your brand.
- Consideration: When a potential customer decides whether to buy from your business.
- Purchase: Well done! Anyone who makes it to this stage is now a customer.
- Retention: Now a customer, the post-purchase support can be the difference between a one-time purchase and a repeat buyer.
- Loyalty: If a customer is happy with your product, they reach this stage where they are likely to become a repeat buyer. They’re also likely to tell their friends and family about your product or service.
Lifecycle Advertising Strategy
Here is how to create an ad strategy based on the lifecycle stages mentioned above:
Awareness Ad Campaign
At this point, you want as many potential customers to learn about your business as possible.
This stage is about getting your ads in front of anyone looking at them.
While it’s essential to consider where your potential customers are hanging out and putting your ads there, it’s also important to avoid putting all your eggs in one basket.
In other words, while you’ll likely find that your potential customers are viewing ads in one specific place more than another, never ignore those second, third, and fourth places (Instagram vs. Facebook vs. print ads, for example) where your ads could be seen!
These advertisements should help potential customers get to know your brand. Include your logo, brand colors, and appearance, but also communicate your values and what sets you apart from the competition.
Here is what a call-to-action (CTA) in this stage might look like:
- Learn more.
- Read more.
- Visit our website.
When a consumer sees your awareness ad, they are now aware of your company.
However, the “rule of seven” states that a consumer needs to see an ad at least seven times before they take action, which is why we continue to advertise past the awareness stage.
YouTube is a great platform for awareness because it’s quick, it allows you to have a button if someone wants to learn more, and you have to watch at least five seconds of the video ad – see the ad below from Cozy Earth:
To learn more about YouTube advertising in general, visit here.
Engagement Ad Campaign
Beyond making your customers aware of your product, the next stage of the journey is encouraging them to interact with your brand.
While these ads should also represent your brand well, the main goal of the ads in this phase is to get the customer to engage.
Engagement can mean:
- Visiting your website.
- Signing up for your newsletter or email list.
- Reaching out to a sales representative.
- Following your social media.
- Reading a blog post.
However, you want your potential customers to engage, decide on that goal, and create a CTA that reflects your goal.
Below are some calls to action for this stage:
- Sign up.
- Read more.
- Download.
Instagram is a great platform for the engagement stage because you can actually ask readers questions – the ultimate engagement.
This gets someone excited about what you have to offer while hopefully keeping your brand top of mind.
Below is a great example from Dapper Renaissance:
Screenshot from Instagram, December 2022Consideration Ad Campaign
When a potential customer hits this stage, they’ve already engaged with your company.
A great way to target customers who have reached this stage is by investing in retargeting advertisements. By segmenting your audience, your ad will only be shown to people who have visited your website or interacted with you in some way.
At this stage, your customer has already shown initial intrigue and engaged with your brand. The goal of the ads at this stage is to help them decide whether or not to buy from you.
Some ways to help your consumers at this stage:
- Be clear about your pricing.
- Clearly explain your features and benefits.
- Share customer testimonials.
- Offer a demo.
- Answer any questions your consumers might have about your product.
Think about what your potential customers need to see at this stage that would help them choose your brand over your competitors.
In this stage, it’s also extremely important to make converting as easy as possible so that when they do decide to buy from you, it’s not a challenge. The end goal of this stage is a conversion.
A CTA at this stage could be:
- Sign up.
- Download.
- Shop now.
Retargeting ads can be shown on any platform, but usually, desktop ads have your consumer in a position to dive deeper and buy.
Running banner ads on popular publications in your industry, such as the example below, is a great option for this stage:
Screenshot from buzzfeed.com, December 2022Purchase
This stage is the primary milestone for most businesses because it turns a prospect into a customer.
It’s important to tag these individuals as customers since they will receive different messages.
This stage isn’t about ads so much (because the last three stages should get you to your “shop now” button), but it’s about actually having an optimized check-out page.
You can learn more about optimizing your checkout page here.
Retention Ad Campaign
Once a customer decides to buy from you, they don’t end their journey.
Retaining your clients is important because repeat buyers can bring in a lot of revenue.
When you’re creating ads for this stage, some great strategies include:
- Offer exclusive discounts or other perks with future purchases.
- Announce exclusive access to a new product.
- Advertise offerings that complement their previous purchases.
- Share a new product.
To successfully engage consumers at this stage, ask yourself, “How can I support existing customers?”
Below is what a CTA could look like at this stage:
- Purchase now (with a discount).
- Download.
- Shop member-exclusive products.
As an avid traveler myself, Abercrombie & Kent is a product I have purchased in the past. They know I’m a solo traveler, so they often retarget me with deals specifically for solo travelers, such as in the example below.
With such a big ticket item, the “exclusive” deal is crucial to retaining me as a future traveler.
Screenshot from Facebook, December 2022Loyalty Ad Campaign
The final stage of the lifecycle is about creating loyalty.
This stage creates repeat buyers but also people willing to advocate on behalf of your brand, recommending your products to their families and friends.
At this stage, similarly to the retention stage, we recommend focusing on exclusivity. For example, you can create exclusivity by offering a membership.
This is the route Psycho Bunny has taken—they offer a VIP membership, which creates loyalty. In turn, their VIP members get access to exclusive deals.
Screenshot from psychobunny.com, December 2022Another route you can take at this stage is offering incentives to share testimonials.
This shows your loyal customers that you value their feedback. The testimonials will help you land more future customers while also giving your loyal consumer a nice perk. It’s a win-win.
Here are some other options:
- Create referral programs.
- Invite consumers to webinars.
- Offer other exclusive perks for repeat buyers.
The end goal of this stage is to keep customers interacting with your brand and show them that their opinions matter. They’re not just another number – they’re a customer that you greatly value.
At this stage, a CTA could look like this:
- Shop now.
- Leave a testimonial.
Creating Lifecycle Advertisements
To create an effective ad strategy, ensure you’re communicating with your consumers at each point throughout the lifecycle.
Your ad should be direct at each point, with one goal in mind.
Finally, ensure it’s effortless for consumers to take the action you want them to take.
You got this!
More resources:
Featured Image: wee dezign/Shutterstock
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SEO
How Compression Can Be Used To Detect Low Quality Pages
The concept of Compressibility as a quality signal is not widely known, but SEOs should be aware of it. Search engines can use web page compressibility to identify duplicate pages, doorway pages with similar content, and pages with repetitive keywords, making it useful knowledge for SEO.
Although the following research paper demonstrates a successful use of on-page features for detecting spam, the deliberate lack of transparency by search engines makes it difficult to say with certainty if search engines are applying this or similar techniques.
What Is Compressibility?
In computing, compressibility refers to how much a file (data) can be reduced in size while retaining essential information, typically to maximize storage space or to allow more data to be transmitted over the Internet.
TL/DR Of Compression
Compression replaces repeated words and phrases with shorter references, reducing the file size by significant margins. Search engines typically compress indexed web pages to maximize storage space, reduce bandwidth, and improve retrieval speed, among other reasons.
This is a simplified explanation of how compression works:
- Identify Patterns:
A compression algorithm scans the text to find repeated words, patterns and phrases - Shorter Codes Take Up Less Space:
The codes and symbols use less storage space then the original words and phrases, which results in a smaller file size. - Shorter References Use Less Bits:
The “code” that essentially symbolizes the replaced words and phrases uses less data than the originals.
A bonus effect of using compression is that it can also be used to identify duplicate pages, doorway pages with similar content, and pages with repetitive keywords.
Research Paper About Detecting Spam
This research paper is significant because it was authored by distinguished computer scientists known for breakthroughs in AI, distributed computing, information retrieval, and other fields.
Marc Najork
One of the co-authors of the research paper is Marc Najork, a prominent research scientist who currently holds the title of Distinguished Research Scientist at Google DeepMind. He’s a co-author of the papers for TW-BERT, has contributed research for increasing the accuracy of using implicit user feedback like clicks, and worked on creating improved AI-based information retrieval (DSI++: Updating Transformer Memory with New Documents), among many other major breakthroughs in information retrieval.
Dennis Fetterly
Another of the co-authors is Dennis Fetterly, currently a software engineer at Google. He is listed as a co-inventor in a patent for a ranking algorithm that uses links, and is known for his research in distributed computing and information retrieval.
Those are just two of the distinguished researchers listed as co-authors of the 2006 Microsoft research paper about identifying spam through on-page content features. Among the several on-page content features the research paper analyzes is compressibility, which they discovered can be used as a classifier for indicating that a web page is spammy.
Detecting Spam Web Pages Through Content Analysis
Although the research paper was authored in 2006, its findings remain relevant to today.
Then, as now, people attempted to rank hundreds or thousands of location-based web pages that were essentially duplicate content aside from city, region, or state names. Then, as now, SEOs often created web pages for search engines by excessively repeating keywords within titles, meta descriptions, headings, internal anchor text, and within the content to improve rankings.
Section 4.6 of the research paper explains:
“Some search engines give higher weight to pages containing the query keywords several times. For example, for a given query term, a page that contains it ten times may be higher ranked than a page that contains it only once. To take advantage of such engines, some spam pages replicate their content several times in an attempt to rank higher.”
The research paper explains that search engines compress web pages and use the compressed version to reference the original web page. They note that excessive amounts of redundant words results in a higher level of compressibility. So they set about testing if there’s a correlation between a high level of compressibility and spam.
They write:
“Our approach in this section to locating redundant content within a page is to compress the page; to save space and disk time, search engines often compress web pages after indexing them, but before adding them to a page cache.
…We measure the redundancy of web pages by the compression ratio, the size of the uncompressed page divided by the size of the compressed page. We used GZIP …to compress pages, a fast and effective compression algorithm.”
High Compressibility Correlates To Spam
The results of the research showed that web pages with at least a compression ratio of 4.0 tended to be low quality web pages, spam. However, the highest rates of compressibility became less consistent because there were fewer data points, making it harder to interpret.
Figure 9: Prevalence of spam relative to compressibility of page.
The researchers concluded:
“70% of all sampled pages with a compression ratio of at least 4.0 were judged to be spam.”
But they also discovered that using the compression ratio by itself still resulted in false positives, where non-spam pages were incorrectly identified as spam:
“The compression ratio heuristic described in Section 4.6 fared best, correctly identifying 660 (27.9%) of the spam pages in our collection, while misidentifying 2, 068 (12.0%) of all judged pages.
Using all of the aforementioned features, the classification accuracy after the ten-fold cross validation process is encouraging:
95.4% of our judged pages were classified correctly, while 4.6% were classified incorrectly.
More specifically, for the spam class 1, 940 out of the 2, 364 pages, were classified correctly. For the non-spam class, 14, 440 out of the 14,804 pages were classified correctly. Consequently, 788 pages were classified incorrectly.”
The next section describes an interesting discovery about how to increase the accuracy of using on-page signals for identifying spam.
Insight Into Quality Rankings
The research paper examined multiple on-page signals, including compressibility. They discovered that each individual signal (classifier) was able to find some spam but that relying on any one signal on its own resulted in flagging non-spam pages for spam, which are commonly referred to as false positive.
The researchers made an important discovery that everyone interested in SEO should know, which is that using multiple classifiers increased the accuracy of detecting spam and decreased the likelihood of false positives. Just as important, the compressibility signal only identifies one kind of spam but not the full range of spam.
The takeaway is that compressibility is a good way to identify one kind of spam but there are other kinds of spam that aren’t caught with this one signal. Other kinds of spam were not caught with the compressibility signal.
This is the part that every SEO and publisher should be aware of:
“In the previous section, we presented a number of heuristics for assaying spam web pages. That is, we measured several characteristics of web pages, and found ranges of those characteristics which correlated with a page being spam. Nevertheless, when used individually, no technique uncovers most of the spam in our data set without flagging many non-spam pages as spam.
For example, considering the compression ratio heuristic described in Section 4.6, one of our most promising methods, the average probability of spam for ratios of 4.2 and higher is 72%. But only about 1.5% of all pages fall in this range. This number is far below the 13.8% of spam pages that we identified in our data set.”
So, even though compressibility was one of the better signals for identifying spam, it still was unable to uncover the full range of spam within the dataset the researchers used to test the signals.
Combining Multiple Signals
The above results indicated that individual signals of low quality are less accurate. So they tested using multiple signals. What they discovered was that combining multiple on-page signals for detecting spam resulted in a better accuracy rate with less pages misclassified as spam.
The researchers explained that they tested the use of multiple signals:
“One way of combining our heuristic methods is to view the spam detection problem as a classification problem. In this case, we want to create a classification model (or classifier) which, given a web page, will use the page’s features jointly in order to (correctly, we hope) classify it in one of two classes: spam and non-spam.”
These are their conclusions about using multiple signals:
“We have studied various aspects of content-based spam on the web using a real-world data set from the MSNSearch crawler. We have presented a number of heuristic methods for detecting content based spam. Some of our spam detection methods are more effective than others, however when used in isolation our methods may not identify all of the spam pages. For this reason, we combined our spam-detection methods to create a highly accurate C4.5 classifier. Our classifier can correctly identify 86.2% of all spam pages, while flagging very few legitimate pages as spam.”
Key Insight:
Misidentifying “very few legitimate pages as spam” was a significant breakthrough. The important insight that everyone involved with SEO should take away from this is that one signal by itself can result in false positives. Using multiple signals increases the accuracy.
What this means is that SEO tests of isolated ranking or quality signals will not yield reliable results that can be trusted for making strategy or business decisions.
Takeaways
We don’t know for certain if compressibility is used at the search engines but it’s an easy to use signal that combined with others could be used to catch simple kinds of spam like thousands of city name doorway pages with similar content. Yet even if the search engines don’t use this signal, it does show how easy it is to catch that kind of search engine manipulation and that it’s something search engines are well able to handle today.
Here are the key points of this article to keep in mind:
- Doorway pages with duplicate content is easy to catch because they compress at a higher ratio than normal web pages.
- Groups of web pages with a compression ratio above 4.0 were predominantly spam.
- Negative quality signals used by themselves to catch spam can lead to false positives.
- In this particular test, they discovered that on-page negative quality signals only catch specific types of spam.
- When used alone, the compressibility signal only catches redundancy-type spam, fails to detect other forms of spam, and leads to false positives.
- Combing quality signals improves spam detection accuracy and reduces false positives.
- Search engines today have a higher accuracy of spam detection with the use of AI like Spam Brain.
Read the research paper, which is linked from the Google Scholar page of Marc Najork:
Detecting spam web pages through content analysis
Featured Image by Shutterstock/pathdoc
SEO
New Google Trends SEO Documentation
Google Search Central published new documentation on Google Trends, explaining how to use it for search marketing. This guide serves as an easy to understand introduction for newcomers and a helpful refresher for experienced search marketers and publishers.
The new guide has six sections:
- About Google Trends
- Tutorial on monitoring trends
- How to do keyword research with the tool
- How to prioritize content with Trends data
- How to use Google Trends for competitor research
- How to use Google Trends for analyzing brand awareness and sentiment
The section about monitoring trends advises there are two kinds of rising trends, general and specific trends, which can be useful for developing content to publish on a site.
Using the Explore tool, you can leave the search box empty and view the current rising trends worldwide or use a drop down menu to focus on trends in a specific country. Users can further filter rising trends by time periods, categories and the type of search. The results show rising trends by topic and by keywords.
To search for specific trends users just need to enter the specific queries and then filter them by country, time, categories and type of search.
The section called Content Calendar describes how to use Google Trends to understand which content topics to prioritize.
Google explains:
“Google Trends can be helpful not only to get ideas on what to write, but also to prioritize when to publish it. To help you better prioritize which topics to focus on, try to find seasonal trends in the data. With that information, you can plan ahead to have high quality content available on your site a little before people are searching for it, so that when they do, your content is ready for them.”
Read the new Google Trends documentation:
Get started with Google Trends
Featured Image by Shutterstock/Luis Molinero
SEO
All the best things about Ahrefs Evolve 2024
Hey all, I’m Rebekah and I am your Chosen One to “do a blog post for Ahrefs Evolve 2024”.
What does that entail exactly? I don’t know. In fact, Sam Oh asked me yesterday what the title of this post would be. “Is it like…Ahrefs Evolve 2024: Recap of day 1 and day 2…?”
Even as I nodded, I couldn’t get over how absolutely boring that sounded. So I’m going to do THIS instead: a curation of all the best things YOU loved about Ahrefs’ first conference, lifted directly from X.
Let’s go!
OUR HUGE SCREEN
The largest presentation screen I’ve ever seen! #ahrefsevolve pic.twitter.com/oboiMFW1TN
— Patrick Stox (@patrickstox) October 24, 2024
This is the biggest presentation screen I ever seen in my life. It’s like iMax for SEO presentations. #ahrefsevolve pic.twitter.com/sAfZ1rtePx
— Suganthan Mohanadasan (@Suganthanmn) October 24, 2024
CONFERENCE VENUE ITSELF
It was recently named the best new skyscraper in the world, by the way.
The Ahrefs conference venue feels like being in inception. #AhrefsEvolve pic.twitter.com/18Yjai1Cej
— Suganthan Mohanadasan (@Suganthanmn) October 24, 2024
I’m in Singapore for @ahrefs Evolve this week. Keen to connect with people doing interesting work on the future of search / AI #ahrefsevolve pic.twitter.com/s00UkIbxpf
— Alex Denning (@AlexDenning) October 23, 2024
OUR AMAZING SPEAKER LINEUP – SUPER INFORMATIVE, USEFUL TALKS!
A super insightful explanation of how Google Search Ranking works #ahrefsevolve pic.twitter.com/Cd1VSET2Aj
— Amanda Walls (@amandajwalls) October 24, 2024
“would I even do this if Google didn’t exist?” – what a great question to assess if you actually have the right focus when creating content amazing presentation from @amandaecking at #AhrefsEvolve pic.twitter.com/a6OKbKxwiS
— Aleyda Solis ️ (@aleyda) October 24, 2024
Attending @CyrusShepard ‘s talk on WTF is Helpful Content in Google’s algorithm at #AhrefsEvolve
“Focus on people first content”
Super relevant for content creators who want to stay ahead of the ever evolving Google search curve! #SEOTalk #SEO pic.twitter.com/KRTL13SB0g
This is the first time I am listening to @aleyda and it is really amazing. Lot of insights and actionable information.
Thank you #aleyda for power packed presentation.#AhrefsEvolve @ahrefs #seo pic.twitter.com/Xe3A9MGfrr
— Jignesh Gohel (@jigneshgohel) October 25, 2024
— Parth Suba (@parthsuba77) October 24, 2024
@thinking_slows thoughts on AI content – “it’s very good if you want to be average”.
We can do a lot better and Ryan explains how. Love it @ahrefs #AhrefsEvolve pic.twitter.com/qFqWs6QBH5
— Andy Chadwick (@digitalquokka) October 24, 2024
A super insightful explanation of how Google Search Ranking works #ahrefsevolve pic.twitter.com/Cd1VSET2Aj
— Amanda Walls (@amandajwalls) October 24, 2024
This is the first time I am listening to @aleyda and it is really amazing. Lot of insights and actionable information.
Thank you #aleyda for power packed presentation.#AhrefsEvolve @ahrefs #seo pic.twitter.com/Xe3A9MGfrr
— Jignesh Gohel (@jigneshgohel) October 25, 2024
GREAT MUSIC
First time I’ve ever Shazam’d a track during SEO conference ambience…. and the track wasn’t even Shazamable! #AhrefsEvolve @ahrefs pic.twitter.com/ZDzJOZMILt
— Lily Ray (@lilyraynyc) October 24, 2024
AMAZING GOODIES
Ahrefs Evolveきました！@ahrefs @AhrefsJP #AhrefsEvolve pic.twitter.com/33EiejQPdX
— さくらぎ (@sakuragi_ksy) October 24, 2024
Aside from the very interesting topics, what makes this conference even cooler are the ton of awesome freebies
Kudos for making all of these happen for #AhrefsEvolve @ahrefs team pic.twitter.com/DGzk5FSTN8
— Krista Melgarejo (@kimelgarejo) October 24, 2024
Content Goblin and SEO alligator party stickers are definitely going on my laptop. @ahrefs #ahrefsevolve pic.twitter.com/QBsBuY5Yix
— Patrick Stox (@patrickstox) October 24, 2024
This is one of the best swag bags I’ve received at any conference!
Either @ahrefs actually cares or the other conference swag bags aren’t up to par w Ahrefs!#AhrefsEvolve pic.twitter.com/Yc9e6wZPHn— Moses Sanchez (@SanchezMoses) October 25, 2024
SELFIE BATTLE
Some background: Tim and Sam have a challenge going on to see who can take the most number of selfies with all of you. Last I heard, Sam was winning – but there is room for a comeback yet!
Got the rare selfie with both @timsoulo and @samsgoh #AhrefsEvolve
— Bernard Huang (@bernardjhuang) October 24, 2024
THAT BELL
Everybody’s just waiting for this one.
@timsoulo @ahrefs #AhrefsEvolve pic.twitter.com/6ypWaTGDDP
— Jinbo Liang (@JinboLiang) October 24, 2024
STICKER WALL
Viva la vida, viva Seo!
Awante Argentina loco!#AhrefsEvolve pic.twitter.com/sfhbI2kWSH
— Gaston Riera. (@GastonRiera) October 24, 2024
AND, OF COURSE…ALL OF YOU!
#AhrefsEvolve let’s goooooooooooo!!! pic.twitter.com/THtdvdtUyB
— Tim Soulo (@timsoulo) October 24, 2024
–
There’s a TON more content on LinkedIn – click here – but I have limited time to get this post up and can’t quite figure out how to embed LinkedIn posts so…let’s stop here for now. I’ll keep updating as we go along!
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