SEO
What You Need To Know
To stay relevant, brands must continue to engage their customers through ads, contests, and other marketing strategies.
But what is a Facebook competition? How does it work? And why should I care?
Competitions are a great way to get noticed and build brand awareness. They are excellent for getting more likes on your page and in your group or boosting traffic to your site. They also provide a fun opportunity to interact with your audience.
Competitions on Facebook can involve posting a question or challenge, then promoting it to engage your followers.
Rewards can include cash prizes, gifts, or even admission to exclusive events.
But before jumping into a competition, there are some things you should consider. To ensure your competition is a success, check out these helpful tips.
1. What Are Facebook’s Official Rules?
Like most aspects of Facebook, there are official rules, including rules for all competitions.
However, the rules tend to change as new policies arise, so it’s important to check them before starting a competition. The current ones include:
Setting Up Your Own Restrictions
When you create a competition, the owner of the Facebook Page or Group’s job is to ensure they run properly and lawfully.
This means you have to set up terms and eligibility requirements which would include the age range for who can participate and the region for the competition.
So, for example, a brand can set guidelines that only people 18 plus in the U.S. can participate in the competition.
It also means that there need to be clear standards of how the competition will be run. Such as how and when the participants will participate and receive rewards.
Transparency is paramount. It will ensure everyone knows how the competition will operate and won’t get your brand in any sticky situations with Facebook or the law.
Create A Statement About Facebook
You will also need to mention in a post or release that Facebook is not involved in the competition in any way. And that the brand itself is in charge and responsible for the competition.
The participants also need to agree to these terms. So, it’s your job to get the participants to consent to these terms before participating.
Restrictions To Where You Can Post About The Campaign
Only official Facebook Pages, Groups, or Events can be used as platforms to promote a competition.
A brand can’t encourage its team or other participants to promote, tag, or share the competition on their personal Timelines.
People can find this as a spammy way to promote a competition anyway, so this shouldn’t impact promoting your competition.
Understanding Who’s Involved
Unfortunately, you are on your own and in charge of running a campaign on Facebook. So, Facebook can’t get involved if issues arise; it’s your job to manage any potential problems.
2. What Objectives Do You Want To Achieve?
Now that you know the rules, it’s time to set your goals for the competition.
There are numerous objectives you can select for a Facebook competition.
Some of them include:
- Increasing likes or followers.
- Getting traffic from other pages.
- Building engagement
- Promoting a product or service.
If you want to increase the number of likes you receive for posts and use a competition to help with this, then you need to post regularly and interact with users.
To build engagement, you should ask questions to your participants and answer any responses they give.
Additionally, if you want to promote a product or service, you should use promotion tools like Facebook ads.
Generally, the main objectives of any Facebook competition are to increase engagement and gain followers.
If you want to achieve higher engagement rates, you need to create a competition where participants feel like they have something to gain.
This could mean giving away prizes to select participants after encouraging them to participate on your social media pages or directing them back to your website to sign up for your email subscription.
This helps you get more active leads while also generating engagement.
Tracking Your Competition
As you would set goals for other social media campaigns, selecting specific and measurable objectives is paramount. This way, you can track the success of the campaign.
Putting together a couple of key performance indicators (KPIs) can help inform your promotional strategy for your Facebook competition.
It’s also incredibly important to set a schedule to monitor Facebook promotion analytics regularly.
Promote Your Competition
For your competition to gain traction, you need to leverage your marketing efforts.
Whether your competition is run solely on Facebook or you’re using it across multiple platforms, it’s crucial to hit all areas where your customers follow you.
Either direct them back to Facebook to participate or be clear about how and where they can enter the competition on other platforms, such as your website.
Also, depending on your brand goals for the competition, it may be worth boosting it as a paid Facebook post.
You can also customize your campaign by creating unique hashtags. This will help participants associate a post with your competition to remind them to enter if they haven’t done so already or reignite their excitement about potential prizes.
In addition, remember to establish a set schedule for when and how you will post about your competition throughout its duration.
Do You Need An App For Your Competition?
Using a third-party app to run your competition removes a lot of the headache associated with running a promotion but also has some drawbacks.
For example, they may not offer any additional functionality beyond what your team can manage.
Also, if you plan on promoting through Facebook ads, you’ll need to pay separately for each campaign (which could get expensive).
And finally, these apps aren’t usually designed to work on mobile devices, so you won’t be able to access them easily from a smartphone or tablet.
3. Who Is The Audience You Want To Enter?
With your objectives and rules established, it’s time to decide who you want to get involved in your competition. It’s essential to tailor your competition to your target audience.
What do you think your target audience wants? Do you have a new product or product line coming out soon? Then maybe you can gift a couple of participants some of these products.
Or perhaps there is a product that is generally sold out. Then a couple of lucky winners can receive this elusive good.
You could also create a limited edition product specifically for the competition. This way, more people will get excited to participate, so they don’t miss out on this one-time offer.
Figuring out what your audience wants most can help improve the success of your competition. Choose a prize that appeals to your ideal customers. You want your participants to be excited when they finally get their gift.
Finally, think carefully about how you’re reaching your target audience.
Will they respond positively to how you plan to promote your competition? Are you offering enough prizes for the type of following you have on Facebook or across social media?
4. What Type Of Competition Do You Choose?
A Facebook competition requires a lot of planning. Before starting any Facebook competition, you need to decide how much effort and money you want to put into the competition.
Such as how much money you want to spend on Facebook ads and other promotional activities, as well as what prizes you want to give away and how many prizes you’re willing to offer. Then it’ll be easier to select what type of competition would work best.
Three traditional competitions include giveaways, sweepstakes, and contests. Each has different rules.
If you plan to run a giveaway, you should consider limiting how many products you give away. Usually, with a giveaway, a set number of the people who participate first receive a prize.
A sweepstake is more of a lottery where you would select a certain number of participants from the pull of participants that enter the competition over a period of time.
And a contest would have more specific criteria that the participants need to follow, and then the participant(s) who best follow the criteria would win. Such as a picture contest.
How Long Will The Competition Run?
If you want to run a competition on Facebook, then you should know how long the competition will last. The typical duration is one month.
However, some competitions may be open longer if you have the budget and time or certain long-term goals for that competition.
Some competitions end when they reach a certain number of entries, while others continue until a specific date.
5. How Will You Follow Up With Participants?
It’s crucial to communicate how you will follow up with your participants to let them know who won the competition.
This way, you won’t create any unnecessary upsetness or miscommunicate about when the prizes will go out. You don’t want to waste all your hard work by ending the competition on a sour note.
Here are some tips on how you can follow up with participants after the competition ends:
- Announce the end of the competition and thank everyone for participating.
- Make a note of the winners’ names and send them a message with the information about how and when they will receive the prize.
- Finally, don’t forget to check periodically to see what new messages or comments they leave.
Takeaways
Facebook competitions are a fun way to promote your company, brand, product, service, or cause.
Also, they are a great way to build a community around your brand and get feedback from followers.
They’re free to enter, easy to set up, and fun to watch. So, if you want to build a community around your product or service, try creating a Facebook competition.
More Resources:
Featured Image: Dean Drobot/Shutterstock
SEO
YouTube Extends Shorts To 3 Minutes, Adds New Features
YouTube expands Shorts to 3 minutes, adds templates, AI tools, and the option to show fewer Shorts on the homepage.
- YouTube Shorts will allow 3-minute videos.
- New features include templates, enhanced remixing, and AI-generated video backgrounds.
- YouTube is adding a Shorts trends page and comment previews.
SEO
How To Stop Filter Results From Eating Crawl Budget
Today’s Ask An SEO question comes from Michal in Bratislava, who asks:
“I have a client who has a website with filters based on a map locations. When the visitor makes a move on the map, a new URL with filters is created. They are not in the sitemap. However, there are over 700,000 URLs in the Search Console (not indexed) and eating crawl budget.
What would be the best way to get rid of these URLs? My idea is keep the base location ‘index, follow’ and newly created URLs of surrounded area with filters switch to ‘noindex, no follow’. Also mark surrounded areas with canonicals to the base location + disavow the unwanted links.”
Great question, Michal, and good news! The answer is an easy one to implement.
First, let’s look at what you’re trying and apply it to other situations like ecommerce and publishers. This way, more people can benefit. Then, go into your strategies above and end with the solution.
What Crawl Budget Is And How Parameters Are Created That Waste It
If you’re not sure what Michal is referring to with crawl budget, this is a term some SEO pros use to explain that Google and other search engines will only crawl so many pages on your website before it stops.
If your crawl budget is used on low-value, thin, or non-indexable pages, your good pages and new pages may not be found in a crawl.
If they’re not found, they may not get indexed or refreshed. If they’re not indexed, they cannot bring you SEO traffic.
This is why optimizing a crawl budget for efficiency is important.
Michal shared an example of how “thin” URLs from an SEO point of view are created as customers use filters.
The experience for the user is value-adding, but from an SEO standpoint, a location-based page would be better. This applies to ecommerce and publishers, too.
Ecommerce stores will have searches for colors like red or green and products like t-shirts and potato chips.
These create URLs with parameters just like a filter search for locations. They could also be created by using filters for size, gender, color, price, variation, compatibility, etc. in the shopping process.
The filtered results help the end user but compete directly with the collection page, and the collection would be the “non-thin” version.
Publishers have the same. Someone might be on SEJ looking for SEO or PPC in the search box and get a filtered result. The filtered result will have articles, but the category of the publication is likely the best result for a search engine.
These filtered results can be indexed because they get shared on social media or someone adds them as a comment on a blog or forum, creating a crawlable backlink. It might also be an employee in customer service responded to a question on the company blog or any other number of ways.
The goal now is to make sure search engines don’t spend time crawling the “thin” versions so you can get the most from your crawl budget.
The Difference Between Indexing And Crawling
There’s one more thing to learn before we go into the proposed ideas and solutions – the difference between indexing and crawling.
- Crawling is the discovery of new pages within a website.
- Indexing is adding the pages that are worthy of showing to a person using the search engine to the database of pages.
Pages can get crawled but not indexed. Indexed pages have likely been crawled and will likely get crawled again to look for updates and server responses.
But not all indexed pages will bring in traffic or hit the first page because they may not be the best possible answer for queries being searched.
Now, let’s go into making efficient use of crawl budgets for these types of solutions.
Using Meta Robots Or X Robots
The first solution Michal pointed out was an “index,follow” directive. This tells a search engine to index the page and follow the links on it. This is a good idea, but only if the filtered result is the ideal experience.
From what I can see, this would not be the case, so I would recommend making it “noindex,follow.”
Noindex would say, “This is not an official page, but hey, keep crawling my site, you’ll find good pages in here.”
And if you have your main menu and navigational internal links done correctly, the spider will hopefully keep crawling them.
Canonicals To Solve Wasted Crawl Budget
Canonical links are used to help search engines know what the official page to index is.
If a product exists in three categories on three separate URLs, only one should be “the official” version, so the two duplicates should have a canonical pointing to the official version. The official one should have a canonical link that points to itself. This applies to the filtered locations.
If the location search would result in multiple city or neighborhood pages, the result would likely be a duplicate of the official one you have in your sitemap.
Have the filtered results point a canonical back to the main page of filtering instead of being self-referencing if the content on the page stays the same as the original category.
If the content pulls in your localized page with the same locations, point the canonical to that page instead.
In most cases, the filtered version inherits the page you searched or filtered from, so that is where the canonical should point to.
If you do both noindex and have a self-referencing canonical, which is overkill, it becomes a conflicting signal.
The same applies to when someone searches for a product by name on your website. The search result may compete with the actual product or service page.
With this solution, you’re telling the spider not to index this page because it isn’t worth indexing, but it is also the official version. It doesn’t make sense to do this.
Instead, use a canonical link, as I mentioned above, or noindex the result and point the canonical to the official version.
Disavow To Increase Crawl Efficiency
Disavowing doesn’t have anything to do with crawl efficiency unless the search engine spiders are finding your “thin” pages through spammy backlinks.
The disavow tool from Google is a way to say, “Hey, these backlinks are spammy, and we don’t want them to hurt us. Please don’t count them towards our site’s authority.”
In most cases, it doesn’t matter, as Google is good at detecting spammy links and ignoring them.
You do not want to add your own site and your own URLs to the disavow tool. You’re telling Google your own site is spammy and not worth anything.
Plus, submitting backlinks to disavow won’t prevent a spider from seeing what you want and do not want to be crawled, as it is only for saying a link from another site is spammy.
Disavowing won’t help with crawl efficiency or saving crawl budget.
How To Make Crawl Budgets More Efficient
The answer is robots.txt. This is how you tell specific search engines and spiders what to crawl.
You can include the folders you want them to crawl by marketing them as “allow,” and you can say “disallow” on filtered results by disallowing the “?” or “&” symbol or whichever you use.
If some of those parameters should be crawled, add the main word like “?filter=location” or a specific parameter.
Robots.txt is how you define crawl paths and work on crawl efficiency. Once you’ve optimized that, look at your internal links. A link from one page on your site to another.
These help spiders find your most important pages while learning what each is about.
Internal links include:
- Breadcrumbs.
- Menu navigation.
- Links within content to other pages.
- Sub-category menus.
- Footer links.
You can also use a sitemap if you have a large site, and the spiders are not finding the pages you want with priority.
I hope this helps answer your question. It is one I get a lot – you’re not the only one stuck in that situation.
More resources:
Featured Image: Paulo Bobita/Search Engine Journal
SEO
Ad Copy Tactics Backed By Study Of Over 1 Million Google Ads
Mastering effective ad copy is crucial for achieving success with Google Ads.
Yet, the PPC landscape can make it challenging to discern which optimization techniques truly yield results.
Although various perspectives exist on optimizing ads, few are substantiated by comprehensive data. A recent study from Optmyzr attempted to address this.
The goal isn’t to promote or dissuade any specific method but to provide a clearer understanding of how different creative decisions impact your campaigns.
Use the data to help you identify higher profit probability opportunities.
Methodology And Data Scope
The Optmyzr study analyzed data from over 22,000 Google Ads accounts that have been active for at least 90 days with a minimum monthly spend of $1,500.
Across more than a million ads, we assessed Responsive Search Ads (RSAs), Expanded Text Ads (ETAs), and Demand Gen campaigns. Due to API limitations, we could not retrieve asset-level data for Performance Max campaigns.
Additionally, all monetary figures were converted to USD to standardize comparisons.
Key Questions Explored
To provide actionable insights, we focused on addressing the following questions:
- Is there a correlation between Ad Strength and performance?
- How do pinning assets impact ad performance?
- Do ads written in title case or sentence case perform better?
- How does creative length affect ad performance?
- Can ETA strategies effectively translate to RSAs and Demand Gen ads?
As we evaluated the results, it’s important to note that our data set represents advanced marketers.
This means there may be selection bias, and these insights might differ in a broader advertiser pool with varying levels of experience.
The Relationship Between Ad Strength And Performance
Google explicitly states that Ad Strength is a tool designed to guide ad optimization rather than act as a ranking factor.
Despite this, marketers often hold mixed opinions about its usefulness, as its role in ad performance appears inconsistent.
Our data corroborates this skepticism. Ads labeled with an “average” Ad Strength score outperformed those with “good” or “excellent” scores in key metrics like CPA, conversion rate, and ROAS.
This disparity is particularly evident in RSAs, where the ROAS tends to decrease sharply when moving from “average” to “good,” with only a marginal increase when advancing to “excellent.”
Screenshot from author, September 2024Interestingly, Demand Gen ads also showed a stronger performance with an “average” Ad Strength, except for ROAS.
The metrics for conversion rates in Demand Gen and RSAs were notably similar, which is surprising since Demand Gen ads are typically designed for awareness, while RSAs focus on driving transactions.
Key Takeaways:
- Ad Strength doesn’t reliably correlate with performance, so it shouldn’t be a primary metric for assessing your ads.
- Most ads with “poor” or “average” Ad Strength labels perform well by standard advertising KPIs.
- “Good” or “excellent” Ad Strength labels do not guarantee better performance.
How Does Pinning Affect Ad Performance?
Pinning refers to locking specific assets like headlines or descriptions in fixed positions within the ad. This technique became common with RSAs, but there’s ongoing debate about its efficacy.
Some advertisers advocate for pinning all assets to replicate the control offered by ETAs, while others prefer to let Google optimize placements automatically.
Image from author, September 2024Our data suggests that pinning some, but not all, assets offers the most balanced results in terms of CPA, ROAS, and CPC. However, ads where all assets are pinned achieve the highest relevance in terms of CTR.
Still, this marginally higher CTR doesn’t necessarily translate into better conversion metrics. Ads with unpinned or partially pinned assets generally perform better in terms of conversion rates and cost-based metrics.
Key Takeaways:
- Selective pinning is optimal, offering a good balance between creative control and automation.
- Fully pinned ads may increase CTR but tend to underperform in metrics like CPA and ROAS.
- Advertisers should embrace RSAs, as they consistently outperform ETAs – even with fully pinned assets.
Title Case Vs. Sentence Case: Which Performs Better?
The choice between title case (“This Is a Title Case Sentence”) and sentence case (“This is a sentence case sentence”) is often a point of contention among advertisers.
Our analysis revealed a clear trend: Ads using sentence case generally outperformed those in title case, particularly in RSAs and Demand Gen campaigns.
Image from author, September 2024(RSA Data)
Image from author, September 2024(ETA Data)
Image from author, September 2024(Demand Gen)
ROAS, in particular, showed a marked preference for sentence case across these ad types, suggesting that a more natural, conversational tone may resonate better with users.
Interestingly, many advertisers still use a mix of title and sentence case within the same account, which counters the traditional approach of maintaining consistency throughout the ad copy.
Key Takeaways:
- Sentence case outperforms title case in RSAs and Demand Gen ads on most KPIs.
- Including sentence case ads in your testing can improve performance, as it aligns more closely with organic results, which users perceive as higher quality.
- Although ETAs perform slightly better with title case, sentence case is increasingly the preferred choice in modern ad formats.
The Impact Of Ad Length On Performance
Ad copy, particularly for Google Ads, requires brevity without sacrificing impact.
We analyzed the effects of character count on ad performance, grouping ads by the length of headlines and descriptions.
Image from author, September 2024
Image from author, September 2024(RSA Data)
Image from author, September 2024
Image from author, September 2024(ETA Data)
Image from author, September 2024
Image from author, September 2024(Demand Gen Data)
Interestingly, shorter headlines tend to outperform longer ones in CTR and conversion rates, while descriptions benefit from moderate length.
Ads that tried to maximize character counts by using dynamic keyword insertion (DKI) or customizers often saw no significant performance improvement.
Moreover, applying ETA strategies to RSAs proved largely ineffective.
In almost all cases, advertisers who carried over ETA tactics to RSAs saw a decline in performance, likely because of how Google dynamically assembles ad components for display.
Key Takeaways:
- Shorter headlines lead to better performance, especially in RSAs.
- Focus on concise, impactful messaging instead of trying to fill every available character.
- ETA tactics do not translate well to RSAs, and attempting to replicate them can hurt performance.
Final Thoughts On Ad Optimizations
In summary, several key insights emerge from this analysis.
First, Ad Strength should not be your primary focus when assessing performance. Instead, concentrate on creating relevant, engaging ad copy tailored to your target audience.
Additionally, pinning assets should be a strategic, creative decision rather than a hard rule, and advertisers should incorporate sentence case into their testing for RSAs and Demand Gen ads.
Finally, focus on quality over quantity in ad copy length, as longer ads do not always equate to better results.
By refining these elements of your ads, you can drive better ROI and adapt to the evolving landscape of Google Ads.
Read the full Ad Strength & Creative Study from Optmyzr.
More resources:
Featured Image: Sammby/Shutterstock
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