I’ve often complained that restaurant online ordering solutions don’t come with the basics of tracking and monitoring tools you’d normally get in any ecommerce solution. URL shorteners offer a workaround this, but how does tracking help us?

For this exercise, we are going to use two data sources:

1. Transactions export by order source:
   I’ve removed sensitive data like order id’s and customer names, but this is an actual export from ChowNow’s transactions. The only variables that we can use in our sales attribution are the time and order source. Neither of those variables are perfect, so we will have to still perform some approximations.

   

2. URL weblogs:

   I’ve exported this from SOCIALHOSE links url shorterning tool.

   

Now that we have our data, we can start analyzing while remaining tool-agnostic. Let’s have a little fun now shall we?

Attribution Rules for Tracking Clicks with Purchases

Attribution is the holy grail of marketing, because it is so impossibly difficult to get right. We have to make a lot of educated guesses, because the data is never complete enough.

We will use two basic rules for our attribution of sales here:

Time lapse rule

For the purpose of this exercise, we will allow for a maximum of 10 minutes from the time a user clicked on the link to when an order is made. If more than 10 minutes passed, that order cannot be attributed to the link.

Device match rule

ChowNow’s exports only tell us the following about the order source:

• Direct Mobile Web 4.0: mobile user

• Direct Web 4.0: desktop user

• Discover iOS: through ChowNow’s iOS app

• Yelp: through Yelp’s order (and payment) processing

• Unknown/Other

We try to match the order source with devices we know. So if we think an order fits the time lapse rule, we check to see if the device/os match the Order Source.

Play with numbers like a data scientist

We’re not going to do anything advanced here, so don’t let the ‘data scientist’ scare you. Now let’s fire up Jupyter and play with those numbers a little..

As you can see, this is not particularly interesting, but we can see that our users are overwhelmingly on mobile devices. It’s not a surprise, but I was actually surprised at how much PC users were there.

Matching timezones

If you’ve noticed, there are a couple of lines that seem to deal with time. Those lines simply take the string-based time column and converts it into a machine-readable version, so we can have fun with it later.

When combining data from multiple sources, we have to be careful to match the timezones used. For example, ChowNow’s exports times in PST, while we are on CST (that’s a 2 hour difference). If you don’t do that, you may find it difficult to attribute any orders to a clicked link.

Keep it short and sweet

Now we have some data showing the gross sales amounts. Here we created a new DataFrame that only has the columns: bot, device, os, gross. This is not necessary, but it makes it easier for us to know what we’re working with.

Let’s take a closer look at the breakdown to see if any of this makes any sense.

iOS users spend the most

We’ve always known about iOS users being more affluent than Android users. There are many reasons why iOS users spend more money than other platforms, but we’re not getting into this now.

Let’s take a look at our breakdown from August 1’s sales of direct online orders. That is, those are orders made directly through the restaurant menu (powered by ChowNow) and does not include phone-in orders or in-person orders.

I’ve included the bots here just so you’re aware of the noise level they create. As you can see, the iOS users spend is significantly higher than those of Android’s or even desktop.

An assumption the restaurant owner had was that orders that came through offices for lunch are big tickets. That may still be true, but what we can demonstrably tell is that those holding an iPhone make the biggest orders.

We barely scratched the surface here, but I hope that it was enough to have you start imagining all the different bits and pieces of information you have at your disposal, and how collating them can inform your business strategy.

One would be forgiven to assume that link shortening services are all about creating a url with less characters. Well, historically, that may have been one of the main purposes of the service, but things have changed since then.

It all began when Twitter started knee-capping a bunch of third-party tools built around its platform. When Twitter adopted a standard of shortening links themselves, others like LinkedIn followed suit. It is now safe to assume that your link will not be rendered the same way by any social network, making saving character counts an exercise in dead horse beating.

Of course, that only makes sense in posts and not in advertisements. Ah! If you’re trying to track how a link is visited by using UTM parameters, you will quickly learn that they create a very ugly looking URL. Quiet simply, it just looks like an unprofessional mess. Ideally, you don’t want to let your customers know what you’re calling a campaign or how you’ve configured it. It’s internal stuff that should remain so.

You could read this article by the UK Government Communication Service’s Louise Harris, where she claims that you shouldn’t use the service because there are other service providers offering the service. It’s almost as if Harris worked for Google or Meta. To demonstrate, allow me to quote this hilarity:

Some link shorteners claim to provide you with analytics. And perhaps they do, but no more than you get natively, for free, on social media platforms and via tools like Google Analytics. Social media platforms tell you how many clicks you received and provide a click-through rate (CTR) — you don’t need a third party tool like a link shortener to find that out.

Louis Harris, Creative and Channels Team Leader, Government Digital Service (GDS)

Harris is addressing government organizations here, by actually saying that you should put all your eggs in the Google basket.. or Instagram one. Whichever one you like, just not some other service because that’s the one worthy. Or something. But point is, it is complete and absolute nonsense.

Regardless of the entity you’re representing online, be it a government agency or your own personal brand, decoupling yourself from providers who can shut you out of the world is a key component in assessing the risk of any service. You may be thinking, but the government can’t be de-platformed, right? Well, maybe. But that is not true for all governments. Because this is a variable that changes based on who the service provider is and their relationship with you, perhaps it is better to adopt a more holistic approach.

I recall working on a project with government entity in Abu Dhabi, over a decade ago. One of their requirements was to not allow Google services to track anything from within their sites. They wanted their own analytics and did not want to share their data with anyone else, including Google. This is a more typical governmental approach to data.

Let us break down the pros and cons for a links shortening tool, by type of user.

Link Shortening for Creators

Creators come in all shapes and sizes, but they often have a much lower bar for branding, even if some exceed it and then some. The point is, because of that, often it makes little sense to take on the overhead of your domain name.

The overhead the comes with your own domain, website and other associated services is simply uneconomical, which is why link shortening services make sense. They make sense because you want to have the same level of control, sans administrative overhead.

A creator use case

Jenny is an active creator on instagram. She posts regularly and has an engaged following. Then, one day, Instagram decided that her account was involved in suspicious activities and was suspended. Luckily, Jenny uses a url shortening service and a link-in-bio service where she uses one link to point to her instagram account. All she had to do was update the link's target url to her newly created account.

The above is an over-simplified poorly constructed use case, but the idea stands. You get to have control over where the link takes you and change that at will.

This is a very powerful tool.

Link Shortening for Agencies

When you’re an agency, you’re dealing with multiple clients with a wide array of needs and wants. There will be a client who only needs social profiles links and another who is constantly running promotions and ads. There will be a need to segment them and categorize them accordingly.

But you already know this. The only question you have to ask yourself is, does this service do all the things that I want for my customers.

Link Shortening for Brands

Brands have a slightly different want, which centers around the type of domains used in a url shortened address. While having a generic shortened url works for creators and smaller clients at an agency, it will not work for bigger brands.

It’s really an obvious problem, because no one is going to feel comfortable clicking on an unknown link that is supposedly associated with a recognizable brand. The good news is, most url shortening services offer the option to brand your shortened url’s.

URL shorteners may have burst into the scene as a way to ration characters in social posts, but this is just as relevant as claiming that revolving doors were invented to keep horses out. It may have kept horses out, but that’s not why Theophilius van Kannel invented them.

Originally posted here https://socialhose.net/blog/how-url-shorteners-are-so-much-more-than-short-links/

If 63% of marketers are planning on a big job change, where are they going?

All marketers have left the building

If you’ve been watching the employment reports lately, you would probably be aware of a few things:

• Employers are short-staff across the board with some sectors more affected than others

• Employees are demanding more WFH options with some resistance from employers

• Everyone seems to be quitting their jobs

And if you’re still not sure how that is impacting marketers, the 2021 Rosie Report tells a tale of a new world order. The report includes a survey of 423 US-based marketers, which found a whopping 63% of marketers planning a big job change this year.

I asked We Are Rosie for a breakdown of the demographics of their survey and this is what they had to say.

 — @RosieReport

It’s important to recognize the size of the population before we can assign any confidence in survey results. Please excuse my pedantry, but if the data needs qualification, we should do that early on. According the US Bureau of Labor Statistics, there are 270,200 Marketing Managers, as of May 2020. Estimates of all marketing related jobs range from 620k to 824k, depending on who you ask and what categories they group together.

With that in mind, a more optimal sample size would be north of 2000 respondents. However, we can still work with what we have as long as increase the error margin to 5%.

So now that we know we can live with an error margin of 5%, where are all the marketers leaving to? That’s higher than the global trend of 41%.

1 in 3 Independent marketers are never going back to Full-Time Employment

This is very significant, because it shows that marketers did like Katy Perry and liked it. The newfound independence of flexible working schedules and the ability to choose the projects they want to work on have never been more attractive, primarily because employers are now more willing to hire remotely. The trend is to work on projects without the long-term commitment.

“Every full-time job I’ve had started out as a freelance gig — and every time I regret signing on as a ‘real employee’.” — Creative Director

This quote from the report aptly sums up the sentiment. Marketers have commitment issues. They’re just not into you. They’re not ready to settle down just yet. They want to explore and see other people.

It’s not surprising then that we would find another 27% of those surveyed not concerned with upward mobility. It’s almost as if marketers have decided to go on backpacking through Europe on a self discovery journey.

Allow me to put this in a way that employers can understand better.

Marketing careers suck

It’s that simple. If people aren’t bothered with it and are looking for project-based work, it is a clear indicator that whatever career paths exist today are nowhere near as attractive as they need to be.

It’s not about the money though. It is obvious that marketers are making a decent living skipping FTE. I suspect this has more to do with working conditions than financial compensation.

WFH struggles: what a difference a year can make

Looking at the chart above, we can conclude that there are some clear benefits from Working From Home. As people become more competent in their use of technology, difficulties decrease. As more people join the WFH movement, loneliness decreases as they have more people to relate to. However, the problem with time management rears its ugly head once again.

Time management is an especially serious problem, as Americans put in more working hours than most industrial nations. According to the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD), the US is the 10th most overworked country (2018). If we were to to couple this with WFH and the inability to unplug from work, we have a recipe for mass burnouts.

Measuring productivity changes with WFH

I’m a huge fan of measuring productivity and have done so extensively in the past. But productivity is not always measurable or quantifiable. A 9-month long study of 16,000 call center workers [PDF] reports an increase of 13% in productivity. Call center work is a lot easier to measure. A marketing manager’s productivity has a lot more moving parts, making it tricky.

The push-pull between companies and employees continues with employees quitting over Apple’s hybrid work policy, while Ford expanded their hybrid policy, and Facebook doubled-down making WFH policies permanent.

The debate continues with proponents declaring that productivity has either increased or remained the same. Some people even mock managers for wanting to “monitor” them at work by visually confirming they’re working. This oversimplification makes it difficult to address the real challenges brought by WFH.

For example, building meaningful connections that would facilitate professional growth is more difficult for entry level workers. Creativity-based work isn’t about the number of hours you spend, but is sparked by casual mindless conversations.

This is not to say that we cannot find WFH alternatives to achieve comparable results. It is, however, a very important factor to consider as we examine ways to adapt.

Creating clear actionable goals for marketers that we can hold them accountable to would be more productive than worrying about the number of hours they are clocking on the job.

Vaccination messaging and censorship

COVID-19 vaccination can be a divisive issue and has become needlessly politicized, due to many factors internal and external.

The US Surgeon General Jerome Adams recently posted a series of tweets admitting that his advice in the early days of the pandemic against masks was the wrong call. He appears to apologize for everything, but his actual fault.

 — @JeromeAdamsMD

In his tweets he claims that what he and Dr. Fauci said was based on the “science and conditions at the time”. In a now-deleted tweet from Feb 29, 2020 the Surgeon General clearly and in plain English said that masks are NOT effective.

I remember watching Dr. Fauci on TV explaining why masks aren’t effective for the general public. He explained how they are notoriously difficult to keep on properly and that the untrained public’s constant adjustment of the mask would lead to an increase risk of infection. Can you believe that? I will never forget this because I’ve had a lot of long arguments about this where I defended Fauci’s position and now feel stupid for it. Examples of how masks were effective in Asia during the SARS outbreaks did not dissuade me.

The science did not change, despite the lies Dr Jerome Adams continues to spew. Something far more sinister has happened. People of science broke the public’s trust. The unwritten contract we had was simple: you give us the unfiltered facts as you know them.

Allow me to demonstrate. Imagine visiting your physician for a medical checkup, and she tells you that you have lung cancer knowing you’re a smoker. You don’t have lung cancer, but she lied to you so you can be incentivized to quit smoking. If you condone that type of behavior from your healthcare provider, then you will find Dr Fauci and company’s action acceptable. If not, then you would find it absolutely reprehensible.

Scientists are not in the business of lying to the public for the greater good or for any reason for that matter. This has always been the domain of politicians. So is it any wonder that skepticism in our institutions continues to dominate?

Instead of addressing the erosion of trust in the CDC and other instrumental institutes, politicians are quick to blame social media platforms for disseminating misinformation. In a stunning sound-bite, President Biden declared that “they’re killing people”.

 — @thehill

Facebook was quick to respond with data showing that 85% of Facebook users in the US have been vaccinated or plan to. Of course that is not going to stop politicians from using FB as a punching bag. But there is more danger than FB’s feelings.

New language is emerging to label COVID-19 vaccine hesitancy as inciteful. The vaccine that the FDA has only issued Emergency Use Authorization because they still have questions. A legitimate cautious approach that you would expect from a science-based organization.

 — @davidfrum

Most disturbing is the censorship coordination between the White House and social media platforms, which allow the government to effectively skirt the first amendment by outsourcing it to private companies.

“..current constitutional doctrine doesn’t clearly lay out how much government coercion of a private actor’s speech decisions it would take to constitute a First Amendment violation.” — Noah Feldman, opined.

Expect more of social media platforms cracking down on content that they deem inappropriate. It is definitely a development that we will be watching very closely.

Twitter was founded in 2006 and since then, it has grown up to over 300 million monthly active users employing 4900 people. But this isn’t what makes Twitter special. Twitter’s conversational style is what makes it special. Unlike all other social networks, success on this platform depends on your ability to hold a conversation. This also makes it the best platform for a quick pulse check on sentiments on any given subject.

Social listening is the active tracking of online conversations through keyword and phrases, giving you a 360 view in real-time.

Why is Twitter Monitoring Important?

Social listening on Twitter is the most cost effective way to track and analyze sentiments across a wide array of subjects and audiences. There is simply nothing that comes even close to the type of insights social listening can offer us.

According to research, customers reach out to brands online to:

1. Ask questions

2. Raise issues with your products and/or services

3. Praise your products and/or services

4. Tell all about online experience

5. Tell all about offline experience

In a somewhat dated but relevant survey from 2017, 25% of businesses were using social listening to improve their products, 24% to attract customers, and 21% to improve customer service.

When it comes to Twitter monitoring, we want to think beyond branded searchwords and consider trends, geographically segmented micro-influencers, and other ways to glean insights from the marketing treasure trove that is Twitter.

How to Do Social Listening on Twitter?

You can do a lot of basic social media monitoring using Twitter’s own tools, without needing to resort to specialized social listening software.

The same tool is also available on Tweetdeck, which offers more flexibility for Twitter power users.

Twitter’s advanced search allows you to search for keywords/phrases and also filter by:

• Date range

• Language

• Authors

• Location

• Engagement: number of reweets, likes, and replies

Tweetdeck’s social listening options are so good that you may find it perfect for your purposes. Of course, if you’re looking for something with a little more oomph! and reporting, then you can always opt for a specialized social listening tool like SOCIALHOSE.

There are many social listening platforms that complicate the process of query building. That is, the search phrase and filters we use to pull data from Twitter.

If you prefer clicking through countless boxes to label things AND/OR and drag and drop every phrase into a bucket or something, then this is not the right tool for you. If you want to just type out your query, without complication then you’re in the right place.

We begin by using the + operator. We use + to say “must include” and — to say “must exclude”. In the above example, the + operator is redundant but it is for you to understand it.

We use parenthesis to group things together. Every space is interpreted as an OR operator. The AND operator must be explicitly used. So, the above reads as “must include journorequest OR prrequest OR lazyweb”. Great.

At first, it may be difficult to determine what we should be listening for, because we are spoiled for choice. The sheer volume of online conversations happening every second in real-time.

In order to put things in perspective, approximately 9,500 tweets are sent every second. This is an incredible amount of information waiting to be looked at and analyzed.

Develop an Actionable Twitter social listening Strategy

So you have your feeds working for you, collecting valuable social data, it’s time to take action and utilize all the insights that we have learned from our active listening.

Product improvement

Rhianna’s Savage x Fenty recently released leggings with a butt cleavage. You read that right. Sometimes, a product is so outrageously ridiculous that it elicits strong reactions from consumers.. and sometimes, nothing happens. In this case, people were not shy about letting their opinions be known.

And divided indeed! If we were to take a quick look at sentiments without digging too deep into the search, we will see an unusually high volume of negative tweets. That should either inform us to change plans or double down.

We don’t know what Savage x Fenty will do with the way the butt cleavage leggings have been received, but it is an opportunity to continue to gauge sentiments through time.

Industry monitoring

You probably have figured out by now that social listening is not a “set it and forget it” type of affair. You must actively be listening and adapting, because conversations are happening at breakneck speeds. 9500 tweets per second, remember?

When monitoring industry trends, you can start by tracking some of the key players’ twitter accounts at first. As you continue to monitor their activities, new topics will emerge.

This is where the Word Cloud (themes) become very useful and informative.

Inform content strategy & campaigns

A content engine is the people, processes and tools that produce the fuel that feeds our content creation. A content engine is what we use to draw inspiration and insights. Who are the 5 best accounts to follow on Twitter who tweet about our topic/area of interest? Experts, contrarians and other influencers are all candidates for your content engine.

Identify new partnerships

There is no guarantee that you will find new partnerships on Twitter, just like there aren’t any guarantees to find love at your local bar. One thing is for certain, making your business and brand available and approachable will increase the chances of that happening.

You may find a new distributor. An influencer who will be your brand advocate. Like most things in life, you get what you put in.

Find New Leads Through Social Listening

Finding and qualifying leads happens on Twitter all the time, because of its top of the funnel nature. Similar to SEO, we search for high intent phrases to find prospects and leads.

Using social listening to find leads on Twitter is a very cost effective way to find prospects in real-time.

How Much Does Social Listening Cost for Twitter?

Social listening can be cost effective or expensive, depending on how you approach it and the tools you choose to use. At SOCIALHOSE, you can start social listening on Twitter starting at $2 per feed. Adding analytics will add $15 to your feed. It all depends on what you’re trying to achieve.

Originally published at https://www.socialhose.io.

In an interview with Marketing Brew, Hill House and Communité both came out swinging at metrics measuring influencer marketing campaigns. Surprise: creatives don’t want to be held accountable for their work.

Gems like, “CPM is wack” from Danielle McGrory, founder of Communité or amazing oversimplifications by Hill House Home’s CEO Neil Diamond such as, “followers don’t matter.”

It’s not new to hear creatives look down on measurement and metrics as irrelevant. They see their work as art and therefor impossible to quantify. Then of course there is this curious selection criteria:

One of Diamond’s favorite influencers of the 13 selected for [..], not only because she is Hill House’s first trans influencer, but also because…

Wow. I understand the desire to pander to the trans community because of their relatively outsized voices, but can we go back to choosing creators for their creativity alone? I sincerely don’t understand what someone’s gender identity has to do with their work. What I do know is that when a marketing agency says they’re looking for “marketing appeal”, they are really just saying “trending subculture.”

I don’t know what Neil is talking about, but no one looks at “follower count” as the deciding metric to choose an influencer. It’s particularly disingenuous coming from someone in the industry, because he surely knows better.

When we look at influencers, we look at their reach including engagement levels. Micro-influencers are particularly interesting because of the high engagement levels and trust levels with their followers.

We also know that it is more effective to have 10x microinfluencers with the same level of follower count than 1 influencer with 10x the follower count. This is, simply because of engagement.

So, Neil saying follower counts don’t matter is of course true, but also bullshit because no one is making that argument anyway.

Those guys keep talking about content creators and calling them influencers because it’s convenient. Hill House are not hiring influencers, they are hiring content creators to get really cheap freelance work with some minimal distribution.

This is admittedly a brilliant strategy that was put in focus due to the pandemic, but will likely continue to grow. Why? Cause people crave authenticity and you have a much better chance to uncovering authentic amazing talent with a wider net.

Not all content creators are influencers and not all influencers are content creators. It’s really not that complicated a concept. You can be an influencer and not necessarily create any meaningful content.

To put it in an easier way to digest, content creators are focused on their content whereas influencers are focused on engagement. Every now and then you come across someone who is both, and those are stars in their own right.

What’s Wrong with Metrics?

One word: vanity. Clients can sometimes insist on certain metrics that don’t make sense outside of vanity. This can be frustrating to agencies who find it would penalize them unfairly. It doesn’t always have to be this way though. We could, *gasp* actually measure things that affect the bottom line. I mean, isn’t that why we’re doing all this?

I would be very wary of any agency that completely rejects accountability by claiming they are “wack”. Any successes such an agency may have would be nothing more than a fluke. The “gut” instincts of one executive that is not possible to scale nor replicate. Hill House Home and their likes are causing more harm to the industry than they realize.

By rejecting accountability without offering an alternative, they are a breed of agencies that I find troubling.

If you’ve ever been tempted to purchase mailing lists for your business, I want to tell you to take heed from my experience. I learn from doing and if you are not going to take my word for it, do it on a limited scale to find out for yourself.

Because that’s exactly what I did.

Spam and Porn, Same Difference

I’ve never come across someone who openly admits to spamming. I’ve also seen way too many spamming practices by big and small companies alike. Each have their own way of doing it. Some are brazen, others get technical about it where the lines get blurred. Much like porn, everyone does it but we’re all appalled.

Ok fine, it’s an exaggerated analogy, but the point is the same. It’s far more common than people would admit to. It’s kind of “dirty”. But I have to get started and I have to look at all the possible options. Some things, I recognize, are temporary measures to get the ball rolling.

Purchased lists present themselves as the perfect way to get started while you build a real list. So, I found a list of 2500 emails of users of competitors for $600. The list appears to be legitimate.

Sanitation: Safety First

If you plan to work within the main existing ecosystem of internet services, then you will have to maintain a minimum level of indiscretions. For example, mail service providers will put a pause on your account if a lot of emails fail to be delivered. It will raise questions about the origins of that list.

An easy and quick way to weed out the bad emails, older emails, deleted email accounts and the likes is to use a an email verification service, like kickbox. You upload your list and they give you back your list in groups, based on risk.

Generally speaking, “Risky” is an acceptable level to use, but anything above that is untouchable.

Now that you have a clean list, it’s time to figure out how to send out emails to them. Don’t use your primary marketing email provider. When dealing with the unknown, you don’t want to ruin your relationship with your current provider.

It’s not just your mail provider. You don’t want your domain to be blacklisted because of being flagged by recipients. Find a similar-sounding domain and use it. It doesn’t matter what. Think of it as a domain you’d use if you had a branded URL shortener.

Running the Campaign

Read this from the bottom up. You will notice that the number of recipients keeps dropping, this is a result of bounced emails and unsubscriptions. Also, notice how the open rate also continues to drop, despite removing all the bounced emails and the drop in unsubscribes.

Ignore the clicked stats as they don’t reflect page loads and are mixed with server side queries. What is notable is that generally speaking, it’s a pretty good list for a purchased list. Clearly, recipients find it relevant.

But then what? What does it translate to? 2. It translated to 2 registered accounts. So, let’s do the math real quick. It cost $300 per user, all while acting like a total douche spamming people.

Thins You Can Do With Your Useless Purchased List

So now that we have demonstrated what a clean list of your target audience looks like; and what a spectacular failure it is, here are some ideas of what to do with it:

• One last ditch to opt-in: Email the list asking them to opt-in if they wanted to continue to receive emails. If they don’t, it’s over.

• Test bed for email subjects/copy/etc.: Keep the list around and periodically use it to test open rate, click rates and other metrics.

• Purge it: Just delete the list.

Today, I am proud to be fully GDPR-compliant, because it makes sense. I think that there are people who want to hear from you, and they will let you know. But, if you want to let people know about you, spamming them is not going to get you the results you’ve hoped for.

Much like diet pills and weight loss, the simple truth is that there are no shortcuts. Your list has to grow from people who voluntarily want to give you their contacts. Your time is better spent figuring out how to do that, than trying to get a purchased list to produce any meaningful returns.

Say it with me: purchased lists suck ass. Don’t do it.

A little background, I’m a techie by training and so I have a pretty reasonable understanding of the technical side of things. In short, Search Engine Optimization is the process by which you optimize a web page for a search engine. Pretty simple stuff. You format it properly and make sure the machine that’s about to crawl your site can read it and figure out what’s what. So let the geeks handle it.

Bring the geeks!

The geeks come in and clickity clack.. you got yourself a website with schemas that google likes, meta descriptions for everything, and headings are all labeled. You’re golden. Except, the search engines (and let’s be honest, we only care about google) don’t notice. It crawls and indexes your site, but so what?

They tell you, oh.. you gotta blog. If you blog, google will notice that you’ve been a good boy and rank you higher. Yeah, from #423948234 to #423948230. You blog and no one comes. No one cares.

What’s the point of fancy formatting and hiring geeks if nothing happens? And that’s an actually very good reason to be frustrated. The issue here is that Google cares about how popular you are and so the more popular sites linking back to you, the higher it ranks you. Backlinks are the real stuff of SEO and everything else is just housecleaning.

It’s also an area where many make mistakes, because up to this point, I haven’t said anything that most CEO’s don’t already know one way or another. The issue is, when a very high ranking site links back to you with a branded link (your company’s name links to your website), it doesn’t really do much for you. It improves your domain authority, but it doesn’t help getting you traffic from people who don’t already know they’re looking for you.

Just because you’re blogging about eye tracking technology doesn’t mean that google will start directing traffic to you. Only when people link to your pages using phrases with “eye tracking” (or a similarly relevant phrase) in it will you start seeing that kind of traffic. And for that to happen, people have to already be talking about you, a lot. Organically.

Or not.

Which hat fits me best?

Aaah.. so what’s going on here? Hiring an ‘SEO guy’ is not going to solve this problem, neither is yelling at your IT team. There are 3 ways you can approach this:

1) Black hat: You will find those on freelancer marketplaces, where one advertises linking to you from DA50+ sites or something like that. DA here stands for Domain Authority, and the number following is the level of authority a domain has. Higher is better. Problem with black hats is that they get flagged as spammy, which hurts your own domain’s authority. It may have some temporary good boosts, but ultimately, the algorithm figures it out and shuts you down. What you often find are domains with pages hidden deep under that no one clicks on, with links to you and every other sucker paying for the service. Just don’t do it.

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2) White hat: This is where people in the legal profession likes to live. Technically legal, but ethically debatable practices are fun to debate in college but they are real life. Here, you pay someone to go out and have other legitimate sites create very organic looking backlinks. For example, a blog post about eye tracking technology from a major privacy blog casually linking back to one of your pages as they talk about “eye tracking service”. This is expensive, but highly effective.

3) Do the work: There is no substitute to doing the work and engaging with your customers, creating a community that will compound your efforts. But getting there takes a lot of work and if you’re in a hurry, there are “hats” to approach.

Now that you have backlinks and you start seeing traffic, it’s very bouncy. That is, a visitor clicks on a backlink, sees your page and decides this is not what they’re looking for and leaves. Here’s the thing, you can’t bring people over and then not know what to say to them. If your site has nothing to engage with, visitors will bounce.

Creating content that answers visitors questions is a process of trial and error. It also takes us full circle to what it means to have an SEO strategy. It has so little to do with the technical structure of website, doesn it? It’s a lot of work that takes 6 months to even start seeing movement, but it is a compounding effort.

Everyone loves compounding, but you gotta get started.