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60 Travel Icons To Awaken Your Wanderlust (Freebie) You post image after image on Instagram, but can’t seem to get more than 25 or 30 Likes on each. Your comments are as inactive as a car broken down on the side of the road. You’ve tried every “hack” in the book, but nothing seems to work. Don’t give up hope just yet. A lot of marketers look for the “secret” to get floods of engagement. Well, the secret has less to do with a specific Instagram filter or tactic, and more about understanding how we see and process visual information. Figuring out what attracts a person’s eye to…

The post Science Has Spoken: Here’s Why Your Instagram Posts Don’t Get Engagement appeared first on The Daily Egg. A recent update to Google AdWords is changing the way performance marketers understand their landing pages’ Quality Scores. Image via Shutterstock.

While Quality Score is a critical factor in your ad performance, it’s always been a bit of a mystery wrapped in an enigma. Marketers have never been able to natively view changes to Quality Score components in AdWords directly. That is — even though expected click through rate, ad relevance and landing page experience scores are the elements contributing to your Quality Score, you haven’t been able to see these individual scores at scale (or for given timeframes) within your AdWords account, or export them into Excel.

Which is why, up until now, some especially savvy marketers have had to improvise workarounds, using third-party scripts to take daily snapshots of Quality Score to have some semblance of historical record — and a better-informed idea as to changes in performance.

Fortunately, an AdWords reporting improvement has brought new visibility into Quality Score components that could help you diagnose some real wins with your ads and corresponding landing pages.

What’s different now?

As you may have already noticed, there are now seven new columns added to your menu of Quality Score metrics including three optional status columns:

And four revealing historical keyword quality: Image courtesy of Google’s Inside AdWords blog

This is not new data per se (it’s been around in a different, less accessible form), but as of this month you can now see everything in one spot and understand when certain changes to Quality Score have occurred.

So how can you take advantage?

There are two main ways you can use this AdWords improvement to your advantage as a performance marketer:

1. Now you can see whether your landing page changes are positively influencing Quality Score

Now, after you make changes to a landing page — you can use AdWords’ newest reporting improvement to see if you have affected the landing page experience portion of your Quality Score over time.

This gives you a chance to prove certain things are true about the performance of your landing pages, whereas before you may have had to use gut instinct about whether a given change to a landing page was affecting overall Quality Score (or whether it was a change to the ad, for example).

As Blaize Bolton, Team Strategist at Performance Marketing Agency Thrive Digital told me:

As agency marketers, we don’t like to assume things based on the nature of our jobs. We can now pinpoint changes to Quality Score to a certain day, which is actual proof of improvement. To show this to a client is a big deal.

Overall, if your CPC drops, now you can better understand whether it may be because of changes made to a landing page.

2. You can identify which keywords can benefit most from an updated landing page

Prior to this AdWords update, ad relevancy, expected click through rate and landing page relevancy data existed, but you had to mouse over each keyword to get this data to pop up on a keyword-by-keyword basis. Because you couldn’t analyze the data at scale, you couldn’t prioritize your biggest opportunities for improvement. Image courtesy of Brad Geddes and Search Engine Land

However, now that you can export this data historically (for dates later than January 22, 2016), you can do a deep dive into your campaigns and identify where a better, more relevant landing page could really help.

You can now pull every keyword in your AdWords account — broken out by campaign — and identify any underperforming landing pages. Now, an Excel deep dive into your AdWords campaigns can help you reveal landing page weaknesses.

Specifically, here’s what Thrive Digital’s Managing Director Ross McGowan recommends:

You can break down which of your landing pages are above average, or those that require tweaking. For example, you might index your campaigns by the status AdWords provides, assigning anything “Above Average” as 3, “Average” as 2 and “Below Average” as 1. You can then find a weighted average for each campaign or ad group and make a call on what to focus on from there.

What should you do when you notice a low landing page experience score?

As Google states, landing page experience score is an indication of how useful the search engine believes your landing page is to those who click on your ad. They recommend to, “make sure your landing page is clear and useful… and that it is related to your keyword and what customers are searching for.”

In short, it’s very important that your landing pages are highly relevant to your ad. Sending traffic to generic pages on your website may not cut it. Moreover, once you are noticing low landing page engagement scores, it’s time to try optimizing these pages with some quick wins.

In the words of Thrive’s Ross McGowan:

Figure out what a user wants, and do everything you can to tailor the on-page experience to them. Whether that be [using] Dynamic Text Replacement, A/B testing elements to get the best user experience, or spending less time on technical issues and more on writing great content.

Finally, for more on AdWords’ latest improvements, AdAlysis founder Brad Geddes has written a great article on Search Engine Land. His company had enough data on hand to attempt a reverse-engineer of the formula for Quality Score to get a sense of how changes to one of the QS components would impact overall score. His recommendation is much the same as Ross’, in that, if a landing page’s score is particularly low, your best bet is to focus on increasing user’s interaction with the page. 
Google AdWords Launches Greater Visibility Into Quality Score Components (And What This Means For You)

Have you ever dreamt of exploring the deep sea and getting up close to its fascinating, weird creatures? Or maybe you’ve dreamt of boarding a spacecraft to experience the beauty of our planet from above? The desire to leave the beaten tracks and explore unfamiliar terrain is human nature.
(Full preview) To celebrate mankind’s urge to explore, the creative folks at Vexels created a set of 30 adventurous icons that take you on a journey from the ground of the sea right up to outer space.


30 Adventurous Space To Earth Icons [Freebie] With the holidays almost here and the new year already in sight, December is a time to slow down, an occasion to reflect and plan ahead. To help us escape the everyday hectic for a bit and sweeten our days with a delightful little surprise each day up to Christmas, the web community has assembled some fantastic advent calendars this year. They cater for a daily dose of web design and development goodness with stellar articles, inspiring experiments, and even puzzles to solve.


Tech Advent Calendars For Web Designers And Developers In 2016

Some like it loud, others need some steady beats to stay focused, others calm tunes. A while ago we asked on Twitter and Facebook what music the web community is listening to when coding and designing.
The answers were as diverse as the community itself and certainly too good to live an existence only in a Twitter discussion. That’s why we’ve compiled those hand-crafted spotify playlists, favorite artists, and loved soundtracks in this article to see which tunes fuel the web.

View the original here:

Spotify Playlists To Fuel Your Coding And Design Sessions

Today we’ll be looking at eye candy that will undoubtedly help you start the new week with your creativity freshly nurtured. Grab your cup of coffee or tea, and let these designs shine on you with their smart details, fantastic textures, and well-chosen color palettes.
I’ve sifted through the web to dig up little nuggets of inspiration to indulge in — just for you. This time I’ve collected a potpourri of styles ranging from delicate and subtle to bold and playful.


Breaking Out Of The Box: Design Inspiration (May 2016)

Desperate times call for desperate measures. In attempts to fight back against the growing adoption of ad-blockers, many publishers and ad-dependent websites adopt all kinds of techniques from introducing “light” paywalls to limiting access to the site to fully blocking ad-blocker users from accessing the content altogether.
It seems a bit ironic that a website would send away potential customers that are taking measures to actually access the site faster, and read the content published on the site without annoying distractions.


A Never-Ending Story On Ad-Blockers

What’s happening in the industry? What important techniques have emerged recently? What about new case studies, insights, techniques and tools? Our dear friend Anselm Hannemann is keeping track of everything in the web development reading list, so you don’t have to. The result is a carefully collected list of articles that popped up over the last week and which might interest you. — Ed.

Hey, lovely to have you back here. It’s getting autumn here in Germany which means fog is back again and the trees are getting their lovely golden or red colors again. Time to spend the weekend out in the nature and take a deep breath, far away from your work. Just a few hours can help to get the refreshment you needed for days or a week already. And after that, start catching up with what I serve you in today’s list.

The post Web Development List #104 appeared first on Smashing Magazine.

See the article here –

Web Development List #104 Trust is the building block of every relationship — even if it’s between business and customer.

Social media has gone from being the bold new frontier of advertising to being an assumed element of almost any marketing campaign. But just because social media campaigns are commonplace doesn’t mean that you can just tweet your new promo code and watch the conversions roll in.

But the nature of social advertising — interrupting or distracting from someone’s personal news feed — combined with the fact that everyone is doingc it means that if you want to get those clicks, you’ll really need to earn them.

And if there’s anyone that can help, it’s Michael Patterson: he leads co-marketing efforts at Sprout Social, a great social media management platform. (I know because I’ve used it!)

In our latest unwebinar, 5 Steps of a High Converting Social Media Campaign, he explained that before you can expect big conversions coming from social campaigns, you need to first increase your social reach. Or, as Michael put it:

Get into people’s faces and get them aware of your product.

But how can you do it? Check out the full unwebinar or read on for the distilled wisdom.

Experiment with real-time marketing

If you’ve ever read an article about marketing on Twitter, you’ve probably seen the infamous “Dunk in the Dark” tweet from Oreo during the infamous Super Bowl power outage: Make sure you watch the full webinar for all of Michael’s social media insights!

Riding the wave of a popular current event by offering a unique or entertaining perspective is one way to make your social messaging more relatable — and consequently, more shareable. Just make sure you’re actually adding to the conversation rather than just being tasteless and opportunistic, like, uh, this: Possibly the worst #brand tweet of all time. (Source: Huffington Post)

Harness the power of hashtags — responsibly

As Michael noted in his webinar, hashtags have gotten a bit of a bad rap. But that’s mostly been earned due to people not knowing how to use them.

Let’s look back at that Oreo tweet. Notice how they didn’t tag it #superbowl? Worldwide-trending hashtags like that get multiple tweets per second, so the hope of being seen within it is pretty much non-existent. Not only would adding that hashtag have not increased Oreo’s social reach, but it would have dumbed the joke down, and seemed more like pandering than a flash of inspiration.

According to Michael, there are two key ways to use hashtags effectively:

It’s also important to understand how to use hashtags on different media platforms. Instagram users tend to pile them on, since there’s no limit and communities are organized around them. On the other hand, it’s rare to see a tweet with more than one hashtag, and even rarer to see a Facebook post with a hashtag at all!

Mention popular people or companies

Indiscriminately spamming influencers and big brands is one way to get yourself blocked. But if you do it smartly and appropriately, it can lead to a big increase in your social reach. Michael experienced this himself when he mentioned popular social marketing expert Peg Fitzpatrick on Twitter. She caught the mention and retweeted his tweet, bringing its reach to over 105,000 users. A far cry from his typical average of 268, and all it took was a simple @mention.

Look for ways to engage with influencers that are relevant to their field or craft, and only mention influencers in areas where your business participates.

Now you’ve got the reach. But how do you get the clicks?

Clickable content that fulfills its promise

Increasing social reach may grow the top of your funnel, but that increase in awareness needs to translate into an increase in business in order to justify itself.

When it comes time to turn those followers into conversions via targeted social media advertisements, you need to be producing clickable content that promises value and fulfills that promise.

Unbounce’s director of customer success, Ryan Engley, jumped into the webinar to illustrate the importance of message match in making the user feel like the ad’s promise is being fulfilled.
If the page looks or says something different, it’s liable to confuse the user or make them feel like they’ve fallen for a bait-and-switch.

The solution, according to Ryan:

Think beyond your posts — think about the full marketing experience. When you create any kind of a post, you’re setting expectations for your visitors.

The best way to meet those expectations and reassure your prospects they’re in the right place? A landing page unique to each social marketing campaign, with messaging and imagery tailored specifically to it.

Here’s a great example that Ryan shared from KISSmetrics: As you can see, everything matches. The ad says Content, Conversions, and Lead Generation and so does the landing page itself. Even though the landing page itself is sparsely designed, placing the bio images in both the ad and landing page lend it a sense of visual continuity.

There’s no doubt to the user that the page they’re landing on fulfills the promise of the original ad.

It’s all about trust

As I’d mentioned early, the nature of social advertising is inherently intrusive, taking up space typically reserved for one’s friends, favourite celebrities, and topics of interest. People are naturally pretty wary about advertising that’s delivered this way.

That’s why it’s so important to build trust in every stage of a social media advertising campaign.

This piece just scratches the surface of all the amazing social media know-how Michael and Ryan dished out in the full Unwebinar, so make some time to tune in before launching your next social media campaign! Continued –

How to Win More Conversions by Building Trust on Social Media


