Internet Marketing – Cyfe

Keyword tracking: What it is and how to do it

Burkhard Berger — Tue, 12 Oct 2021 13:11:55 +0000

If you’ve been planning to rank on search engines, then you already know that keywords are as important as SEO metrics. Every website you see that ranks on the first page of search engines have strategically used keywords to achieve their position.

Given the importance of this aspect in SEO, it just gives you more reason as to why you need to know more about keyword tracking. This process allows you to have insights into what you’ve been doing correctly on your SEO endeavors and what needs improvement.

In this article, you’ll get to learn more about keyword tracking and why it’s important for your business. You’ll also get to know how it’s done effectively so you can apply it to your own web pages as well.

What is a data dashboard?

When ranking on search engines like Google, you want to rank for keywords that relate to your business.

If you’re an SEO agency, you want to rank for keywords like “SEO agency”, “digital marketing group”, “digital marketers”, and “SEO marketing”. Basically, you want to rank for those keywords since those are the things that your company does.

So how do you know if your website is ranking for those keywords? You simply do keyword tracking.

Keyword tracking is the process of monitoring the position of your website or web pages for specific keywords. Doing this process allows you to see if your website is ranking for keywords that you’re targeting in your content.

The results you see here will give you an overview of your website’s SEO performance. You’ll see what keywords you are doing well on and what keywords you need to improve your visibility.

What is keyword tracking?

When ranking on search engines like Google, you want to rank for keywords that relate to your business.

So how do you know if your website is ranking for those keywords? You simply do keyword tracking.

The results you see here will give you an overview of your website’s SEO performance. You’ll see what keywords you are doing well on and what keywords you need to improve your visibility.

How to do keyword tracking?

1. Traditional keyword tracking

This method is considered a classic when it comes to keyword tracking. A website owner can manually check for a keyword and see if their web page ranks on search engines.

The challenge with this is that the person needs to account for various things when doing research on search engines. Most of these search engines factor in different elements within a search result – especially with Google.

Sometimes, Google tends to give out different results to each user because of its personalization feature. Google considers the user’s device, locality, language, and browsing history.

2. Local rank tracking

Businesses should check if the keywords they’re ranking for have local search intent. If it does, then ranking on the first page would be a lot harder.

Keywords with local intent have different rankings based on area code, city, to even the neighborhood.

So how do you know if your keywords have local intent? Try searching it on Google. If it triggers a Local Search Pack, then Google thinks that the keyword has local intent.

Local Search Pack is Google’s search results that display the local businesses related to your query.

So if your business only operates online and you are targeting keywords with local intent, it’s better to look for another set of keywords.

If you persist in using the same keywords, it will always be difficult for you to rank. Since Google’s algorithm sees that your targeted keyword has local intent, it is programmed to display companies that have their own address and physical store.

But if you’re a local business and you intend to rank on these keywords, here are a few tips you can do:

Set up your Google My Business Page – Once you’ve claimed your business page, make sure it includes a long and unique description and the category of your business. You can also upload photos, add a phone number, a business address, operating hours, and reviews from customers.

Be consistent with your NAP – NAP stands for name, address, and phone number. If possible, make sure it is easily seen on your website. If you’ve noticed, websites that rank on local searches display those details.

Utilize those reviews – According to Google, more reviews and positive ratings can improve your business’s local rankings.

You can place all of this information on the bottom part of your website. Checkout how Mixam’s website has all of these elements present:

3. Using keyword tracking tools

The best and most efficient way to do keyword tracking would be to use tools that have this feature. This makes the overall process a lot easier and brings more in-depth analytics and results.

These tools make analytics engaging with their charts and line graphs. It makes any data analysis process easier. Plus, if you’re an agency, you can collate all important metrics and create an engaging presentation for your clients.

Since we can’t discuss all of the tools available for public use, let’s talk about the top 3 most recommended ones.

a. Ahrefs

Ahrefs is a well-known tool for backlinks and SEO analysis. The website is always part of every recommendation post from different websites.

It’s basically an all-in-one place where you can do keyword research, site analysis, and other SEO activities. This makes it a great tool to be partnered with Saas marketing campaigns, B2B marketing, social media marketing, and many more.

With the number of things that you can do on this platform, it makes sense why Ahrefs is the go-to website for everything SEO-related.

b. SEMrush

If you’ve searched for SEO tools or even just content-related tools, you’ve definitely run into SEMrush already.

SEMrush is one of those household names when it comes to social media, SEO, PPC, and content solutions. It’s just so widely used that the majority of its reviews come from agencies.

With its easy-to-use interface and the number of features within its platform, SEMrush is a great tool for keyword tracking and SEO campaigns.

c. Google Search Console

People use Google Search Console because of its high accuracy. Some would choose this over other tools because the search engine always accounts for differences in search caused by personalized search results.

d. Cyfe’s Web Analytics dashboard

Using Cyfe’s web analytics dashboard, you get to track the performance of your website. It can be an all-in-one place to check the important metrics and necessary data to improve the current state of your site.

In terms of keyword tracking, the dashboard provides a clear picture of keywords that drive new visitors from Google. It also monitors all of your traffic channels and top organic keywords.

All of the features that the web analytics dashboard presents can help any website owner in creating content strategies and other improvement opportunities.

Benefits of keyword tracking

Keyword tracking shows whether your SEO strategies and efforts are paying off. The process provides you important insights on how your website is ranking in search engines relative to specific keywords.

It gives you an overview of your website’s search engine presence. If you don’t see any improvements in your website’s ranking, it can mean that your SEO strategy needs to change.

By giving attention to keyword tracking, you’ll have an idea of how your web pages are performing. It also gives you insights on what keywords you need to work on more.

Some would even hold online conferences or summits just to discuss these things. But the fact that you know about keyword tracking now puts you at a serious advantage.

The advantage of this is you get to see issues at an earlier time. You get to work on your mistakes and improve your process before things get worse.

This puts you ahead of companies that mindlessly produce content and hoping to rank on search engines.

To further dive into the topic, here are other important benefits that keyword tracking solves for you:

1. Boosts your revenue

If you’ve been tracking the analytics of your website, then you know which pages have the most visits and clicks. But unfortunately, visits and clicks can only do so much for a business. To keep the overall operations running, it needs to make money.

To take keyword tracking a step further, you can utilize those high-ranking web pages to sell your products or services. You can also use them to naturally introduce your referral program or insert your affiliate links.

When more people get to see your products, services, and links, the higher the chance that those things will convert.

2. You can double down on what works for your website

A problem with some of the websites in competitive industries is that they think there are only a few sets of ways on how they can rank on Google. They think that the information shared online is the only path to rank high on search engines.

What they don’t realize is their business can have its own sets of ways on how it can rank – they just need to observe what’s working for them. And a way to do so would be keyword tracking.

Since keyword tracking is a process to see where you rank on certain keywords, you get to see your web pages that have high visibility. These pages are proof that your SEO efforts were correct.

Knowing what works for your audience, means you can now double down on the strategies you used on those top pages. You can duplicate those results or better yet have more improved metrics than your current top web pages.

3. Find solutions to traffic dips

Unless you’re making a killing on your SEO game, traffic drops are a common thing for websites. You just can’t expect to be at the top for a long time especially if you’re ranking for highly competitive keywords.

A few reasons for this can be a need for re-optimization of those pages or a change in the search engine algorithm that you weren’t aware of. Sometimes it can also be a website or a domain issue. That’s why companies go to the lengths to hire a web developer to check and fix this certain issues.

By doing keyword tracking, you get to address these problems earlier. You get to find solutions for these issues before they get worse.

4. It helps you monitor your competitors

Keyword tracking also lets you know which keywords are your competitors ranking for and what they’re missing out on.

This works well in new industries. Some keywords won’t be too crowded like ones in the NFT-DeFi space and the emergence of the streaming industry. Being a first-mover gives you an opportunity to effectively create an SEO keyword strategy.

It gives you an option to go for keywords that have less competition. There are many ways to tackle this aspect, just make sure that the process you’re going for benefits your efforts.

If you see that your competitors are gaining traction with some keywords, you can also look into why that’s the case. Could it be that they’re publishing more content? Are they taking a different route in their content production? Do they have a new marketing campaign?

The process of looking at your competitors gives you a set of new ideas on how you can improve your own content and strategies.

5. Find new opportunities for your site

By analyzing what works for you and your competitors, you get to find new opportunities to jump on. These keywords that you’re targeting will surely branch out to other keywords as well.

For example, if you’re primarily targeting “sales tools”, you can dive deeper into the term and unlock a whole set of possible keywords. The term will give you keywords like predictive dialers, CRM systems, paid and free project management softwares, and automated tools.

This also works outside the realm of all things digital marketing. Keywords along the lines of personal development, skincare, health and wellness, these too can introduce you to related terms that you can target.

Basically, any keyword that you’re targeting right now can lead you to find new opportunities.

By using keyword tracking and looking at keywords that work for your website, you’ll also get insights on a whole new list of keywords that you can target.

3 tips to improve keyword rankings in Google

Now that you know what keyword tracking is, how it’s done, and the different benefits of doing it, it’s time we talk about how you can greatly improve your keyword rankings.

Since the essence of keyword tracking is to look at where your website stands when it comes to certain keywords, let’s discuss how you can improve your website and web pages in search engines.

I. Optimize your content

Optimization is vital to business growth. Keyword tracking and making keyword-focused content leads to the optimization of your website which is considered a growth hacking strategy by many.

If you’ve been slacking and wondering why you haven’t been hitting your content marketing KPIs, you can review these elements of your content:

Title Tags – Your title tag should tell you what your content is. Make sure it’s unique and up to 60 characters only. If possible, include the keyword you’re targeting in the title.

Meta Descriptions – Most websites tend to leave this section blank. Meta descriptions are phrases pertaining to what your content is about. It’s like a sneak peek of the whole content. When writing this, make sure it’s concise and you’re able to hook your readers.

Header Tags – Headers are used to make the overall article structure be more organized. Don’t just increase the font, use your H1’s or H2’s properly. Search engines also consider these header tags when it comes to ranking a website.

URL Structure – The URL for your content should contain the keyword you’re targeting. Sometimes, businesses make their targeted keyword their domain name which also works.

An example of this would be www.restaurant-website-builder.com. When you search for the keyword “restaurant website builder” in search engines, it naturally comes at the very first page.

Images – Pictures make the overall article lively. If readers see a wall of texts, it automatically turns them off.

Keywords – If you want to rank for a certain keyword, make sure you use it naturally in your content. The number of times a keyword should be present will depend.

Overall Content – Your overall content should bring value to readers. If it benefits readers wherein they get lessons and ideas after reading, naturally they’ll share it with others.

If a lot of people get to read your content and share it to multiple platforms, this tells Google that your content is valuable and is worth ranking.

An example of optimized content would be a blog by Aura as shown below. Aura’s web pages ranked on the first page of Google when you search for the keyword “amazon repricer”.

The first web page that ranked is a blog post of theirs talking about the keyword “amazon repricer”. Notice how they didn’t only use the keyword on the title, but it’s also present in the URL and meta description.

The second web page was Aura’s website. The brand has been producing content around that keyword that Google saw Aura as an authority website when it comes to that topic.

II. Avoid keyword stuffing at all costs

Keyword stuffing is when a website stuffs keywords in a web page even if it’s out of context. They do this with the hope of ranking high for that keyword in search engines.

Although this doesn’t work for Google since its algorithm can detect such acts, you still shouldn’t consider this for the sake of visibility.

Make sure when you’re using the keyword you’re targeting, place them where it makes sense. Use them in context and not for the sake of stuffing them in your article or home page.

In the example above, look at how many times the word “Mannequin” was used on MannequinMall’s homepage. The term was used 74 times on a single web page.

But was this considered keyword stuffing? No. Because if you check and read the whole page, every term was used naturally and was in context every time.

Even Google thinks that this isn’t keyword stuffing. In fact, due to their overall content and strategic use of the keywords, when you search in Google “mannequin online” or “mannequins for sale”, MannequinMall will always pop up on the first page.

III. Be specific, concise, and clear

When you’re creating content, it’s easy to be too focused on ranking on Google. You tend to only focus on what Google looks for in an article. This makes you forget one important aspect in this whole equation – your audience.

No matter who your audience is, people appreciate when the information they’re looking for is provided to them immediately. They appreciate when the content gives them the answer they need without delay.

An example of this would be VPNOverview’s “Watching Netflix with a VPN – A Step-by-Step Guide”.

This blog is a great example because the content goes straight into the details immediately. It only suggested one VPN provider and moved on directly to how the readers can navigate it.

The article was straight to the point and was concise on the information it wanted to relay. This is why this blog ranks high on the search for “Netflix VPN guide” – a keyword that they were targeting.

Conclusion

Business owners like keyword tracking because it gives them an idea of how well their websites perform for certain keywords. The process shows whether their SEO strategies are working or it needs further improvement.

Other than knowing how a website is performing, keyword tracking also allows you to see what the competition is doing. This gives business owners ideas if they ever rework their digital strategy.

Burkhard Berger

. His articles include some of the best growth hacking strategies and digital scaling tactics that he has learned from his own successes and failures. Burkhard Berger is the founder of Novum. You can follow him on his journey from 0 to 100,000 monthly visitors on novumhq.com. His articles include some of the best growth hacking strategies and digital scaling tactics that he has learned from his own successes and failures.

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YouTube SEO In 3 Steps To Expand Your Business’s Audience

Drew Gula — Thu, 17 Jun 2021 21:54:30 +0000

YouTube has become the de facto home of content creators and video watchers alike. The site has over 2.3 billion users around the world, and 79% of people who go online say they have a YouTube account.

Even if you aren’t actively uploading videos, you’re at least watching videos. And you’re probably doing it every day, whether you go to YouTube or find embedded video on the websites you visit.

All of that is true about your customers. You can’t always direct them to embedded videos on other sites, but if your videos rank in YouTube’s SEO algorithm, you’ll get your content in front of the people who are searching for the keywords you care about.

So here are three steps to help you grow your business’s audience with YouTube SEO.

YouTube as a search engine

YouTube is the second most popular social network and the second most used search engine with more than 3 billion searches every month. The site is a hub for entertainment, news and also — through YouTubeTV — live events and shows.

But before you decide that YouTube is a shortcut to beating all your quarterly goals overnight, here’s a quick splash of reality: 55% of marketers are already using YouTube to drive brand awareness, social discourse and web traffic.

In other words, all of that content and activity leads to competition.

You know how valuable YouTube traffic could be, and so do other brands in your industry. And since you want your content to rank higher than theirs, you’re going to need to leverage your SEO powers for this new platform. YouTube SEO is a proven way to get more views on your videos, and it’ll also give your company an advantage over competitors.

1. Adjust your keyword research

There’s not exactly a 1:1 correlation between Google SEO and YouTube SEO. It’s a close comparison sometimes, but the two systems are just different enough that you’ll still need new techniques to make sure your videos are visible in search results.

And like every new initiative, that process starts with keyword research.

You most likely have a strategy for choosing keywords to target. Let’s say your team’s current focus is whiteboard videos as a way to educate people on your product. Your team built educational videos for your social channels, new email templates, and a list of LSI keywords to target in upcoming blog posts.

Traditionally, that would be a recipe for success getting more organic traffic. But if you target “whiteboard videos” on YouTube, you’ll get…whiteboard videos.

You won’t see textbook definitions like you’d expect from Google. Instead, the focus is on “how to” content, videos intended to apply an idea rather than just explaining it. People use YouTube to be educated or entertained, and tutorial videos are consistently among the top-ranked videos on any subject.

For comparison, here are the top Google results for the same keyword:

YouTube’s search algorithms function differently than Google’s, which is why results vary so widely between the two platforms. YouTube often prioritizes things like content relevance and how long people watch the video, unlike Google’s focus on backlinks as a measuring stick for where posts should rank.

That means that a video from a new channel could outrank established brands and creators. (You’ll notice the results in that first screenshot didn’t have a lot of traffic.)

While this could be advantageous for your new focus on YouTube SEO, it does mean you’ll need to rethink your keyword targets as you move between these two search engines. And by making those adjustments, you’ll be able to target current and new customers on a platform where most internet-users spend time each day.

2. Rethink your SEO tools

Anyone who has worked on small teams and businesses knows the importance of finding new uses for old tools. Sometimes, budget constraints means you’ve got to get as much as you can out of a resource because you might not have the budget to invest in something new — that’s why web apps with a white label option have become so popular for digital marketers.

So rather than going out and signing up for 5 different YouTube SEO web apps, make the most of what you’re already using. Most SEO tools let you choose the search engine you want to target, and the best ones have a YouTube-focused option.

Here is what Ahrefs shows when you look up “whiteboard videos” on Google search:

Compare that to the activity on YouTube. You’ll see a lot less search volume (because “whiteboard videos” is a somewhat technical search) which indicates that while this is a solid term on Google, you’ll want to take a different approach for any YouTube SEO efforts.

As experts get a better understanding of YouTube’s always-changing SEO algorithm, you’ll discover additional resources and advice on how to rank for the keywords that matter to you.

But as a starting point, take advantage of the tools you already have — chances are that you’ll be able to start exploring terms for YouTube and building a new SEO strategy for that channel. And by doing that, you’ll save your budget for growing the business instead of spending it on new tools you might not need.

3. Find ways to boost engagement

Businesses love YouTube because it provides a perfect, concise feedback loop. And that gives you access to data so you can gain all those insights without needing to outsource the collection process.

For example, you can post a video about your newest product and ask viewers to comment which feature they want to use first. Then, you can study the viewer analytics and engage with comments or replies, either answering questions or engaging your target audience.

This has a lot of benefits in terms of managing how customers and leads feel about your business. (As a rule, people love brands that engage with them and seem “in touch” with the community around their industry.) But viewer engagement also affects YouTube SEO rankings.

At face value, that may not make a lot of sense. Your recent upload about making whiteboard videos hits all the right notes, from keyword variations to adding CTAs in the video description. Shouldn’t that be all you need to compete for a ranking on that keyword?

Not quite. YouTube lives somewhere between a social media platform and a search engine. One social-driven aspect is placing value in how people react to videos they watch. After all, viewers searching for a keyword are probably the best judges on whether or not a particular result answers their question or entertains them.

As a result, likes and comments can actually improve video rankings. Number of subscribers doesn’t have as big an impact, but the YouTube SEO algorithm will notice engagement trends and give a little more weight to videos from consistently high-ranking channels.

For what it’s worth, these engagement numbers don’t supersede traditional factors like keyword accuracy. But because they play a role, they are important in helping you grow your business through your YouTube SEO strategy.

Turning YouTube SEO into business growth

At the end of the day, it’s not enough to create videos, embed them on your website and share them on social media. That used to be enough to attract views and build an audience, but as YouTube has developed its own SEO algorithms, the rules of the game have changed.

And if you’re interested in turning a strong SEO strategy into healthy (and recurring) business growth, your only choice is to learn those rules and master them in the same way you’ve figured out how to use other search engines. SEO gives you a clear image of what next steps your business should take. So take that mindset and apply it to your video marketing strategy and watch the growth begin.

Drew Gula

Drew Gula is the copywriter at Soundstripe, a company that helps businesses and creators with royalty free music by providing resources like royalty free rock music .

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4 Steps To Create A Stress-Free Pre-Launch Marketing Strategy

Ann Smarty — Mon, 05 Apr 2021 16:58:40 +0000

Launching a new (digital) product is always overwhelming. There’s so much to keep in mind and take care of. This is a stressful time.

You can eliminate the stress by creating a solid pre-launch marketing campaign. Take steps to plan things carefully and prepare assets before launching anything. Your stress level will thank you and the success of your launch depends on it.

Here are a few things you can do prior to launching your new project…

Note: This is a “pre-launch phase” which means you are likely to already have your project ready (or almost ready). So here we skip things like finding a name, analyzing market gaps, creating a pricing strategy, etc. All those steps should have been followed in the product creation phase. Here we are already ready to launch!

1. Set up a lead generation landing page

This is usually the first step to launching anything: Create a site or set up a separate landing page for the product or project you are about to announce.

The thing is, whether you are doing pre-launch marketing to build up some anticipation or create awareness, you can use this page to help you start building your initial email list. Let people opt-in for news and updates with a simple form that captures their email address and you’ve leveled up to a lead generation page. Traffic and activity on this page will help you get to know your future customers and community better. If someone has opted in from your “Coming soon” page, chances are they are extremely interested in what you are about to launch.

Building a page like this has become extremely easy. My favorite solution today is Wix’s landing page templates, mainly because Wix’s SEO Mordy Oberstein is my good friend, but also because I just love what they have been doing recently. With Wix you can put together a custom page in minutes and it will also connect to your email marketing solution.

While setting up a pre-launch landing page is easy, getting the word out about your product may take some time. At the bare minimum, use a link to your page to:

Announce your project is coming soon on your social media channels
Send to friends and partners
When doing preliminary niche blogger outreach (see the step below)

Your “Coming Soon” page can help you start collecting valuable data on your future customers. At this point I suggest installing the following tracking codes to start building up your data:

Google Analytics (to know your most effective traffic sources and access user demographics)
Facebook pixel (to track people who come to your site and be able to target Facebook ads to them)
Finteza (to be able to create personalized campaigns for your site visitors)

Going forward, the more data you have, the more effective ads and on-site personalization options you will have at your disposal.

2. Plan your content strategy

Content strategy will take the most in your pre-launch marketing strategy because content is fundamental to the success of any digital marketing campaign (from SEO to ads). It makes sense to start preparing for your launch by creating some initial content now, before you’re busy with other things:

First, write your core content

This includes pages like Privacy Policy, “About us”, Terms of Service, etc.

Having these necessary – albeit pretty boring – pages done early will help you to focus on more important (and exciting) things when you launch.

Then, start working on putting your product in natural context

Which problems is your product solving? Start describing those problems and offering your product as the solution. Different content types you can start working on include:

Use cases
FAQs
Comparison with competitors (how does your project stand out?)
Blog posts

When you launch you want your site to address all possible use cases and initial questions. You may also want to have 5-10 blog posts to start gradually publishing them once your site is live.

To create your initial content strategy, use Text Optimizer. This service clusters your target search query into underlying concepts and entities. Use this to identify important associations with your target search query and build a page which would fit in.

For example, if I were to launch a book on SEO, a landing page announcing it would need to include concepts like “traffic”, “local search”, and “backlinks” as well as “entities” (i.e. names) like “Google Search Console” and “Ahrefs”. In the future, blog posts and guides on your site would elaborate further on these key concepts and important entities.

This will help you determine how to meet your future customers’ expectations in the best possible way.

The goal is to create context which would put you in Google’s Knowledge Graph (i.e. Google’s understanding of the topic) next to already established brands:

To help you out even more, here’s a good guide on creating an SEO strategy which includes goal setting and future result tracking which you may want to bookmark.

Lastly, start looking for your content collaborators

This is also a good time to identify who you are going to collaborate with when you launch. You need some niche influencers, bloggers, and journalists on your side to help you with your launch by:

Showing up for your launch events
Sharing about your product on their social media channels
Providing initial feedback and social proof
Announcing your launch on their website to drive traffic
Helping you create more trustworthy content by providing their expertise, etc.

So start emailing niche bloggers and influencers asking them if they would be able to help and on which terms. This step will also help you plan your pre-launch marketing budget carefully.

3. Plan your product announcement campaign

Depending on your budget, a product announcement campaign may vary. Here I am sticking to a modest investment:

Obviously, send an email to all your new subscribers (those you have generated through your pre-launch landing page). Make sure to note that they are part of pre-launch, so you’d love to know their feedback and get any help in promoting the project. This will build up some additional word-of-mouth marketing and turn some of those subscribers into beta testers and loyal brand ambassadors.

Consider hosting a Twitter party with your subscribers. A Twitter party is a one-time Twitter chat allowing people to exchange ideas using tweets that all have a unique hashtag.

Publish an official announcement on your social media channels.

Host a live video with your most active subscribers and / or niche influencers announcing the launch. You can stream to Youtube, Facebook and Twitter’s Periscope. You can later re-use that video as Instagram IGTV video as well as permanent content on your Youtube channel and Facebook wall.

When hosting a Twitter party and / or live video, collect some initial feedback on the project. This will generate some initial social proof for you to use on the landing page and elsewhere.

Invest in Facebook ads: Here you can go as aggressive as your budget allows. Just don’t forget to install Facebook’s pixel to keep record of people who visit your site and be able to re-market to them going forward. At this point you also start investing in data.
I suggest using these two resources to play with different ad formats:
- Here are a few Facebook ad mockups to create an eye-catching Facebook ad.
- Here’s an easy (and affordable) tool to create Facebook video ads.

4. Bring everything together using a pre-launch marketing dashboard

A dedicated pre-launch marketing dashboard will help you keep your sanity and everything organized. You can use Cyfe to build a dashboard that will give you a bird’s eye view of the scope of work of your projects as well as help you to delegate efficiently when you are ready.

To manage my pre-launch strategy, I’ve added the following widgets:

Project timeline to keep dates on track (I’ve added Google Spreadsheet via the iFrame widget)
Google Analytics to keep an eye on my traffic numbers
Brand mention monitoring widgets (Twitter mentions and Google alerts)
Mailchimp stats (to keep an eye on my automated campaigns). There are more email marketing integrations if you are using something else.

Down the road, when your project is launched and announced, you can re-use this dashboard for your next pre-launch marketing campaign. Simply create a copy. You will be able to use many of the current widgets and add new ones as needed.

Best wishes for a successful product launch!

Ann Smarty

Ann Smarty is the Brand and Community manager at InternetMarketingNinjas.com as well as the founder of ViralContentBee.com. Ann has been into Internet Marketing for over a decade, she is the former Editor-in-Chief of Search Engine Journal and contributor to prominent search and social blogs including Small Biz Trends and Mashable. Ann is also a frequent speaker at Pubcon and the host of the weekly Twitter chat #vcbuzz

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10 White Label Marketing Tools Digital Agencies Use To Drive Growth

Phillip Paquette — Sat, 20 Feb 2021 17:35:17 +0000

A recent study by Bain & Company found that a 5% percent increase in customer retention can lead to a 75% increase in company profits. You don’t need to reinvent the wheel to retain your agency clients — you just need to continually provide them more value.

One way agencies deliver more value and prove ROI without huge overhead is by using white label marketing tools.

In this guide, we’ll look at off-the-shelf digital tools you can white label and leverage to expand your services and scale up your agency.

1. White Label Design Tool - Xtensio

Looking for a tool to create all your business development collateral without having to bill a designer internally or hire a freelancer to get your proposals done? With Xtensio, you can easily create sleek pitch decks, user personas, and other presentation documents.

Work off their proposal, sales sheet, and other templates to create your own sales collateral. Drag and drop to make any tweaks. Then, share with colleagues to collaborate on the final version or ping these documents over to clients.

2. White Label Reputation Management - Grade.us

If you’re part of a digital marketing or local SEO agency, online reputation inevitably comes up with clients. Grade.us is a powerful platform used by agencies as a white label marketing tool for reputation management.

Give your clients a single space to manage their reputation and grow their reviews on Google, Facebook, and other third-party review websites. Grade.us’ white-label tool also can monitor reviews for Yelp and sites specific to industries including:

Angie’s List, HomeAdvisor, and Houzz for home service companies
Zocdoc, Healthgrades, and WebMD for healthcare offices
Zillow, Trulia, and Realtor.com for real estate clients

Use the Grade.us Review Management ROI Calculator to determine your agency’s potential profit margins and monthly recurring revenue.

Grade.us also offers white label pitch decks and educational resources to close new clients along with review management checklists to ensure your customers get the most value out of the reputation management tool.

3. White Label Video Creation Tool - Lumen5

Create videos in minutes for clients or your agency’s social media initiatives using Lumen5.

Here’s how it works: Lumen5 reviews the text of any content via AI and generates the music and image suggestions to help you storyboard and publish videos onto any social network.

Whether you’re looking to test new social content for your clients or scale-up that service offering, Lumen5 can help.

4. White Label Invoicing & Payment Solution - Invoice Ninja

A smooth payment experience can also be a marketing tool that encourages retention. Invoice Ninja offers free, unlimited invoices and quotes for up to 100 clients. Their white label service is $30 per year and lets you add your agency’s logo, brand colors, and adjust the overall style for invoices.

5. White Label SEO Reporting - AuthorityLabs

Show your SEO strategy is driving organic rankings. AuthorityLabs lets you white label SEO ranking reports.

Rank Tracker is their core daily reporting system used by Mint, Symantec, and other enterprise brands. Rank Tracker reports give you the most up to date, accurate ranking data. That way, clients can see:

The snippets acquired in SERPs
Their keywords ranking in relation to competitors
How their pages rank for a given keyword in specific countries, cities, and zip codes

With this rank tracking data, you can also build out interactive, accurate reports in Google Data Studio.

6. White Label Landing Page Creator - Landingi

As you know, if you’re building out ad campaigns, the ad creative is only half the battle. Your agency also needs to manage landing page design and optimization so you can own the landing page metrics. There are a variety of white label marketing tools for email but you can build out dozens of landing pages fast on behalf of your clients with Landingi.

Landingi’s white label agency plan includes:

Unlimited landing pages
30 custom domains
Custom templates you can save and share with clients
Priority support

7. White Label Project Management Tool - Notion

Make sure your ducks are in a row for every project across all your different clients using Notion. Create a database containing all the tasks associated with each client. Then assign tasks internally and stay on top of every deadline. As you’re developing briefs or gathering your customer’s feedback, you can add them to any task.

If you’re looking to get started faster, Notion provides templates you can duplicate to create your own briefs, content calendars, and more.

8. White Label Messaging Platform - SimpleTexting

SimpleTexting offers a white label solution for automating and running SMS campaigns. Their white label marketing tools let you:

Run trigger-based event messages and mass texting campaigns
Monitor account activities and run reports
Rebrand their platform as an offering you can price to your client
Manage email templates across sub-accounts

9. White Label Email Marketing Platform - ActiveCampaign

If email marketing is your agency’s bread and butter or a service you’re ready to roll out, ActiveCampaign offers their automation platform as a white label marketing tool.

Enterprise account holders ($229 per month) can:

Create custom domains
Rebrand with their logo and colors
Remove all references and links to ActiveCampaign

Each of these features let you provide a fully branded experience to your clients. ActiveCampaign also directly integrates with Cyfe so you can report email marketing results to your customers from our white label dashboards.

10. White Label Dashboards & Reporting - Cyfe

As far as white label marketing tools go, Cyfe brings together all your client’s data sources into a single spot where your customers can monitor their KPIs and quickly understand the results you’re driving through data visualizations.

Depending on the services your agency provides, you can build dashboards off Cyfe’s dashboard templates including:

Social media dashboards covering your client’s results on Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and LinkedIn
Report at a campaign, ad group, or keyword level on key metrics like conversions, cost per conversion, and click-through rate with the Google Ads dashboard
Website conversion rates, goals, page views, and other KPIs for your client’s website performance using the Google Analytics Dashboard
A dashboard for your own team’s internal use containing marketing agency KPIs

Cyfe’s white label solutions let you create an effective, branded experience with:

Branded reports including customized dashboard backgrounds and domain names
Embedded analytics so you can add key metrics to a client portal or any other existing reporting system
Custom URLs that direct your client’s stakeholders to dashboards
Set benchmark metrics against your client’s business goals to stay on track and report growth

Phillip Paquette

Phillip Paquette is the Head Content Marketer and Founder at OnPoint Content. Coming from a background in journalism, in-depth research and interviews are key ingredients in his special sauce. Feel free to reach out with any questions or comments at phillip@onpointcontent.io.

The post 10 White Label Marketing Tools Digital Agencies Use To Drive Growth appeared first on Cyfe.

10 Essential Email Marketing KPIs and Metrics

Burkhard Berger — Thu, 04 Feb 2021 08:00:21 +0000

To succeed in today’s marketing arena, you not only need a great-performing website and strong social media presence, but you also need a solid email marketing strategy based on analyzing and interpreting the right data.

Email marketing requires that you constantly monitor your marketing performance so you can measure your success and improve your results.

Although a lot of marketers only look at a few KPIs, there are actually 10 essential email marketing KPIs and metrics you need to watch so you can get the full picture. Thankfully, there are a lot of email marketing tools like Cyfe that allow you to easily track and analyze your data easily so you can truly optimize your email campaigns.

With that said, here are the 10 essential email marketing KPIs and metrics to track.

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1. Delivery and Deliverability Rates

Before you can worry about whether or not your subscribers open and act upon your emails, you first need to ensure that your emails actually reach their inboxes.

The delivery rate indicates how many emails are accepted by your recipients’ servers. As long as an email doesn’t bounce, it counts as delivered. The formula for calculating the delivery rate is as follows:

Delivery Rate = (Emails delivered / Total number of emails sent) x 100

If you send 40,000 emails to subscribers, and only 38,500 are delivered, it means that your delivery rate is (38,500/40,000) x 100 = 96.25%.

Your deliverability rate is a measure of how many emails actually avoid the spam folder and reach your recipients’ inboxes.

Also known as the inbox placement, this metric is impacted by a variety of factors, such as your domain setup, content, authentication, and your reputation.

You can use a tool like HavocShield whose “mail armor” feature allows you to strengthen your email security and maintain high deliverability rates.

Pro Tip: When using platforms like Wix or Shopify, opt for a personalized and customized email address to match your domain name and business brand.

2. Open Rate (OR)

Your email open rate indicates how many emails were opened in relation to the total number of emails delivered. Most email service providers (ESPs) calculate this KPI for you automatically. But, you can calculate it for yourself using the following formula:

Open Rate = (Number of emails opened / Total number of emails delivered) x 100

So, for instance, if you send an email to 100 contacts, but only 50 of them open it, your email open rate is (50/100) x 100 = 50%.

ESPs track email open rates by embedding a tracking pixel or a tiny transparent image in your marketing emails and then recalling them each time a subscriber receives your email.

The email open rate is an engagement metric that is very important for you to track. You can study how your open rate compares to the industry average so you know where to focus your efforts to improve your email marketing campaigns.

If you have a weak open rate, there are certain tactics you can use to improve it, such as segmenting your list to ensure that each group of subscribers receives the most relevant content.

Another way to improve open rates is to add the recipient’s name to your email subject line. You can also use a subject line generator to help you come up with unique and engaging email subject lines.

3. Conversion Rate

Your conversion rate shows you the number of subscribers who took action on your email. It indicates the percentage of email recipients who clicked on a link inside your email and then went on to complete an action, such as:

Claiming a discount
Signing up for a free trial
Making a purchase
Reading a blog post
Registering for a webinar

You can use the following formula to calculate your email conversion rate:

Conversion Rate = (Total number of completed actions / Number of emails delivered) x 100

So, for example, if you send an email to 1,000 subscribers, and 50 recipients click the link, it means that your conversion rate is (50/1,000) x 100 = 5%.

You don’t need a digital marketing expert to tell you how important your conversion rate is for helping you determine your email marketing ROI (return on investment). When you know how much you spent on a campaign, and the number of email subscribers converted, it’s then easy to determine if your efforts, as well as the money you spent on the campaign, are paying off.

You can easily measure this metric by integrating your ESP, together with Google Analytics or any other web analytics tool. You can then create a unique tracking URL for individual links within your marketing emails. Cyfe is one such tool as it allows you to track all your key performance metrics and share them with your team.

4. Click-Through Rate (CTR)

Your email click-through rate shows you the number of subscribers who clicked on at least one link inside a given email.

This is among the most common email marketing KPIs and metrics that help marketers to establish how successful their email marketing campaigns are. You can calculate your CTR using the following formula:

CTR = (Number of email clicks / Total number of emails delivered) x 100

As an example, if you send out 10,000 emails, and 500 subscribers click on one or more links inside the email, your CTR will be (1,500/10,000) x 100 = 5%.

The average click-through rate is about 4%, although this figure varies in different industries and can be influenced by a variety of factors.

You will discover that welcome emails and emails calling for specific actions, such as an email informing your subscribers that you are hosting a webinar, will experience higher click through rates.

If you are experiencing low click-through rates, an effective way to improve this essential email marketing KPI is to carry out frequent A/B testing on the different elements of your email, including:

The wording of the email
The content layout
The call to action text and design
The images in the email

Pro Tip: Use the tips in this graphic design article from Pixpa.com to help you set your email marketing, advertising, and branding apart from your competitors and boost your CTR.

5. Click-to-Open Rate (CTOR)

This KPI shows you the number of clicks in relation to the total number of emails opened. It also measures the number of recipients who clicked on links – but, only for the subscribers who actually opened your email.

This means that the CTOR doesn’t include all the subscribers on your list, or the total number of emails delivered. But, it’s a very accurate metric for measuring your email’s level of interaction. You can calculate your click-to-open rate using the following formula:

CTOR = (Unique clicks / Unique email opens) x 100

If you have 400 unique clicks out of a total of 2,500 unique email opens, then your CTOR is (400/2,500) x 100 = 16%.

If you have a low CTR, but your CTOR is high, it could mean that your emails are well-designed, but that you’re wasting effort and resources sending emails to subscribers who don’t find them relevant.

On the other hand, if you are experiencing a low CTOR, it could mean that your content is uninteresting and is falling flat once recipients have opened your emails.

A great way to improve your click-to-open rate is to ensure that you segment your list so that you send relevant content that each group wants. You can use the segmentation categories outlined below as a guide:

6. Complaint Rate

Spam or abuse complaints are among the most important email marketing KPIs and metrics to monitor because they can have a significant negative impact on your email marketing campaigns.

Your complaint rate is the number of times subscribers report your marketing emails either as unwanted or as spam. ESPs calculate the complaint rate automatically using the following formula:

Complaint Rate = (Total number of complaints / Number of sent emails) x 100

If you send 6,000 emails and you get 8 complaints, your complaint rate will be (8/6000) x 100 = 0.13%.

Important Note: Not all ESP’s have feedback loops set up with ISPs, which means that the formula above may not show you a truly accurate idea of your complaint rate. That’s why it’s important to choose the right email service provider to ensure you get a proper sense of your spam complaint rate.

Once you know what your complaint rate is, you can compare it to the industry average, which is about one complaint per 1,000 emails sent, or 0.1%.

This number is acceptable, but any higher than that will likely affect your email deliverability, and possibly result in the ESPs suspending your account.

7. Unsubscribe Rate

Your unsubscribe rate counts the number of recipients who clicked the “unsubscribe” link to show you the percentage of subscribers who opted out from receiving your email messages.

This metric is calculated automatically by most ESPs, but you can double-check your numbers using the formula below:

Unsubscribe Rate = (Number of unsubscribes / Total number of delivered emails) x 100

If you send 5,000 emails, and 20 people unsubscribe, your unsubscribe rate would be (20/5,000) x 100 = 0.4%.

Your unsubscribe rate is likely to fluctuate depending on your email sending frequency. On average, most email campaigns experience a 0.2% unsubscribe rate, and if yours is much higher than this, then it’s cause for concern and you should focus your attention on dealing with it right away.

One way to lower a high unsubscribe rate is by setting the expectations for when you are going to email your subscribers. Stick to a consistent schedule and always deliver on the promise of your subject line.

Also, you should segment your list by interests so that you always send relevant content that your subscribers find interesting using a drip email marketing strategy.

And don’t be afraid to ask for feedback from your subscribers so that you have a better understanding of the type of content they want and expect from you.

Pro Tip: When working to improve your email design and reduce unsubscribes, you can use design resources like these to get your work done faster and more effectively.

8. Bounce Rate

The bounce rate indicates the number of email subscribers who didn’t receive the email you sent. It’s the percentage of addresses that return an error after you send an email.

In email marketing, there are two kinds of bounces: soft, and hard bounces.

A soft bounce involves temporary problems with an email address that is valid, such as a full inbox, issues with the recipient’s server, and so on.

A hard bounce, on the other hand, refers to permanent issues with an email on your mailing list, such as an email address that is either closed or nonexistent.

Whether your emails bounce due to the recipient’s mailbox filters or if you are sending to an address that is incorrect or mistyped, you still need to keep track of this email marketing KPI. You can calculate the bounce rate using this formula:

Bounce Rate = (Number of bounced emails / Number of emails sent) x 100

So, for example, if you send out 12,000 emails, and 80 of them bounce, it means that your bounce rate is (80/12,000) x 100 = 0.66%.

A high bounce rate can cause you to have a poor sender reputation, and this can result in the ISPs viewing your business as a spammer. That’s why keeping track of this KPI is vital to the “health” of your mailing list. It will help you to monitor any email deliverability issues you might be experiencing.

Although there are tons of online business tools to help you with various aspects of your business, it’s important for you to choose the right tools to assist you in reducing your bounce rate and getting more emails into your recipients’ inboxes.

9. ROI

Email marketing ROI is a metric that allows you to evaluate the efficiency and profitability of your investment. In many cases, it’s the main marketing metric you need to monitor in order to accurately measure how cost-effective your email campaign is.

This KPI will show you how much you earned compared to how much you spent to implement your email campaign. To calculate email marketing ROI, use this formula:

ROI = [(Total sales from campaign – Campaign costs) / Campaign costs] x 100

As an example, if you make $2,500 in sales, and your email campaign costs $500 to implement, your ROI would be calculated as follows: [($2,500 -$500) / $500] x 100 = 400%.

On average, email marketing has an ROI of 40:1, which means that for every dollar spent on email marketing, you get back $40! You could build a website and monetize it using the best tactics and still not achieve such an impressive ROI.

This is why email is among the best and most effective marketing channels you can use for your business.

If you are experiencing a low ROI in your email marketing, you can use the following tips to help you improve your results:

Divide your list into segments so you can send more targeted emails
Personalize emails by including the subscriber’s name in the subject line
Focus on improving your email deliverability rate
Discover the best days, times, and frequency for sending emails
Optimize your emails for mobile
A/B test subject lines and go with the ones that are most engaging
Include strong calls to action in each of your emails
Use lots of eye-catching visuals, including videos in your emails

10. Revenue Per Subscriber/Email

It’s estimated that there will be over 4 billion email users by 2024. With numbers like these, it’s no wonder email is such a profitable marketing tool.

The revenue per subscriber KPI shows you how much each subscriber on your list is worth in terms of revenue. This is very important because it allows you to identify the value of your email list.

To calculate your revenue per subscriber, all you have to do is divide your total revenue from email by your number of subscribers, as in the formula below:

Revenue per Subscriber = Revenue from email / Number of subscribers

So, if you have a list of 8,000 subscribers and you send an email that generates $10,000 in revenue, Your revenue per subscriber would be $10,000/8,000 = $1.25/subscriber.

In addition to knowing your revenue per subscriber, you also want to calculate your revenue per email. You can calculate your revenue per email using the following formula:

Revenue Per Email = Revenue from email / Number of emails delivered

This KPI helps you gain valuable insight as to the types of marketing emails that are most valuable for your business. You can then identify the characteristics and trends common to your most profitable email marketing campaigns.

Conclusion

No matter what system you’re using, whether you opt for a popular ESP or predictive dialer software with built-in email marketing tools, these are the 10 essential email marketing KPIs and metrics that you need to know, follow, and analyze so you can accurately measure the success of your email campaigns.

The Cyfe dashboard lets you monitor all the important KPIs mentioned in this article so you can understand your campaign performance.

There are many methods to make money online, but not many offer an ROI as impressive as email marketing.

Which of the email marketing KPIs and metrics mentioned in this article do you currently track? Sound off in the comments!

Burkhard Berger

The post 10 Essential Email Marketing KPIs and Metrics appeared first on Cyfe.

How to Measure Marketing With Attribution Models

Phillip Paquette — Thu, 07 Jan 2021 08:34:00 +0000

What’s the point of marketing? You’re putting your business in front of your potential customers. Your marketing message needs to drive revenue, conversions, sales, and other business KPIs.

How do you determine which of your marketing campaigns deserve credit for the conversion? Does your customer’s first interaction with a blog post get all of the credit? How about the ad they clip at the end of their research? Which touchpoint matters the most and how does that impact future marketing investments?

Enter attribution models.

What are Marketing Attribution Models?

Marketing attribution models are frameworks for determining which touchpoints a lead interacts with that you credit for a conversion. Touchpoints receive (or don’t receive) a percentage value of the credit defined by the attribution model.

Why use Marketing Attribution Models?

Platforms like Google Analytics can quickly show conversions by channels including:

Organic search ads
Direct traffic (when someone enters your site’s URL into their browser or visits via a bookmark)
Social media
Email (whether it’s from your sales, marketing teams, or customer referrals)
Referrals (such as 3rd party reviews sites like Yelp or backlinks pushing traffic to your website)

Still, you need to factor in all the prior touchpoints that contribute to a sale. For many buying cycles, your leads may see 6-10 pieces of content before even converting across different channels.

Attribution models give you:

A plan for comparing the effectiveness of different initiatives.
A clearer picture of ROI on your marketing activities beyond ad spend whether you need to prove marketing ROI to your clients or your CEO.
The ability to reallocate your budget based on what’s most effective.

That’s just a few of the major reasons why Salesforce research found 41% of organizations use marketing attribution modeling to measure ROI.

Now let’s look at specific attribution models.

The Most Common Marketing Attribution Models

The attribution models you will use depend on:

The amount of data you have at hand.
The number of campaigns you run.
The funnel stages you are looking to measure.

1. First Click Attribution

First click attribution assigns all credit for a lead’s conversion based on their first interaction/click. This can be especially useful to see what content or ads drive initial interest that converts. In other words, you can find the top of funnel marketing that is most effective.

All that said, when comparing campaigns you won’t be able to see what other touchpoints influenced a conversion except the initial interaction if you only use a first click attribution model.

2. Last Touch Attribution

Last touch attribution is also a single-touch model. Instead, it assigns 100% of all value to the last click. Last touch attribution lets you see your strongest channels for converting leads if your sales cycle is short. You can also compare how much specific offers convert such as discounts served through ads.

Using this model alone you will only be tracking the final interaction and won’t be able to see if there are any bottlenecks in your campaigns.

3. Time Decay Attribution

Like linear attribution, time decay factors in all interactions you can trace. However, a time decay model gives more value to touchpoints that happen closer to a purchase. The first interaction gets less and the last interaction receives the most credit.

If you’re working with long sales cycles, this can help you drill down to:

See what touchpoints closest to the last one before conversion provided value.
Figure out if they interact with a cluster of content before converting.

Then you can iterate on your middle and bottom of funnel activities.

This model requires more advanced tracking you won’t get out of the box with Google Analytics. It also doesn’t show the value of the top of the funnel content.

“Generally, the more expensive your product, the longer you want to open that window. Facebook allows you to keep the window open up to 90 days to track data and see how many touchpoints there are,” said Sandro Galindo on the Sandro & Liz Marketing Podcast.

“A good place to start for most businesses is that one day decay just to divide the attribution, give it more weight to the most recent, and less weight as time goes on.”

4. Data-Driven Model

The data-driven model uses the algorithmic model in Google Analytics 360. The algorithm factors in all the conversion paths of your leads and sets values on each interaction based on their importance in the conversion process.

This model is advertising-driven as Analytics 360 requires a Google Ads account with at least 15,000 clicks on Google Search and a conversion action with at least 600 conversions within 30 days

5. Linear Attribution

Linear attribution places equal credit to every touchpoint your lead interacts with before converting. This model reinforces:

The value of each step in your funnel.
The average B2B buyer reads 10 pieces of content before purchasing.
The overall campaigns that are driving leads for your brand.

Here’s the catch, though: Due to the equal distribution of credit, linear attribution does not highlight which specific marketing activities are more effective.

6. Position-Based Attribution

Position-based attribution, also known as u-shaped attribution, looks at your lead generation efforts. This model places value with:

40% going to the first touch.
40% to the point where they become a lead (e.g. they request a demo).
20% equally distributed across any touchpoints between the other two touches.

If you hand off leads to your sales team, you can see which touchpoints generate the most initial interest and entice leads enough to provide their information. But by design, this model assumes the first and last interactions are the most important parts of a customer’s journey.

7. W-Shaped Attribution

W-shaped attribution takes the idea of u-shaped models one step further. Along with the first and lead creation touches (credited 30% each), this model gives 30% to the final touchpoint before a lead becomes a customer. The remaining 10% goes to all other interactions a lead has with your brand.

This can help you see which marketing activity pushes a lead to take the next step in your funnel. In other words:

The first touch shows what ad, blog post, or other marketing initiative led to an anonymous user reaching the top of your funnel.
A user opts into downloading your eBook or subscribes to your newsletter, hitting your mid-funnel content.
At the bottom of the funnel, you can see if a lead reads a product comparison whitepaper or receives a one-time-discount offer and then converts.

8. Custom Attribution

With custom attribution models, you set the rules on how much credit different interactions receive on a lead’s journey. If you have a specific campaign and the existing data you need to determine the most important touchpoints, custom models can be valuable.

Simpler models are a better fit in the beginning though if you’re:

Creating initial campaigns and need to establish benchmarks.
Working on personalization campaigns.
Moving upstream to higher-value target clients.

How to Measure Marketing Attribution with Custom Models

There are two key ways you can create custom models:

Through an experienced data scientist that has access to business intelligence tools
Create custom models off a default model in Google Analytics

Here’s how to create a custom model in GA:

Select Conversions > Multi-Channel Funnels > Model Comparison Tool

2. Click into “Select model” and choose “Create new custom model”

3. Give your model a name and select a baseline model you can customize from

4. Toggle your desired customization options including:

Lookback window (the total amount of time a touchpoint can go that you want to credit in your attribution model) so you can factor in your sales cycle into your attribution model (the max time allowed in Google Analytics is 90 days prior to a conversion).

Automatically adjust credit based on how much a user engages with content based on time on site or page scroll depth.

Set custom rules that define how much credit each touchpoint gets based on conditions being met.

5. Once you’re done, click “Save and Apply.”

Summing It Up

To track the effectiveness of all your marketing spend and what content pushes leads further along to buy, you’ll likely need more than one attribution model.

Once you have attribution models set up in platforms like Google Analytics, you can view your KPIs and attribution measurements in a single dashboard using Cyfe.

Dashboards let you analyze code free and access all the data you need. Bring together in minutes all your data sources such as:

Facebook
Google Ads
HubSpot
Salesforce

Phillip Paquette

The post How to Measure Marketing With Attribution Models appeared first on Cyfe.

6 Underrated Content Marketing KPIs and Why You Should Focus on Them in 2021

Pratik Dholakiya — Wed, 16 Dec 2020 10:33:43 +0000

Content marketing is one of the best channels for increasing engagement and ROI, no doubt about that. And, one of the most important ways to measure and improve your content marketing is through metrics.

While the usual content marketing metrics such as leads, sales, and traffic can be useful in providing an overall measure of the performance of your content, these metrics are not enough if you want to go more granular.

There are lots of other content marketing metrics that can help you to gauge your content better. You can get deeper, useful insights about the quality of your content, the best channels for distribution, and engagement.

The content marketing metrics mentioned in this guide serve towards the ultimate goal of content marketing, which is generating leads, sales, and traffic. If you are interested in learning about these underrated, yet useful content marketing KPIs, then read on. You’ll find some super-helpful unique content marketing metrics that can help you improve your content marketing ROI.

1. Backlinks

A backlink is when an external website adds a link to your site. Backlinks are considered as one of the top three ranking factors by Google. This is because backlinks are an indicator of the quality of your content.

Backlinks indicate to Google that your content is well received by other publishers, especially when the linking domain is a high-authority one. More backlinks to a piece of content tells Google that other publishers in your industry are recommending your content to their audience. This is why backlinks can be a great metric for measuring your content quality.

Apart from the number of backlinks, you should also look for the quality of the backlinks that you get. For example, even one backlink from a high domain authority website probably indicates that the piece of content is very valuable.

When you create high quality and valuable content, more and more external domains will be willing to add a link to your content. The outreach efforts of your marketing team will yield better results when you are promoting a high-quality piece of content.

For example, by publishing an infographic on the topic of on-page SEO, Backlinko was able to generate 6730 backlinks to it. Simply using an online infographics maker, you too can generate numerous backlinks and up your content game.

Hence, we can say that the number and quality of backlinks can be an excellent content marketing metric that you must consider using to get better results with your content marketing.

Understanding and analyzing the sentiment of your content can be very difficult to do manually and thus sentiment analysis tools can be of great help.

2. User Sentiment

The success of your content marketing is primarily governed by how your audience is perceiving it. Metrics like shares, likes, and comments can help understand this. However, if you want to know in-depth, then sentiment analysis can be a great metric to use.

Sentiment analysis is the process of computationally deriving opinions about your content by using the opinions expressed by your audience after consuming your content.

Understanding and analyzing the sentiment of your content can be very difficult to do manually and thus sentiment analysis tools can be of great help.

Source

Using social listening and sentiment analysis tools, you will be able to understand exactly how your audience feels about your content. Do they find it up to the mark? Do they find your content valuable enough? Which content marketing channels do they prefer?

You can use sentiment analysis tools to measure the quality of your content by using user reviews, comments, and survey results as inputs for these tools.

For instance, you can analyse the common sentiments of your users towards your email newsletter. You can gather the data through a quick survey. If you find that the polarity of the analysis is more on the negative side, you can think about ways to improve the quality of your newsletter. You can do the same for your social media content as well.

A great example of this would be sentiment analysis done on the company, American Multinational Conglomerate. Through the sentiment analysis on their social media profiles, they were able to gain useful insights such as getting to know the best social media channel that is preferred by their users.

The Finnish outdoor equipment company Suunto used sentiment analysis to understand the overall polarity of the user-generated content that was being put out for their new product launch. This helped them to do some quick damage control.

3. Content Downloads

If you have any content upgrades, downloads, or lead magnets to offer on your website, then these too can be a means of measuring your content marketing. This is because your users probably have to fill a form, give their email addresses, or other contact information in exchange for downloading the content. This shows the interest and eagerness of the user to consume your content.

For example, suppose that you offer a template or a swipe file as a content upgrade from your blog post. Then the number of downloads for this content upgrade can be a great indicator of the quality of your blog content.

Similarly, you can also measure your middle-of-funnel content this way. If you are offering case studies as downloads from your site, you can use the number of case study downloads to measure your content in this part of the funnel.

4. Active Email Subscribers

If you have an active email newsletter where you share your weekly content wisdom, then the number of new email list sign-ups and active email subscribers is also an important metric that you must consider.

Think about the last email newsletter you signed up for. Most probably you signed up because they had something valuable to offer you in return for your email id. The same goes for you as well.

When your content is worthy and useful, you’ll automatically see an increasing number of email subscribers. You’ll also notice increased open rates, lesser unsubscribe requests, and more active email subscribers.

5. Average Time on Page

You might perform SEO, use catchy headlines, or even use paid advertising to bring in the traffic to your website. But how many of these visitors are actually enjoying and finding value in your content?

This is why website traffic should not be your only content marketing metric. Apart from measuring the website traffic, you should also look at the average time on the page of your website visitors. You can use Google Analytics to find this data. You can find it under Reports > Behaviour.

When users spend more time on your page, it indicates that they are going through your entire content instead of simply skimming through it.

A great example of this would be the Wista blog. They found a 260% increase in their dwell time by adding video to their content. This is an indication of the fact that time-on-site or dwell time is an effective way to measure the quality and likeability of your content.

Average time on the page also indicates that the content is something that the user is exactly looking for. In other words, we can say that your content is matching the search intent of your website visitor.

Apart from the overall average time on page, you can also gauge the quality of individual pieces of content by measuring the time on page for each of your content pages. If you find any pages with comparatively lower dwell time, then you can think about revamping it.

6. On-Site Behaviour

Apart from measuring the traffic and the time spent on your website’s pages, you should also consider measuring your visitors’ on-site behavior. You can do this by using heatmaps.

Heatmaps essentially give you an idea about which parts of your website are the visitors interacting with. For example, through heatmaps, you can see if many users are highlighting a particular paragraph or quotation. Using this as a metric, you can improve all your content.

Using heatmap record sessions, you can get extremely beneficial information about your content. You can see what your visitors are reading the most and where they are scrolling.

You can also see what elements of your content are they engaging the most with. Is it an embedded video? Graphics and illustrations? Tools? Call to action?

Using these insights from heatmap record sessions, you can find the strengths and weaknesses of your content and thus improve your overall content marketing game.

The project management solution Taskworld saw a 40% increase in their conversions by using heatmaps!

Final Thoughts

Finally, we can summarize by saying that if you want to spruce up your content marketing, then you should look beyond the usual metrics. All the metrics mentioned in this article are useful, yet underrated.

Using these content marketing metrics, you can gain insights that you probably do not know until now. This can be transformational in improving the quality of your content and the ROI you gain from it.

Pratik Dholakiya

Pratik Dholakiya is the Founder of Growfusely, a content marketing agency specializing in content & data-driven SEO. He regularly speaks at various conferences about SEO, Content Marketing, Entrepreneurship, and Digital PR.

The post 6 Underrated Content Marketing KPIs and Why You Should Focus on Them in 2021 appeared first on Cyfe.

Three Ways to Create an Effective Collaborative Marketing Routine in 2021 and Beyond

Ann Smarty — Wed, 02 Dec 2020 12:22:50 +0000

Have you figured out your marketing strategy for 2021 yet? It’s fast approaching and you don’t want to be caught flat-footed.

Here’s a great idea for you: Embrace collaborative marketing. When you’re working with a variety of people with different experiences, they can all bring something new and exciting to the table. Why not leverage their perspectives in your marketing?

What is Collaborative Marketing and Why Does it Matter?

As the name suggests, collaborative marketing is a marketing strategy that includes any (often several) forms of collaboration.

Collaborative marketing has been a quickly rising trend for several years now. How can you work with your colleagues to produce marketing initiatives that will benefit your culture, your customers, and your audience?

These days, when lots of teams have been moved to work from home, collaboration has become an even more important topic (maybe because we are forced to be more collaborative).

As we feel increasingly isolated from the rest of the world, let alone from the companies we work for, creating an effective collaboration routine can determine the likelihood of a brand’s survival.

1. Include Your Whole Company into Your Marketing

Despite popular belief, collaborative marketing doesn’t have to include external collaboration (working with outside influencers, other companies, or nonprofits).

A collaborative marketing strategy can be one that includes many in-company teams or departments.

In fact, the latter is one of my favorite types of collaborative marketing, and often it’s a missed opportunity. In most companies I’ve worked with, the marketing team is usually isolated from the rest of the organization. No one knows (or cares) what they are doing.

This organizational silo is more common than we think, even when it comes to startups where it’s often a one-person operation.

And yet, your marketing department would very much benefit from working in unison with other departments:

The customer support team would help you create more detailed marketing personas, collect online reviews and feedback for marketing copy, and suggest content ideas based on common questions.
The product team could highlight some of the hidden features that give your product a strong competitive edge.
The sales team would be able to point you to some of the most effective value propositions that help them close more sales. These should be the foundation of your brand’s marketing efforts.

I could go on but here’s the main point: Anyone inside your company can have bright ideas and suggestions that contribute to your marketing efforts.

Digital marketing is a highly creative process. If you are involved in it every workday, it is easy to face burnout on a regular basis. That’s exactly why fostering idea-sharing always works best as part of a successful marketing strategy.

How do you begin to implement collaborative marketing? What do you need to put in place? There are multiple tools that can help you foster cross-team collaboration. However mostly, it is about encouraging cross-team idea sharing on a regular basis.

2. Adopt a Culture of Transparency

Coined by Rand Fishkin, the TAGFEE acronym refers to:

Transparent
Authentic
Generous
Fun
Empathetic
Exceptional

While all of these words are self-evident, it’s the transparency I’d like to focus on.

Transparency is often cited as the main driving force behind a business’s growth.

Transparent businesses publicly share information about their success and struggles.

Transparency refers to both external and internal data sharing ( i.e. a transparent business keeps its employees updated on the current business KPIs and future roadmap.)

Being a transparent business comes with many benefits, but mainly:

Transparency builds trust
Transparency fosters open dialogue

Consequently, transparency is always the biggest force behind cross-team collaboration, because trust and open dialogue remove common barriers like fear and formality.

When every employee knows exactly what is going on with the company, they feel an integral part of the process. This is the foundation of great teamwork.

When a customer knows the company’s full story, they will likely stay with you forever.

Building a transparent business is not a marketing decision. It’s something that needs to be your genuine decision.

That is not to say that there are no tools to help.

Creating a data-sharing dashboard in Cyfe to share with your employees is a solid step to becoming a more transparent company. With a real-time dashboard, employees can check to see the business health of the org and better understand how their contributions help.

3. Foster Cross-Team Independent Learning

I am a huge advocate of independent learning. As someone who holds a degree in linguistics while making her living in digital marketing, I am living proof that degrees don’t matter as much as your own drive to self-educate.

Fostering self-education has a lot of benefits, including:

Let your team drive your brand’s innovation: When they learn new things, they will be eager to implement them.
Identify in-house talent: Those people who can effectively self-educate will likely become the most motivated managers.
Keep more marketing tasks in-house: As your teams learn new things, you will no longer need to outsource parts of your marketing strategy (like graphic design or link building).

Yes, it also comes with a few disadvantages, like possibly losing the most ambitious employees who may feel they have overgrown their roles as they learn more tactics. Another possible risk of in-company education is that there will always be employees who stop working and pretend to be learning all day long.

Yes, these things will happen but the pros far outweigh the cons, so self-education is an integral part of an effective marketing team.

Here are two important steps to fostering self-education:

Create an internal knowledge base to help your employees by creating a well-structured list of courses to take and resources to read. It is pretty doable with these plugins.
Empower your team with tools they can actively play with to better understand the process.

As to the latter, my educational toolkit always consists of:

1. Ahrefs

Ahrefs offers great usability, it is perfect for people who want to figure something out on their own. It’s easy to set up mini-tasks for your employees to see digital marketing in action:

“Identify our competitors’ most successful tactics to get backlinks”
“Find which keywords are driving search traffic to our competitors”
“Identify content gaps for our website”, etc.

2. Text Optimizer

Text Optimizer is a writing tool that offers a semantic analysis of any topic and helps you include more related concepts into your content. It grades any copy you create forcing you to do a better job. This makes it a perfect self-education tool:

3. Finteza

Finteza is a web analytics platform that is extremely easy to figure out. The tool lets you create funnels to better monitor your site users’ browsing and buying journeys. It’s a great way to self-learn analytics skills as well as identify SEO metrics that really matter:

4. InVideo

InVideo is another content creation tool on this list but it focuses on video content. InVideo helps to quickly create videos removing the need to outsource this daunting task. It comes in handy for giving your employees self-guided tasks to create engaging content for your social media channels.

There are also quite a few visual marketing tools we use for collaboration as well.

5. WordPress

While you may be surprised to see this one on the list of self-learning tools, WordPress can be a great way to learn digital marketing. Let your team create mini-sites and compete in marketing them. WordPress is perfect for that because it is extremely easy to set up while providing much flexibility, and hence a lot of self-learning opportunities.

Conclusion

Collaborative marketing will take lots of time. It comes with its own risks and challenges which you can read about in more detail here. But in the end, it will feel right and will help you and your team get more united in growing your company.

Innovation is more important than ever these days, and adopting collaboration is the fundamental step to innovation.

Good luck!

Ann Smarty

The post Three Ways to Create an Effective Collaborative Marketing Routine in 2021 and Beyond appeared first on Cyfe.

What is Business Intelligence? How BI can power businesses

Phillip Paquette — Wed, 18 Nov 2020 08:07:34 +0000

Smarter decisions. Pinpointing problems. Driving up revenue. Whether you own a small business, agency, or consultant, you’re taking big actions every day.

So how do you break down the data behind your business to reach the right conclusions?

The more complex your business, the more difficult it is to surface insights that will improve your financial outlook. With advanced formulas, predictive models, and sophisticated algorithms, you can begin to simplify how your smartest business minds can process your company’s performance and impact growth.

Learn how business intelligence can be used by strategists across your organization to enhance the way you run your business.

What is Business Intelligence?

Business Intelligence (BI) refers to tools and practices that translate data into actionable business insights. BI tools collect, store, and analyze large data sets, helping companies make high-level and tactical business decisions. These tools can present data through:

Dashboards
Cloud data services
Data warehouses
Data discovery tools

Who is Business Intelligence for?

Business intelligence tools are, technically speaking, available for any type of company from enterprises to small businesses. That said, BI tools are not necessarily the best option for smaller organizations unless they have the technical resources to implement and use it.

If you’re looking to get up and running in a short timeframe, BI tools can be complicated to set up. Some companies will pay development firms for on-premise deployment and training due to the complexity of BI platforms.

While some BI tools offer high customization, these tools can also be difficult for non-technical users. In large companies, business intelligence analysts go through the data in BI tools. Then work with in-house data scientists to analyze the gathered data.

Keep in mind BI software is often expensive. A license’s cost averages roughly $3,000 per year.

The Difference Between BI and Business Analytics

While the differences are up to debate for many working in big data, here’s what you need to know:

Business intelligence looks at what happened in the past and how it happened. Often it looks at the big picture trends and patterns but does not consider the future.
Business analytics look at current data to predict future trends.

In other words, BI tools focus on advancing current operations. Business analytics can help update your operations to improve your future work.

While you can use both in tandem to boost your current and future operations, business analytics with a real-time monitoring dashboard can serve the same role.

Business analytics tools like Cyfe are easier to get started. You can get up and running in three easy steps.

Select a dashboard template.

2. Configure your data source whether it’s Google Analytics, QuickBooks, or other software.

Drag and drop to customize your dashboard.

Then use Cyfe’s dashboard to monitor and report on data in real-time.

Let’s say you own an eCommerce clothing brand. BI tools can reveal information such as:

Your most popular item last season by looking at sales figures
Where those customers live
What eCommerce channel drove the most sales

Then you may decide to set up ad campaigns targeting specific geo-locations.

In this case, Business analytics with a real-time dashboard can help you:

See what sites customers come from before landing on your site
Review your most successful ad campaigns
Monitor your eCommerce KPIs

After reviewing your business analytics, you may choose to reallocate your ad spend on specific networks or track data on a live A/B test.

Examples of BI

Here are a few more examples to illustrate how companies use business intelligence…

Amazon Analyzes Actions

Amazon uses big data to understand everything from where to keep inventory in specific warehouses to what customers buy in the same transaction. Using BI tools, Amazon can shorten shipping routes, provide personalized recommendations, and other great customer experiences.

Lowe’s Recovers Revenue

Lowe’s built out a data warehouse to help them look at lost revenue. Through BI tools they analyzed which stores were collecting delivery charges and which weren’t. Collections increased by $30 million the following year.

Seer Interactive Delivers Client Wins

Seer Interactive uses Traject Data SEO API to capture all the search terms their PPC clients’ potential customers use. With the API, they can capture low search volume keywords that provide a great ROI to their clients.

Tools for Business Intelligence

Now, let’s look at other popular business intelligence tools.

Tableau

Tableau, owned by Salesforce is the largest business intelligence tool. Tableau integrates with over 250 applications so you can pull data from files like spreadsheets to larger databases, including AWS.

Tableau has a huge community so you can ask questions in forums or even get certified as an expert on their platform.

A few drawbacks to be aware of with Tableau:

To fully utilize the software, you can expect a steep learning curve.
Only admins can set up scheduled email notifications; other users would need to use custom Python code to create alerts based on specific parameters
Prices start at $840 per year for a Tableau license.

Domo

Domo touts how fast analytics can work within their cloud-based platform. “We maintain a sub-second average query response time,” said CEO and founder Josh James.

Along with their fast query time, Domo users can collaborate through messages and annotations on any data visualizations.

Like other BI tools, users can also set up benchmark alerts and other notifications.

A few factors to consider with Domo:

On-prem deployment is not available
Users report limited pivot table functionality
Platform does not provide dashboard access to non-users

Looker

Looker is a browser-based BI platform. Meaning the installation and maintenance support compared to an on-premise solution is far less. This Google-owned tool lets you share data via links instead of files and has extensive help resources to get you using Looker.

However, some Looker users report:

difficulty customizing Looker templates
slow application loading times
less functionality using the mobile app

Summing It Up

BI tools can help break down big data, but these tools can have a steep learning curve or require a ton of upfront investment to deploy. Working at a large scale and hiring people with technical skills to act as power users can pay off.

More lightweight business analytic solutions can help make smarter decisions for many agencies, small business owners, and other entrepreneurs. Try out Cyfe to help you review:

Current or past business results.
Establish benchmarks to continually improve.
Receive real-time alerts when there are clear changes in your most important metrics.

Phillip Paquette

The post What is Business Intelligence? How BI can power businesses appeared first on Cyfe.

The 20 Best Data Visualizations of 2020

Phillip Paquette — Wed, 04 Nov 2020 12:16:48 +0000

Data is beautiful indeed. Not only can you beautifully illustrate data, visualization also helps you more effectively communicate metrics.

But what data visualizations are setting higher standards in 2020? With the below best data visualizations of 2020, you’ll see how data visualizations can:

Highlight specific causes
Provide vital information so people can make informed health choices
Illustrate trends over time
Pinpoint issues backed by data

1. Coronavirus Riskiest Activities

Data visualizations can break down large amounts of information into an easily understood way. With the pandemic came many ambiguous situations where people weren’t aware of how much they are at risk.

The below data visualization by Information is Beautiful breaks down popular activities by the level of risk.

Data Source: New York Times, Reuters, NPR, SF Gate and others

Data Metrics: Risky activities ranked lowest to highest

2. Identifying Generational Gaps in Music

Visualization can also be an immersive experience. The digital publication The Pudding created a multimedia quiz where site visitors:

Provide their birth year so The Pudding can recognize what generation each visitor is a part of
Listen to clips of music and state whether how much they recognize a song from the 1990s as it plays
- Below the multiple-choice answers, anyone can see the percentage of each generation that knows the song

Data Source: First-party data gathered from users who complete the quiz

Data Metrics: percentage of people who recognize a song

The visualization is clear so that users know it’s a timed quiz and can see their answer history.

According to BuzzSumo, this visualization is the most shared content from pudding.cool with over 9,000 engagements.

3. V. Analytics' Trending Google Searches 2018-2020

The most upvoted r/dataisbeautful post this year isn’t a meme. It’s an effective time lapse of the top Google trending searches by state each day from 2018 to 2020.

Data Source: Google

Data Metrics: Google Trends search data

4. Demographics of the United States Congress

These pie graphs posted to r/dataisbeautiful use multiple data points compiled via spreadsheet to show how much state reps accurately reflect the US population. Anyone can see how demographics including religion, race, and gender compare with each political party.

Data Source: Pew – Faith on the Hill Pew Religious Survey, Congressional Research Service, US Census Congressional Research Service, and US Census

Data Metrics: Religious, ethnicity, and gender demographics

5. How Much Football is in a Broadcast Game

Everyone’s trying to be smarter with their time. A Five Thirty Eight article visualizes data to show how much action each pro sports league airs compared to game stoppage and commercials.

Data Source: University of Texas at Austin Sports Analytics Course

Data Metrics: Total time in minutes airing game action, non-action, and commercials

The distinct color palette helps make this graphic visually appealing.

6. Overall Inflation Versus College Tuition Inflation

A simple line graph can also say a lot based on the data. In this case, you can see the Chartr graph below shows college tuition rates outpace inflation.

Data Source: US Bureau of Labor statistics

Data Metrics: Inflation rate

7. How to Profit in Space: A Visual Guide

Beyond SpaceX, companies are looking beyond earth at business opportunities. This data visualization guide by the Wall Street Journal looks at satellites in orbit by originating country and use.

Data Source: US Space Surveillance Network, The Union of Concerned Scientists

Data Metrics: Satellites in orbit from specific countries and by usage

8. YouTube Channels Then & Now

The below data visualization looks at the top 100 YouTube channels last year compared to 2010. As a second data point, it also factors in how many more of the top channels today are from brands like WWE instead of individual producers. Though minimalist in design, the visualization leverages YouTube brand colors.

Data Source: Wayback Machine and SocialBlade.com

Data Metrics: YouTube channels with the most subscribers that are a YouTuber, mainstream celebrity, or corporation

Monitor data from your own channel using our YouTube dashboard.

9. The Effect of COVID-19 on Unemployment

This animated data visualization shows unemployment figures across the US at the height of the pandemic. Commercial real estate software company Sites USA used After Effects to show the data progression.

Data Source: Sites USA

Data Metrics: Unemployment rates by US county

10. Global Commodities

A spinning globe showing different commodities and locations is a natural fit. Clicking on any country on this interactive data visualization by Data FX shows the:

Gross amount for imports or exports
Global share as a percentage
Rank compared to other countries

Their site contains data on imports and exports spanning the last ten years.

Data Source: UN Comtrade Database

Data Metrics: Gross imports and exports ($) along with global share and rank

11. Most Popular Programming Languages

YouTube content creator Pie Chart Pirate put together this breakdown of the most popular programming language based on GitHub data. The pie chart looks at data starting in 2012, showing the decline in Ruby and emergence of Go as a programming language.

Data Source: GitHub

Data Metrics: GitHub pull request data

12. Public Companies Receiving PPP Loans

Companies are also using data visualization to keep publicly traded companies accountable.

After JP Morgan announced they are investigating the misuse of pandemic funds, Quiver Quantitative created a visually appealing bar graph with complementary colors showing public companies that received PPP loans and either returned the loan or did not.

Data Source: US Department of Treasury

Data Metrics: Market cap in millions and whether each company returned or did not return PPP loan

13. Disney Revenue Streams

Chartr used data from SEC filings and MacroTrends to share Disney’s revenue totals. The bar graph is effective because they provide additional context including:

How much their brand grew in revenue after Bob Iger stepped in as CEO
2019 revenue totals with the percentage of specific revenue streams

Data Source: SEC filings and MacroTrends

Data Metrics: Revenue by year and 2019 by revenue stream

14. Symbolikon

Michela Graziani created a large set of designs featuring ancient symbols from different civilizations throughout history. Symbolikon’s home page features the below visualization incorporating muted colors and an interactive map.

Data Source: Symbolikon

Data Metrics: Ancient symbols by origin

Site visitors can click on any icon within the map to find whether the Incas or another society used the symbol. Anyone looking to design with these symbols can purchase and download them.

15. Homelessness on the Rise in the UK

Data visualizations can also bring to light larger social issues. Viz for Social Good worked with Tomorrow Today, a nonprofit committed to ending homelessness, to create a series of graphics highlighting the homeless in the UK.

Data Source: CHAIN and various local authorities
Data Metrics: Vacancy rate and rough sleepers

Over 200,000 people have viewed the visualizations.

16. COVID-19 Hot Spots

With so many different data sources available, it can be tricky to try to decipher what’s going on. New York Times compiles the current hot spots by county across the United States via data from different state and local agencies.

Data Source: State and local agencies; population and demographic data from US Census
Data Metrics: Weekly cases by county

The legend above the map makes it easy to navigate and any site visitors can also highlight a specific county to view 14 day trends on the number of COVID-19 cases. Anyone viewing the data visualization can also toggle between total cases, deaths, and per capita.

17. Wealth Shown to Scale

Data visualization can also serve to communicate specific items. This graphic lets any site visitor scroll to see Jeff Bezos estimated net worth. His $200 billion in wealth is shown with a ruler-style length at the bottom, with $80 million representing the equivalent of an inch.

As any user continues to scroll, they can clearly see how much that truly is.

Data Source: Forbes
Data Metrics: Wealth of Jeff Bezos and richest people in the world

18. Data Grammar

Data Grammar contains a glossary covering different types of data visualization. Complimentary colors help show why specific charts work best based on the scenario. Black and white images seamlessly weave into the accompanying graphics.

Data Source: Juillet Juillet

19. Migration Waves

National Geographic looks at the migration patterns over the last 50 years with this infographic.

A few conclusions from this data:

Less than 10% of migrants are forced to flee
Most migrants are seeking a better life and move only when they can afford to

Data Source: National Geographic

Data Metrics: Emigration by number of people in a given year and country

The wave patterns in the graphic are both functional and aesthetic. The waves show increase while National Geographic uses their core brand colors of yellow, black, and white here.

20. Movies Critics Loved, But Audiences Really Didn’t

The biggest disparity for the Rotten Tomatoes Score between critics and audiences happened with the release of the Last Jedi. 93% of critics gave it a positive review, other viewers averaged a 56% score. The scatter plot graph by Information is Beautiful looks at other major film releases where big disparities occurred.

Data Source: Rotten Tomatoes

Data Metrics: % gap between audience and critics for Rotten Tomatoes of various films

Summing It Up

As you can see from these examples, visualizations create clear conclusions that anyone can quickly get. Still, the best data visualizations are only as good as the data displayed.

Use the above examples and Cyfe’s dashboard templates as a springboard to help you identify the most important data you can share, whether it’s for your personal life or business KPIs.

Phillip Paquette

The post The 20 Best Data Visualizations of 2020 appeared first on Cyfe.

Internet Marketing – Cyfe

Keyword tracking: What it is and how to do it

What is a data dashboard?

What is keyword tracking?

How to do keyword tracking?

1. Traditional keyword tracking

2. Local rank tracking

3. Using keyword tracking tools

Benefits of keyword tracking

1. Boosts your revenue

2. You can double down on what works for your website

3. Find solutions to traffic dips

4. It helps you monitor your competitors

5. Find new opportunities for your site

3 tips to improve keyword rankings in Google

I. Optimize your content

II. Avoid keyword stuffing at all costs

III. Be specific, concise, and clear

Conclusion

Burkhard Berger

YouTube SEO In 3 Steps To Expand Your Business’s Audience

YouTube as a search engine

1. Adjust your keyword research

2. Rethink your SEO tools

3. Find ways to boost engagement

Turning YouTube SEO into business growth

Drew Gula

4 Steps To Create A Stress-Free Pre-Launch Marketing Strategy

1. Set up a lead generation landing page

2. Plan your content strategy

First, write your core content

Then, start working on putting your product in natural context

Lastly, start looking for your content collaborators

3. Plan your product announcement campaign

4. Bring everything together using a pre-launch marketing dashboard

Ann Smarty

10 White Label Marketing Tools Digital Agencies Use To Drive Growth

Table of Contents

1. White Label Design Tool - Xtensio

2. White Label Reputation Management - Grade.us

3. White Label Video Creation Tool - Lumen5

4. White Label Invoicing & Payment Solution - Invoice Ninja

5. White Label SEO Reporting - AuthorityLabs

6. White Label Landing Page Creator - Landingi

7. White Label Project Management Tool - Notion

8. White Label Messaging Platform - SimpleTexting

9. White Label Email Marketing Platform - ActiveCampaign

10. White Label Dashboards & Reporting - Cyfe

Phillip Paquette

10 Essential Email Marketing KPIs and Metrics

Table of Contents

1. Delivery and Deliverability Rates

2. Open Rate (OR)

3. Conversion Rate

4. Click-Through Rate (CTR)

5. Click-to-Open Rate (CTOR)

6. Complaint Rate

7. Unsubscribe Rate

8. Bounce Rate

9. ROI

10. Revenue Per Subscriber/Email

Conclusion

Burkhard Berger

How to Measure Marketing With Attribution Models

Table of Contents

What are Marketing Attribution Models?

Why use Marketing Attribution Models?

The Most Common Marketing Attribution Models

1. First Click Attribution

2. Last Touch Attribution

3. Time Decay Attribution

4. Data-Driven Model

5. Linear Attribution

6. Position-Based Attribution

7. W-Shaped Attribution

8. Custom Attribution

How to Measure Marketing Attribution with Custom Models

Summing It Up

Phillip Paquette

6 Underrated Content Marketing KPIs and Why You Should Focus on Them in 2021