 Good afternoon everybody and welcome to day two of our Digital Marketing Conference. This is the first time we've run our popular conference as an online event. We hope that you'll find it interesting and you're able to take away some valuable insights and handy tips from our guest speakers today. Day one of the conference yesterday was brilliant, and we had two fantastic presentations from our speakers, Hannah Beauty and Katie Hart. If you didn't get a chance to join us yesterday, you'll be able to watch the recording on demand via the CIM YouTube channel. So onto today's lineup. Today we have presentations from Daniel Rouse and Anne Stanley on the latest digital marketing trends and what's new in search marketing. And then there's me, Phillip Preston, your host for today. So without further ado, I'd now like to hand you over to our first guest speaker today, Daniel Rouse of Target Internet. Over to you Daniel. Thank you very much indeed Phil and thank you everyone for being here. It's great to see so many of you here today. Let's go through and I'll tell you who I am and introduce myself and then we'll go through and talk about latest trends and what's really happening in the world of digital at the moment. Now what I'm going to try and do is give you a very, very practical guide, give you lots of tools that you can take away and use, take these trends and really talk about what they mean in practice to your day by day digital marketing activities. So I'm CEO of Target Internet. Target Internet is a company that works with lots of brands helping them to plan and implement their digital marketing. I'm founder of the digital leadership program which is an alternative to university and if you want to send a thing nice or nasty during the presentation then it's Daniel Rouse on Twitter and Target Internet on Instagram and I'm going to give you a load of resources as I say, but at the end I'll give you a toolkit where you can download all of those as well. So everything I'm going to go through, you don't need to write down all the web addresses, you'll get all of those in the toolkit at the end as well. So these are the kind of brands that we're working with every day helping these organisations plan and implement their digital marketing. So I'll bring in lots of examples from those people. I'm also a program director at Imperial College at the Business School in London which is where I'm actually sitting today. These are some of my lovely MSc students. We're actually sitting down with face to face again now and I've written a few books on the topic and I also do the digital marketing podcast. Now I bring this up not to try and get you to listen but to show you this, right? We're sitting there at Top 50 Global Business Podcast or thereabouts next to Reid Hoffman who started LinkedIn, Neil Patel there, we've got Financial Times, Radio 4 and all these other people and this costs almost nothing to produce. So why does it do so well? Well we focus on our target audience. Who's that? Marketers and digital marketers? What's their problem? They can't stay up today. A couple of years ago or a good few years ago when we started this we realised that our audience commute. They spend time on train and they're driving so they over-index in terms of listening to podcasts. So by taking that target audience, understanding their user journey and their challenges by using this channel we're able to get those people and we get about 80,000 downloads a week this and it is literally just me and a guy called Kieran Chatti so nothing particularly clever about it but always having that step back at the back of our minds of thinking persona user journey to make sure that we're really focusing on what we do where it fits in. Now in terms of the books I mentioned there's a few here I'm not trying to sell your book I promise but just to let you know there are some chapters that I'll send through the toolkit that you can download if you want those as well. So let's put this in context and we always talk about this when we talk about trends. This is a little screenshot from Internet LiveStats. Internet LiveStats shows me what's happened so far today and the one I'll draw your attention to in the middle of the screen is the one that says how many blog posts have been written so far today over 4 million. If you want people to read your blog posts it's getting increasingly difficult. What we've also seen that I'll come to in a moment is we do a skills benchmark with the Chartered Institute of Marketing every year and we look at how skills are progressing and what we've actually seen is over the last two years during the pandemic content marketing skills went backwards. So people haven't been improving their skills necessarily but it basically means there is more and more content and the quality of that content is not inherently better so we've got some challenges around that. More videos viewed on YouTube than search is done in Google that's wildly misleading like a lot of stats can be in digital marketing because that's people starting videos not necessarily actually watching. The average YouTube video now has four views and that's generally by the person that uploaded that video in the first place. Lots of other videos are getting billions of views but we've got a lot of noise and this has been the case for years and whenever I've done one of these trends webinars over the last 10 years this noise has just got worse and worse and worse. If you combine that with skills not moving forward as quickly as they could do which I'll talk about, we've got a real challenge. However, what it means is that if we can actually make sure that we do better than average we've got a great opportunity to stand out with all of this stuff as well. So I want to bring you to this idea of the hero hub and hygiene model and what this basically says is there are three types of content and I want to try and look at that but try and apply it in practice. So hygiene content is the stuff that you've got and it basically should be the best answer to what do you do. So we need to optimize it for the search engines and we're very lucky to have Anne here who's going to talk about the latest trends of search. So I need to make sure that I'm answering that question effectively. Hub content is what we're obsessed with in marketing. It's that stuff that we create that basically engages our audience and as we've just seen the world has probably got too much hub content. We're pumping out loads of low quality hub content and it's not inherently the best stuff in the world. Hero content is the stuff that really drives return on investment for us. It's the content we create that drives engagement, drives traffic, but it keeps doing that in the long term. So I just want to talk about how we go about doing that from a very practical process point of view and it really means thinking about our content, our social media, our search optimization and bringing those things together so let's kind of get into that. But what we really want is every piece of content we create, every piece of hub content to be exceptional and to end up being hero content. So for example, I create some content, put it onto my website and I socialize it, I tweet, I Facebook, I LinkedIn and so on and that drives some social traffic and some social engagement. But then because I've created social signals for Google, Google picks this up and I want to rank really high in Google so that I'm getting traffic for this particular content every single month. So if I go in and I look at my analytics, I can see here under Google Analytics, under my behavior reports, my site content. So this is basically telling me my most popular content and I can see there's a number of pages here and in them have these kind of 91,000 page views over January. I can see the blog posts that are most popular. So top 10 highest paid bloggers, how to get Google Analytics, what is data scraping, how can I use it? Now what I don't know at this stage looking at this is where is this traffic actually coming from? So if I then drill into this, I'm going to go through and click on to one of these particular listings that is the what is data scraping, how can you use it? You can see now 2,940 visits. This isn't coming from social anymore. 2,671 of them are actually coming through from Google Organic Search and we've got a little bit of Bing in there, Google Classroom, DuckDuckGo which is a newly popular search engine that's really focused on privacy. Direct traffic, that's people typing in my website address or a bookmark. So what this tells me is I've created content, socialized it but this has now become hero content because actually we wrote this content five years ago and we do update it regularly but the point being that actually now every single month I'm getting traffic from this from Google which means the return on investment of that one blog post is huge because I know that if I conversion rate my website from visitor to lead is about 3%, every month this is driving leads. So rather than just creating a blog post, getting a spike in traffic might only be 30 visitors then another blog post, another 30, it's exhausting. So we very much suggest take a step back, do less but do it better and we're really seeing this as a trend with our clients who are really taking notice of this net. So why does this rank well? Well what we did is go out and look at what other content was out there and research the topic and then work out what do people want, how can we do this better than anyone else? There's nothing particularly dramatically clever about it but we realize lots of people are searching the question what is data scraping? So we've got the search phrase in there but then we had a hook, how can you use it? Make it clear, this is going to be a kind of tutorial. It's going to be really practical for the audience. So this is the actual blog post itself and it just says what is data scraping, how can you use it? It's then got a big long tutorial underneath but it's broken down with videos as well. Now why is that important? Well it's really important because the dwell time on this page is how long people are staying on the page is going to impact our search rankings as well and all the research we've done over the last six months has shown us there's quite a direct connection between how long people stay on your pages and actually that will have an improvement in your rankings and Anne will go into all the other factors about the search and what's changing and so on as well. So at the beginning of this blog post we have a little video explainer and all it's basically doing is explaining what it says in the blog post but that's encouraging that about 30 or 40% of us that like to watch video rather than reading to actually stay on the page a bit longer. It's good for those users, it drives engagement but it also goes through and means people stay longer. That's the signal to Google and that goes through and improves my rankings as well. So we thought about the content that people want. We've made sure that the content we've done is a better answer to the question than anyone else. We've made sure we're thinking about improving the dwell time on the page and that then turns that hub content into hero content. So when we're thinking about that this is a screenshot from the Moz website. So if you're not familiar with the chat on the screen this is Rand Fishkin. Rand started Moz. He now runs a website called Spark Toro that I will talk about in just a moment. But he came up with this idea of 10x content. If you haven't come across this I definitely recommend the video. We had Rand on our podcast a little while ago thinking about that as well. And what he basically says is that if you want to rank number one content you want to stand out from all of this noise. Do less but do it better. But actually what you need to do is quite an in-depth process and it's not easy to do. So I definitely advise watching this video afterwards but basically go out there and work out what are the 10 best bits of content on this particular topic. And then really think about how could we do it better. But not how can we do it one time better. How can we do it 10 times better? That's actually quite a hard thing to do. So you need to go if you need to gain insights. You need to understand what's out there. What are people engaging with? What's the most popular content on this topic? It may be that you're a better answer. It may be that you present it in a different way. It may be you do something particularly unique in this content but unless you do that your content is not going to get the engagement. It's not going to get the delight of your target audience and it's not going to achieve those rankings that you wanted to achieve because you're competing with so much other content and that's just getting worse and worse and will continue to over time as well. Now this is hard to do but it's really worth that investment in time. So a couple of tools that can help with this. This is a screenshot from SparkToro. So this is Rand's new tool and SparkToro, this is the free version by the way and they're all in the toolkit that I'm going to give you at the end. This basically allows you to put a topic in. I've put in digital marketing in this case and it's going to give me a load of insights about people that are interested in that topic. What phrases they're using, what the hashtags they're using, what social accounts they follow, what websites they visit, what podcasts do they listen to, what YouTube channels they go to and what press accounts do they follow. As well as giving me the big ones you can see are the social accounts like HubSpot and Mars and SearchEngine that. It also gives me what it calls some hidden gems. So these are the small ones that still quite a considerable amount of people are listening to. This is phenomenally useful for working at what's popular but also thinking about outreach. So if I give an example, I said we do this skills benchmark that I'll talk about in a moment. If I want someone else to be talking about that I could reach out to maybe Ian as you can see on the right hand side of the screen here and say like Ian, we've got this report and I don't just want you to publish it. What could I create from our data that no one else has got that would be good for your audience? So again I'm offering them something really specific and really unique for their website. That's going to drive engagement with that audience that in turn could drive links back to my website and so on. It's a great tool. You can have a play around with the free version. You get 10 free searches a month. Similar web, I'm sure some of you are familiar with this but they've just updated this in the last few days if you haven't seen. So similar web, you haven't got analytics for your competitors very clearly. But actually what this tool will do is try and estimate analytics for any website that you put into it. So I put the CIM website in this case and it's gone through and tried to estimate the traffic for the CIM website, where that traffic is coming from. Now because I've got access to the CIM's analytics as well I can see how good is that. And actually what we're seeing is it's increasingly accurate. Now you don't compare your analytics to similar web analytics. You want to do apples to apples. So comparing one to the other. But essentially it's identified here competitors, similar websites, how many visits things and getting that will show me their most popular content where that traffic is coming from. So again a really good research tool to try and understand audiences, competitors, the marketing channels that are being used and so on as well. And that can help us research this content that's really stand out and being exceptional. Another one that's particularly useful in this case this is BuzzSumo. BuzzSumo allows me to put in a topic or a domain and it will find me the most shared content on that topic or on that domain. So great one where you can put your competitors in and it will essentially allow you to go through and to see all the stuff on the website was most popular. So I've gone in here and put Dave Chaffee's website in smartinsights.com publishes some brilliant content and I can see better marketing campaign briefs. So that kind of tells me people are interested in seeing maybe case studies or templates. So that could bring me some ideas. Top trends in marketing. Okay well we know that trends are popular all here today. Healthcare content marketing. Okay that's interesting. So why is that getting shared? I'm going to start to look at that a little bit as well. So really useful tools for understanding what competitors are doing. What's the most popular topic on any particular content area and then thinking about how can I do less but do it better but make it exceptional because that's going to drive social engagement, search traffic, it's going to actually get the interest of my target audience, build my brand and I've got the ability then to go through and try and get you to do something else. So some other changes are going on. There's a lot of privacy changes going on at the moment. You might not be aware of this one. This is one where Apple have basically come out and they've changed the way that any Apple mail allows people to see open rates. So in your email service provided you send an email out you will get your open rates and click through rates. The way the email open rates are calculated is that in your email somewhere there is a little hidden image and that hidden one pixel image when it loads I know that you've opened the email and I also know your location because I get your IP address. So things like MailChimp and all those many email service providers will record that. What Apple is saying, look you didn't ask that. You didn't ask as a user for that data to be exposed therefore anyone that's using Apple mail we are no longer going to expose that data. So what you might think is that means that your open rates will be lower because you're not going to see anyone opening your emails. Not actually true. What happens is that essentially Apple loads that image for everyone automatically to kind of cache it in the background. So it looks like everyone that's got Apple mail of any type that you send your email through has opened it even though they might not have done. So if you've suddenly recently see your open rates go up and you've been very pleased with yourself and you've reported to your team look how brilliant our emails are. I'm afraid it might be this change in iOS. We're seeing changes in privacy elsewhere as well. So this is something that we're seeing in Safari and Google are going to be doing in the future as well and that is blocking third-party cookies just to give this some context. If I go to your website you can set a cookie on my machine and that's a first-party cookie because I've been to your website you're the first party set in the cookie. However, if I go to a website like the Daily Mail there might be 150 different ad networks placing ads in front of me and cookieing me. Those are those third-party cookies and a lot of people aren't happy about them being tracked by things that I didn't necessarily directly opt in for as well. I put a link onto the page. We wrote a big review of this at the end of 2021. Safari already starts to block these. We're starting to see this happening in Google Chrome in about I think about 18 months time as well. It's why lots of us have got ad blockers. People are more aware of privacy. What does that mean to mark this? It means two things. It means that one, on things like Google ads and Facebook ads we are not going to have as many targeting options at the moment. That will be replaced by machine learning and I'll talk about that in a moment but it also means that because people are more aware of privacy we need to be more careful about these things. So there's definitely a bit of a kind of trend going on with this and that's combined with it's concerned about privacy but also about we're seeing more AI marketing starting to appear. So what I've basically got here is a little screenshot from a great website called Generated Faces. Generated Faces, if you need a screenshot of someone that's a particular age, gender, ethnicity you might not have appropriate stock photography. If you go to this website I can put those details in and there are nearly 3 million faces I can select from. The thing is none of these people exist. They are all computer generated faces. So there's this concern about trust going on data. We're starting to see more of this kind of stuff where actually I'm showing you a face of someone but that person doesn't really exist. So this is discreet and this is a fantastic tool that allows you to edit audio and video really easily. But essentially I can go in here I can upload my podcast, my video audio and it will automatically transcribe that for me. So that's phenomenally useful already and I can go and get that transcription and use that for things like YouTube and so on. But what it also does is it allows me to edit the audio by editing the text. So essentially I can go in and maybe I said something stupid in the podcast and I wanted to edit it out I just select that, hit delete and it will edit it out and seamlessly put that audio back together. Now that's pretty clever. The amazing thing about this is that because it's got hundreds of hours of my voice it learns my voice. If I forget to say something I can type it in and it's a feature called Overdub and it will automatically say in my voice I can basically deep fake myself almost immediately in real time you can download this, there's a free version of this that you can download, this is Descript.com So we're starting to see concerns about privacy more artificial intelligence in digital marketing the ability to deep fake which makes people think well can I really believe anything that I'm seeing. So what does all this mean? We can't have third party cookies we need to focus on owning our relationships that means get people to our website so we can set a cookie direct. We need to think about building community so we own that relationship but it's a two-way relationship as well. So what does that kind of mean in practice? Well we want to get back to basics to some extent. So there is this increasing awareness of kind of ethics and there are suspicions of brand and actually a study at the CIM did recently kind of shows that actually people are more aware of this. So if I go through and logged into Google if I go to ads settings in Google it will tell me everything that Google knows about me. So for example which websites I've been on what it knows about my demographic what I've got an interest in and shown as well and what people are realizing is they're kind of seeing privacy as currency I'll give you some data but you need to give me something in exchange for that and if you're going to have that data you really need to use it in a trustworthy way and I'm really going to judge you on that but the thing is people are punishing brands for not using that data effectively in a study at the CIM did up to 70% of people are boycotting avoiding or punishing brands. So let's combine these things remove the cookies, increasing AI and we're not sure if we can trust what we see in here as well. So we need to build that community so that we own that relationship. So really simple example we decided okay how can we embrace this well let's go back to basics let's go back to email but we're going to do it better so we said okay subscribe to our email newsletter and we'll send you three tools, tips or techniques every month but we will never try and send you an ad and we'll never try and show you anything and actually if you reply to this it will come directly into my inbox now that means I get thousands of emails every time we send out a newsletter but I have a team that will help me then manage that and we'll reply to all of those people so bearing in mind that the average open rates for an email are about 20 to 22% and the average click through rates are about two and a half percent how does this email perform because you can see there's nothing particularly beautiful about it but the open rates 46, 47% which is great and then the click through rate is 24.3% not the click rate, the click through rate so that's off the charts compared to average 2.6 just by thinking about how we can own that relationship the point being is that you can reply now every email I put a question at the bottom and I ask my audience something and every time 16% of people there about answer that question directly with really long answers that's a lot of email for me to deal with but it's a huge opportunity I am speaking to my customers I am finding out what their needs and challenges are and we adjust our products we adjust our marketing campaigns based on that data so really important for us to be able to do that recently is this, we do this podcast and for ages people are saying why don't you do a video version and as you can see we have got faces that are very much designed for radio but we said okay, we'll try it out now the idea of this is that I live in Jersey in the Channel Islands so I'm sitting there Kieran is on the Isle of Wight and we all normally record in the two separate places in this case we use the tool called Riverside.fm and that allows us to record good quality audio video in each location and then it combines those things together and you think well why would someone want to watch a podcast? and actually in these videos we edit nothing out so we literally just go through and leave all the bloopers in and all the things we mess up and we fall over on but they get thousands and thousands of views because it makes that personal connection it humanizes the brand it gets people to kind of know us so that community building the humanization of the brand, who are my advocates internally that I can use you are 10 times more likely to engage with an individual than a brand so if you're using LinkedIn then it's fine having your brand on there but actually I want to have individuals and if I'm on Twitter it's fine having my brand on Twitter but actually having individuals in my organization sharing things can be really powerful as well so really thinking about how I can build that community so let's move on to some other things that we need to be aware of which is GA4, the new version of Google Analytics the current version that everyone is using is Universal Analytics the new version is GA4 eventually everyone will have to move to GA4 but don't worry it's going to be a good 80 months at least before that, that starts to be something you need to start thinking about what I would recommend actually at the moment is that Universal Analytics and GA4 have had their own bit of code that needs to go on to every page of your website you can have both running at the same time but what you'll notice if you do this is that actually GA4 is a very different beast to Universal Analytics that we're all probably more used to just to clarify the main difference the main difference in Universal Analytics is that it looks at pages loading whereas actually the GA4 looks at things happening within pages as well so essentially I can see you scrolling at a page I can see you playing a video all those different kinds of things as well look at maybe setting that up, having a new website I wouldn't move from one to the other yet because they're showing slightly different results still so it's kind of worth bearing in mind there may be that difference in the data but get it up and running and then you're going to have historical data in there as well the advertising standards agency and the IAB and various other bodies are moving to regulate influencer marketing more and this is a study 76% of Instagram influencers are hiding advertising disclosure so the bit where you have to put hashtag ad what they're actually doing is going through and putting in all their normal hashtags and then hiding the hashtag ad in there and that's legally compliant currently but it is not necessarily compliant with the spirit of the laws that are in place as well so we are going to see some more regulations so just be aware of that because one of the things we're concerned about is that if the law changes and you're working with an influencer does that apply to their previous posts so if they breach these new rules in a previous post you need to get that post revised or taken down so keep a look out for those things and obviously the CIM will be reporting on all of those all the time as well conversational design well if you're anything like 97% of us when you go through to a website and that chat bot comes up and it says hi can I help you probably think no no you can't you're actually really irritating conversational design is there to try and improve the functionality of chat bots so it's that whole piece about trying to be more of a diagnostic tool so rather than saying hi can I help saying well I know what you've done on my website previously I know what product you've got so I'm going to offer you some options and the likes of sales falls and HubSpot will allow you to do this so you can see an example here we've got a chat flow in HubSpot where we can sequence through a load of chat interactions at the moment it's all very bottom right hand side of the screen you can make this front and center of the experience so rather than navigating through menus I could do on a website as normal thinking about how actually I could use these conversational design to make it a diagnostic tool within my website to go through and actually understand my audiences and if you look at the likes of ASOS and pretty little thing they're doing a really good job of doing this in many cases as well now this isn't artificial intelligence that's this clever scripting but what we are seeing artificial intelligence more and more of is this this is in Google ads you'll see this in Facebook as well when you go and build a campaign rather than it going through and saying set your targeting options it's automatically selected automatic targeting and it says generally automated targeting can improve campaign performance by up to 20% so they're basically using machine learning to target your ads and increasing the build of ads as well you give them 10 different headlines 10 different sets of copy they're going to mix them up set up different versions this is great however it means that the performance of your campaigns may gradually improve over time as the machine learning algorithm learns and don't assume this is going to be better than manual targeting you might actually want to go through run a manually targeted campaign see what results you get then you would go through and run a automatic targeted campaign and see what results you get and then compare the two and see which is giving you the better return on investment so you need to look at visibility need to click through and then you need to look at what happens in your analytics afterwards as well but just bear in mind that some of these campaigns we're seeing results where it takes a couple of months for the campaign to really start running properly because the machine learning needs that level of data to actually go through and improve things but don't always assume it will do a better job than manual targeting but test it out and find out and this kind of brings us on to this whole kind of idea of analytics analysis so it's all very well us having analytics and maybe having GA4 and so on but it's really easy to misrepresent that data so I've just got a mock up here of a client's website and they didn't spoke to them, they're a bank and they said look we want to do more content marketing we did a load of content marketing training with them and they essentially embraced content marketing they said it's brilliant, ever since we've embraced content marketing we redesigned the website people are now staying three times longer which sounds alright the reality when we looked at the stat was quite different so what was actually happening people were coming through to the website and they were waiting about five seconds and they were clicking login to personal banking on the top right hand side of the screen then what happened is they redesigned the website and they moved that login button from the top right to the left hand side of the screen what now happens, people come in they wait about five seconds or so for the page to load and then they spend 10 seconds saying where's the button gone and eventually they click through and they log into personal banking that's it my visit has gone from five to 15 seconds my analytics as I have a 300% visit duration and I think brilliant people are staying three times longer in reality I've just annoyed my customers for 10 seconds so this ability to analyze analytics paint a picture with it is really really important and it's the big missing skill our skills benchmark tells us it's kind of going on at the moment and I'll talk about that skills benchmark in a moment so for free you can benchmark your team for free as well also what we're seeing is day rates for people that can do this are going through the roof so from a career point of view this is a great opportunity but it should be as marketers we're looking at data, we're drawing some sort of inference on that data I think this needs changing I could do this differently we then change something and then we look at the data again as opposed to just going through and holding up a chart once a month to look things are going up we really need to do that analytics analysis a bit more now with all of these things we get quite reliant on analytics and actually what we need to do is go beyond analytics analytics tells us the what it tells us what pages people have looked at what it doesn't tell us is the why and this is an absolutely brilliant tool there are lots of other tools out there that do these similar kind of things but this is a new one this is Microsoft clarity if you've got Google webmaster tools you can access this you can set an account up separately as well this goes on to my website and it essentially records people using my website now you need to make sure that your cookie policy tells people that this is one of the cookies you'll be using and what you're using it for people come in, it records people using this it anonymizes those visits and then I can go in and understand what's going on so there's a couple of really important things here first of all it says dead clicks this is people clicking on bits of the page that they can't actually click on now 14% is a really high number so we're immediately very concerned about that so I'll talk about that in a moment rage clicks is people just furiously clicking on the same bit of the page again and again that's quite low you don't want to see too much of that stuff so what are these dead clicks, what we went through we said have we got so many people clicking on our page repeating it where they can't click what we quickly realized is that people are going through and we've got lots of answers to questions definitions and things like that on our website they were essentially going through and copying pasting content off our website really stealing our content that's okay because there's lots of students lots of people studying, lots of people that are building strategies that use target internet as a resource so we think that's fine but let's add some pop-ups to the page then say download our complete cheat sheet for this data so you don't even need to do that or if you're studying marketing why don't you sign up for this free benchmark and so on so that was one insight the other insight is that we have a page on our website that's got two options one for individuals one for teams and people are going in and it says individual teams and individuals is already pre-selected and you're on the individual version of the page people didn't realize that they thought you had to click on individuals so we could see that in the video we could see how people are actually behaving and then we could take that and improve it so now when you click on that it scrolls you down to the right piece of content so it's good to have analytics it's good to analyze it let's go beyond that, let's actually see how people are interacting with the website, the other way of doing this incident is informal usability testing which is basically get five people, the represent your target audience to go through and to try and do things on your website observe them doing that and then just work out what they're struggling with you can do it over zoom, you can do it face to face because people shouldn't be already familiar with your website and there's a great study that came out from Imperial College and a few other places that basically said if you do informal usability testing with five or more people you will identify 85% of the problems with your website and that's pretty profound that's really important that actually only five people, not many of us do usability testing but actually it will identify those things that are going wrong on your website a lot of the time that we're not even aware of so definitely worth going beyond analytics and maybe look at some of these tools or doing some of that kind of testing so with all this change with the increasing levels of noise with artificial intelligence changes in cookies new AI targeting options what do we need to do, there's too much to think about take a step back to where I started this I was thinking about that podcast focus on the user journey who is your audience, split them into personas map out their user journey brilliant tool by the way, for doing that there's a free version of it, UX Pressure U-X-P-R-E-S-S-I-A dot com and it allows you to build personas and user journeys and map them out really easily and then look at where are the opportunities for improving your target audience's user journey and how could you kind of go about that what type of content is going to work and so on I just wanted to leave you with this I'll give the link through to this before I give you some other resources in a moment we do the digital marketing skills benchmark we publish this every year with the Child's Institute of Marketing and Partnership and it kind of shows where skills are and where they're progressing we test in analytics and data content strategy and so on we get people to actually test their skills using a load of questions, multiple choice questions and see what they know and what they don't know we've had over 7000 people globally go through and do this it's very rigorous data the outer edges of the circle represent 100% and you can see there's this blue bit in the middle that basically represents how well people skills are and you know we don't expect it to be 100% but you would hope it to progress on a kind of yearly basis what we've actually seen is that what's happened in the last two years is that technology continues to move at pace and actually it's accelerating because of more and more people moving online because of the pandemic but we haven't been going to conferences we haven't been attending as many courses there haven't been as many things like this unfortunately skills have actually gone backwards and the areas they've gone backwards the most are analytics and data and content marketing there has been a bit of improvement in email marketing maybe because we're over relying on it and maybe general marketing we've gone back to basics a bit but what this means is that we have got a skills crisis within digital marketing as well and it's great to see huge amounts of you here today on these kind of events it's great that the CLM are organising these events because we all need to commit to lifelong learning and this is going to continue to change at pace as well so if you're interested in the skills or you can download the report for free there's no email sign up or anything like that you can actually go through and benchmark your own skills if you want to as well so first of all every website that I've mentioned today if you go through to digital marketing talk you just google that it will be number one in google and we update that every two or three months and it's got every tool I've mentioned and a load of others in there as well it doesn't aim to be a definitive list but it is a list of what we think are the best free tools that are out there and it's broken down as categories so if you want search keyword research tools, social media monitoring tools all those kind of things all in there if you want to benchmark your own skills if you've got a team of up to 30 people so we're only doing this on a very limited basis you can go in, register on there you can do it automatically as an individual if there's a team it will send out the details so your team can log in to do that and you'll get back a report on where your skills are we'll do that anonymously, we're not going to share it with your boss don't worry but you can see where your skills stand at the moment and it will make some recommendations for free content and it will be useful for you as well so go in and do that you can also go there and download the whole report so there's some really great stuff in there Gemma Butler who's the marketing director at the Charter Institute of Marketing has written some stuff for us as well and there's really big analysis into industry by industry what's happening where the strengths and weaknesses are and how that's trending over a recent time as well that's it in terms of content for me we've got the toolkit we've got the benchmark if you're on the podcast it's on the page as well but if you want to get in contact afterwards it's just Daniel Rolls on LinkedIn and you're very welcome to connect up there Daniel Rolls, one word on Twitter and Target Internet is me on Instagram I'm really happy to connect to those places and have any further conversations as well so it's now time if there's any questions if you've got any questions and talk me through them so what have we got, Phil? Okay, that was brilliant thanks very much Daniel great presentation again and to say we'll be hearing from our second guest speaker Anne Stanley shortly we've already got some questions lined up so thank you very much if you've already posted we'll try and get through as many as we can in the next 10 to 15 minutes or so okay Daniel are you ready for this these are going to come at you in chronological order I think to begin with so how can we deal effectively with the email click-through rate issue with Apple email someone has asked so just to clarify with that it only impacts open rate so your click-through rate will still be accurate it means you just have to accept that the open rate is not going to be accurate but we set again this new benchmark so what I mean is that it's going to skew upwards but then we just compare Apple to Apple so we basically go okay it's this level at the moment let's try new times of day and let's try and make sure that we improve that so there's not much we can do other than being aware of it and then using that as our new benchmark level if you're trying to see the average benchmarks if you search MailChimp open rates they've got a great report that they do regularly that will give us what those averages are and we can benchmark ourselves against that great thanks that's really useful a specific question about Riverside I work in internal comms starting podcasts with management I think Riverside would be great but is there a way to take out mistakes yeah so what you get with Riverside FM or basically I'm sitting somewhere, someone's sitting somewhere else if I've got a decent microphone and a decent camera it will record at my end and the other end and it combines those but that actually gives you separate tracks and it actually gives you an editor as well so you can either download those tracks and edit them in something like the band or the audio or you can go through and use final cuts to do the video but there are some basic tools built into it the other thing it does is it's quite nice is you can take excerpts of those videos and you can use them for social posts so it means it gives you something you can kind of internally or externally you could share little clips to try and get people engaged as well so yeah it does give you those editing options and you can take mistakes out and that's the nice thing what we need to say to people is that we're going to record this no pressure you get it wrong, no problem at all it's obvious to make you look good and you put people at ease and it means they're more likely to get engaged as well one thing I would say though is because you're using video as well two things to think about one is the webcam that's in your computer is probably not up to it so the camera I've got up here is a Full HD 60 frames per second kind of thing and also the audio quality you want maybe a decent microphone this is a Yeti Blue which is a nice quality microphone and those things it will just up the production quality a little bit and they'll just plug both directly into your laptop as well okay great, really useful tips thanks for that so there's a question around the email campaign you mentioned at the start of the presentation I think can you give an example of what a question to your list looks like in an email that gets response, any general tips on that? yeah so what we do first of all there's a little intro that says this is what we're doing and this is what we're up to at the moment, literally a paragraph then there's three things tips, tools, technique and then there's this literally a simple question at the bottom and it says what marketing books you're reading at the moment because books are always out of date and anything good or what's the one marketing thing you're struggling with at the moment or if you're not a paying customer of us why not what is it about your product that I don't like so we're answering quite open question sometimes and about 16% the audience will reply in depth, I mean I get paragraph off paragraph of responses so if I make it really clear the tone of voice of the email is from me and if you reply to it it will come directly to my inbox and combining that with having a podcast and video and things like that so people feel a more personal connection it has a huge impact now if you're going to do this in a really big brand you would probably have a number of different brand ambassadors and you need somewhere managing the volume of emails and things that come back but a lot of people say we can't do that we're a big brand there's too many emails that come back when you think too many of our customers are speaking to us that's what we need to readjust our thinking I think so big opportunity but just what are their challenges not really about our product but more about their challenges that seems to work pretty effectively and people are happy to share and then we can shape our marketing to help them solve those okay great I just noticed that there's a few questions people asking can you say again the name, various websites and tools etc but I guess the thing to do really is to download the handout from today's session but also to go to the digital marketing toolkit everything you've mentioned is included in that isn't it Daniel? Yeah absolutely so if you just google digital marketing toolkit it will be number one in google it's a PDF download and it's got everything in there as well the ones that people always love are Descript.com which is the audio editing one generated faces there's a load in there so yeah if you get that toolkit you'll find them all and they're all in the slides from today as well so you can download that under the handouts as well great just returning to the subject of click-through so yesterday we were told how click-through rates are not necessarily a useful metric to measure what are your thoughts on this and what metrics would you prioritize as most valuable to analyze yeah so click-through is a funny one because we obsess with click-through rate but the reality is this because someone clicks doesn't mean they'll do anything what I would always work down to is I set goals up in analytics so a goal is you know people doing the thing I want them to do filling in the form buying the product staying a certain duration of time once I've done that I've got reports in google analytics like multi-channel funnels multi-channel funnels is a form of attribution modeling and what I suddenly get is look I can see how many people actually did the thing I wanted them to do but actually what are all the steps in their journey because for example you might get a click from facebook you might then get four google searches then two direct visits where I've already bookmarked you and then I fill that forming well I need to know that facebook at the beginning was part of that journey so I would always come back to set goals up within analytics and then look at attribution modeling and multi-channel funnels is quite a nice easy way of doing that it's a report that allows you to see that anyone that ended up doing the thing I wanted them to do what channels did they use on the way there I don't really care about the order they were in I just I can look at that but I want to see how much did email contribute how much did social media contribute and then I can start to work out the value that channel is actually providing okay go on to subject of influences there so do the ASA regulations apply to influences you might work with that are based outside of the UK it's it's basically down to the fact that if you are a UK brand your brand is regulated by it so essentially if you are partnering with a brand what they're saying is it's not just the influence that's responsible it's actually the brand that's going to be responsible as well so if that influencer is in Dubai and the Lord didn't apply to them then they're not responsible but your brand will be I think also just from a point of view of best practice it's good to do this it's the same look you need to put that hashtag in you can't hide it away it needs to be really clear where that is and so on as well so just be careful of that because that's a bit of a change where the brand starts being responsible the law's not in place yet we haven't had clarification yet but that's as we understand where it's going to change to yeah it's becoming a bit of a hot topic this one isn't it sir you mentioned the statistic around I think it was when you were doing the user testing you had five subjects and you'd uncover 85% of all the things that were going wrong somebody's asked what was the source of that research so there's a there's a big study that Imperial College did there's actually been three or four as well from the US it just kind of shows this lovely chart that basically says that how many test users you've got what percentage of the problems you identify and it goes up pretty steeply when you get up past about four or five users and then it creeps up gradually after that I think the point of it is more than anything else is that you don't need a huge amount of people testing your website now when I say testing if we think about what the definition of usability is it's looking at a specified person trying to achieve a specified goal in a specified context so your specified person is your particular target audience the goal is like try and do something on our website and the context is kind of getting into context of why they're doing it then what you're testing is could they the effectiveness the efficiency and the satisfaction and I'm glad I've remembered that definition and basically saying can they do it how quickly could they do it did they like doing it so you then go through and say right try and go imagine you're in this scenario try and go and do this on our website and then you watch them doing you make observations of where they go wrong and so on as well and they said could they do it yes they did it in a reasonable period of time how long did it take well it's time let's look for any outliers and then ask them did you like that was that good and they'll give you some feedback if you do that enough times maybe it's five times maybe it's 20 times you will start to tease out why is everyone on the website doing that you'll start to see that they're they're doing things in a particular way you go oh we need to fix that it was like our button that everyone was clicking on that didn't do everything it was really important that we kind of replace that okay great thank you so here's a question around GA4 does GA4 incorporate some of tag manager's capabilities like track events such as video views and scrolling yeah it does so I mean I would still recommend using tag manager to put in the the analytics code which you've still got that flexibility but we actually had events within universal analytics but it meant you had to add extra code so quite often we'd use tag manager for adding that extra code in in reality the main thing that GA4 is doing differently is looking within the page so things like watching videos and scrolling and clicking on pdf to automatically generate events now so a lot of that just is there automatically so I can not only see what page is looking at I can see oh you scrolled and you watched the video and you stayed for a certain period of time it also fixes the problem with visit duration generally speaking universal analytics the last page you're on it doesn't record the time that you're on that page for it discounts it so it leads to quite an accurate measurement of time so it improves that as well so it does fix some real fundamental flaws the problem is at the moment it's quite a different product it's missing a load of stuff that's in universal analytics and it's got a lot of stuff that's very different so there's a bit of a learning curve it's going to go with that as well okay so here's a big question for you what do you think the future looks like for digital marketing based on your insights do you think there will be any new trends what we're seeing I mean there's a emergence of technologies so first of all fragmentation of social media we are seeing more and more people on multiple platforms not just one easy one to get to with them as well we're starting to see shifts away from the major platforms so fragmentation is one thing we're seeing as well the AI thing is kind of appearing everywhere so the whole machine learning so I don't mean like conversational chatting to AIs but I mean the fact of AI based targeting of ads algorithms that learn websites that are basically giving me content that's personalised to me based on that machine learning so what we're seeing is a trend towards is that when people join their data up they can use machine learning for completely automating the experience that people have I get the right ads at the right time the content of the website is adjusted to me to chat what's talking about the right things so actually more algorithm based marketing there's also a risk with that is that we're just to assume everyone fits into that algorithm and we start giving people the wrong stuff but there'll be a lot of movement into that algorithm based stuff there's lots of discussion at the moment about the metaverse because of what Facebook have done yes but not yet I think we're a bit ahead of things you're going to see lots of NFTs non-fungible tokens coming into marketing why? well collectibles first of all but also privacy so if you think if you can put all of your privacy into something and improve that you own it and then you can take that with you from website to website but no one else can kind of steal it there's some things your privacy that will get quite interesting but I think both of those are in the further future they're not quite mainstream yet but yeah basically algorithm based marketing and an awful lot more fragmentation and more noise and the skills gap getting worse and that stuff is accelerating so quickly those marketers that can really stay up to date and commit to lifelong learning are those that are really going to stand out and succeed okay and there's a quite a few questions actually from viewers around the skills gap so I guess to generalize how would you recommend that people upgrade their skills apart from taking your courses and reading your books Daniel yeah I think we all learn in different ways and I think it's absolutely fine to accept that some people watch videos, some people read reading you know books is a challenge because they're generally out of date by the time they're published which is why we keep on to new editions of things but I would say find your format of learning whether that's podcast, video or anything else but fit it into your week it has to be a commitment to ongoing learning so I like podcasts because I can listen to why I'm doing something good which is why our podcast works well for us as well but also think about different types of interactions and then building it into an organization so things like e-learning people can do in their own time one of the things we do with Target Internet is that we're going to organizations and say how do we encourage the uptake of that online so it's things like right we're going to do this bit of e-learning and we're going to do a lunch and learn on Wednesday and we're all going to get to everyone and talk about what we learn and what we'd like to what we didn't like so it's just having all those different interventions in place and committing to that as part of your week it has to be diarised in your diary it will get pushed and you have to protect that time in your diary so it's really hard thing to do especially when you have like back-to-back zoom calls but the fact that all of you are here on an event like this shows that these are the people that are committing to learning so I really encourage that and implore it We've really run out of time for questions I'm just going to ask you one more and then we'll have to move on to Anne's presentation so final question how do you calculate and prioritize does marketing need the most improvement? So this idea of marketing channel mix and I'll try and keep this brief how much Facebook, how much Google, how much this, how much that there is no right answer and it's different for every organization, for every client and it changes over time as I used to channel adjust so what you need is a measurement dashboard that basically says what are we measuring for each channel but how much is that channel contributing and we can work that out by looking at that attribution modeling like multi-channel funnels so I would look at that and go right, email's not contributing much, can we improve it? Try all the different things it still doesn't work, maybe that's not the area to focus on we're particularly guilty of this with social, we just focus all the effort on social, it doesn't really give us results but we carry on doing it so I think take an attribution modeling basis to this and if you can build a dashboard if you search digital strategy measurement framework we've got a step-by-step blog on this it will be number one in Google and it will talk you through how to build a dashboard so digital strategy measurement framework and that will answer that in detail and give you all the things that I haven't got time to go into now that's brilliant thank you so much Daniel some really great questions from our viewers and some real great answers and hot tips for you as well don't forget that you can download the free marketing toolkit from the Target Internet website as well okay so let's move on to our next guest speaker Anne Stanley from Annika Digital so when you're ready Anne it's over to you hi everybody it's great to be here so what I'm going to talk about today is what's new in search engine marketing I've covered some of the basics but I have dived into some of the aspects in a little bit more detail it's great to follow Daniel because some of the things he was talking about I was going to talk about as well but what I thought we'd do to start with is we do a couple of polls to try and get an understanding of the level of knowledge within the room so we're going to do the first poll are you or your organisation undertaking search marketing that is SEO or PPC most of us know as none of that and you can actually tick more than one answer because some people will be doing it themselves and they'll have an agency as well so interesting yes about 46% of the people either them or their team are responsible for SEO and PPC about 20% of you aren't actually doing it in your current organisation and then 27% it's someone else's responsibility and then there's a few of you that are actually outsourcing this which is quite common and then a few of you are doing it for other people excellent so my next question is my next poll is what's your current knowledge of SEO and this is just about SEO because more of the slides are about SEO so that's really interesting 72% just have a basic understanding 33% are responsible writing content that's good 23% are involved in the technical aspects now that the last one's most surprising I guess digital PR is a new and up and come in a sort of field but there's more and more of an integration between SEO and PR particularly digital PR as we know that links are becoming more and more important to actually get your site optimised okay so my name is Anne Stanley I'm the founder and a chief executive CEO of Annika Digital I've actually been in digital marketing for 20 years this year and it's also Annika's 15th birthday this month so we've got a big party tomorrow so we're going to be celebrating 15 years interestingly there's not that many digital marketing agencies that have been around for more than about 10 years so Annika is the set was founded in 2007 there's 27 of us and we have about 45 clients most of the clients that we work with are about 2000 of B2B but we also do a lot of work in science manufacturing and we do a mix of e-commerce and lead generation and we work with some quite well-known brands like Experian Pal X Dykeman shoes it was quite a mix and what we have done is we've tried to for our 15th birthday we've identified the four sectors that we mainly work in which is around construction STEM local we do a lot of training we've just launched a three month training course in the East Midlands which has been free for the majority of people for over 100 learners so we're doing quite a lot of tender work with the local leps and Chamber of Commerce and we're also doing a lot of work around manufacturing as well so that's e-commerce so what I'm going to cover today is I'm going to do a quick reminder of the key digital marketing channels I know that there's a few students in the room and some of you may not be aware of this so this is just a sort of an acronym that you can use to remind you and then got we also use similar web we've got a paid version of similar web I really recommend it but it's it's a reasonable investment every month for the paid version but it's brilliant so I'm going to go through the search to find out what drives website traffic for different sectors so I've got some examples there and I'm also going to show I've got a slide from my 2018 presentation I did at Ducksford and I'm going to put exactly the same searching and just show you how much things have changed over the last well over the last four years and I'm also going to do the same search in some of the other search engines so Danny mentioned go but also you've got Yahoo and Bing and I'm going to talk a little bit about how search engines work so I'm just going to mainly focus on SEO from this perspective and I'm not going to try and teach you all to suck eggs but what I did want to do is by just explaining the basics of that I could then go through the main algorithm changes that's happened in 2021 and what we're expecting to happen in 2022 and I've also got a couple of tools in there so for example there is something that allows you to check your mobile speed and page experience and I've got a URL that you can just go and run it and see how you're getting on and that's going to be really important because it's now going to apply in the future to desktops as well and I'm going to do a little bit on the growth in paid advertising and how those results have changed and what's been going on with that and then I know that Dan did quite a lot on tracking and analytics but you may have read in the news that the EU has well attempted to ban Google analytics for privacy issues so I just want to bring you up to date with what's happening with that and also what's happening with some of the tracking of ads that we talked, Dan talked a lot about Apple but of course things are moving in Google's world as well. So without further ado I'm just going to bring up an acronym that we use and we call it POET so this is quite a good slide for you to use as a sort of a memoir of some of the many channels that we actually use in digital marketing so paid is everything that you have to pay for which is the stuff that you do yourself so this is the stuff that you control your content, your emails I mean you can have webinars and podcasts on there we actually run a webinar every Friday morning and that's out in the same way that Dan was describing he uses podcasts, we use webinars as our route to market and I've got the schedule for the next couple of months to share with you later then you've got the earned media which definitely started off very much old but if you think about something like social media where you are reliant often on other people sharing your content it's sometimes the most difficult bit it's also the part that's most likely to cause problems both from a point of view of lack of control but if it works well you can get viral spread of your content and that's ideally what everybody wants and then I've just added an extra one into this which is called technical it makes it very easy to remember because everybody can remember poet but the reason we've added this is because as you saw with some of the stuff that Dan was doing you can't really do advertising and marketing without having a really good understanding of analytics, tracking use of things like Google data studio for data visualisation and dashboards UX and conversion rate optimization these are all the stuff which overlaps with your web developer but web developers are often not that good at this so it sort of almost is a bridge between marketing and what the web developer does and it's a really sought after skill there's a lack of people that understand this and it's an area where you often have to train people up that maybe are doing paid ads to be able to do some of this stuff because it's an essential part of what you need to do to actually manage your marketing the other half of this is some of the newer technologies such as voice search AI machine learning internet, API and product feeds but also what I haven't mentioned is things like if you look at something like Spotify which I know is within the news a lot recently they use almost like a programmatic way of finding their audiences in the same way that Sky's AdSmart works on a similar basis where you're actually choosing the audience rather than having the run of a program or of a channel so things are definitely moved so a lot of the types of advertising that previously we would have called traditional has now sort of now overlaps with the digital world and they're now converging and so when you look at something like similar web I've chosen three examples here so I've chosen home and garden which is I think there's about 50 websites of all different sizes some of them are quite well known so you've got things like John Lewis in Wayfair but then you've got a lot smaller ones in this bespoke group that I made and what you'll notice is that when you've got a lot of well-known brands there's a lot of direct traffic and you also get a lot of organic search and that's because a lot of people are actually searching for the brand rather than typing in Wayfair directly into the browser you also get in e-commerce land a lot of paid search and the reason is is that when people are trying to shop for products the first thing they probably do is either go to Amazon or go to Google so you see that you've got a heck of a lot of paid search in e-commerce and what surprises most of people is just how low some of these other channels are so you can see that most of these are under 2% and that is actually quite common you do get some exceptions if I go we've got over 150 maybe slightly more than that analytics accounts link to ourselves and the exception of the ones that are spending a lot of money on paid social particularly Facebook and Instagram ads we actually find that most of the advertising is happening when they're in the platform and they don't really utilise clicks or conversion ads which get them over to the website so the traffic going over to your website from social tends to be very low if you compare that with doors and windows things like Everrest and then your local UBPC Windows supply what you can see here is there's not so many big brands so you don't get quite as many direct searches and as a result there you get a lot more organic search and you get a lot more paid search now this is going to be a combination of product phrases and service phrases as well as brand phrases but you can see that when you've got Mississippi commerce and you've got the local window fitter who nobody really knows apart from in that local area then it tends not to be direct traffic it tends to be mainly search traffic the next one I chose was solicitors now this is an interesting one for a slightly different reason again this was a big people like Gordon Slater Erwin Mitchell but also a load of local and of course most solicitors have been around for literally tens of years or even hundreds of years so a lot of them have got very high brand awareness so you do get quite high levels of direct traffic and you also get very high levels of organic search now what you'll notice in this one is the paid search is much much lower and I think the reason for this is because in the cases of solicitor phrases the cost per click can be prohibitively expensive so there's a bit of a difference to be spending sort of five fifteen thirty pounds a click depending on the type of service for these phrases so this is an area where to be honest if you are a solicitor or some of these lead generation sites there's often quite some quite good opportunities because it's not saturated even though it might be quite competitive and therefore quite expensive one of the things I wanted to show you was the evolution of the search results and this is first slide is taken from 2018 where I've presented a couple of times for the CIM but this was my first outing and this was a search for O2 phone deals and you can see you've got a couple of ads on the at the top you've got a few shopping ads on the right both of which are coming from the google ads platform and then you've got your organic results and the thing that's interesting here is that the top organic result is actually car phone warehouse and this is actually and that's actually a featured snippet which tends to be a list now you don't get the featured snippet unless you're in the top ten and normally you have to deliberately change the content in a way to encourage you to get there and so you can see in this case the O2 listing is actually a bit further down now if you compare with what I did last week you'll notice first of all that there's a lot more there's actually now four ads and these are either text ads but they can also be something called dynamic search ads which is almost like a paid SEO and I think that's going to be really important going forward Google's trying to use machine learning to automate everything you do and eventually what it's going to do is decide what phrases you want to be found for rather than you going out and finding them all and so you can see in this case particularly with the top one which has got all these site links underneath the ads are taking up nearly all of the page you've also got your shopping ads on the right and you can see in this case now O2's organic result is at the top now what I thought I'd do is I'll show you the full bit more of the page making it smaller and thinner and you can see the ads just go on forever on the right hand side so again you've got four big ads at the top you've got all those shopping ads and then you've got the organic results they've started to introduce logos into the search results now so that's an image that's taken from the site and then also the whole of that top bit is O2 so in this case O2 brand is getting most of the visibility at the top of the organic results and the money supermarket one in this case is pushed a bit further down but if you go back to the previous slide the point of this is is that there's so many more opportunities for people to actually click on something else before even though O2 number one as you'd expect there's so many opportunities for somebody to click on something else before they scroll down what it does mean is the relatively click through rate of SEO is often adversely affected by everything else that's happening above it and if I did something like O2 phone deals near me I would probably get the map results in there as well which would push it down even further so you can see that even if you're number one in SEO it can be very difficult to actually get the visibility and the click throughs so one of the things I wanted to present to you was actually Spark Toro which Daniel mentioned he's did a study using similar web data this is the most recent data I can find but did include the period of the pandemic and the first lockdown and the important thing about this slide is it shows that when people actually search on Google a lot of the time they don't click through to another website in fact Google is providing the answer nearly, well in this case 46% of the time so clicking through to a link on the left hand side is about 50% and the paid click through rate is only about just under 3% now this would seem to imply that there's no point in doing paid which I would completely contest because in most cases there's so many searches you wouldn't be able to afford to buy all the clicks anyway so I wouldn't worry too much about that but what this shows is that again even if you're at the top the organic search results if Google's provided either an answer or a Wikipedia listing or something else at the top people don't even click through to your website anymore and it's even worse on mobile phone the reason it's so bad on mobile phones is because a lot of the searches on mobile relate to local results such as accountants near me or local plumber or something like that where the map comes up and when you get into your mobile the Google business profile is really dominant and often the telephone number is the first thing that's there so what will happen is that people will actually click on the phone and actually call rather than go through to the website so you can see in this case the actual clicks are even lower so although we've got a situation where Google sorry more people are searching in mobile for most sectors and some hardcore B2B it's still dominated by desktop but in many many sectors mobile has taken over the volume although you get the searches you get in the clicks and then the next thing that happens is actually a lot of the time when they come to your website they don't convert as much because it's not as easy customer journey or they've got to fill in a more complicated form so a lot of the mostly analytics I look at the mobile is probably converted about half of that of the desktop traffic now what about other search engines then so first of all I just wanted to show you the market share so this has changed a lot since April 2020 which was just as the pandemic started at that point Google had 85% and then that's actually gone up to 86% now the search volumes themselves have massively increased we're talking about in some sectors 3 and in other sectors 20 times more and this is because so many people have moved over to e-commerce so what you've seen is that Google has has grown its market share and that's been at the expense for Bing and also Yahoo hasn't changed that much it's dropped a little bit and then Duck Duck Go actually has increased its market share it's actually at 1% now if you look at Duck Duck Go in a minute I'll show you it's actually exponentially grown but traffic overall has grown but it is taking a bigger share and this is because of the privacy concerns now interestingly when you actually look a lot of the data that's presented in Duck Duck Go actually comes from Bing and the other thing that and Bing is Microsoft and the other thing that you may or may not be aware of is that Bing has a very good share in desktops but a very poor share in mobile so Bing's target audience is often older it's a lot B2B and you often get a higher conversion rate so I definitely think about this if you aren't being found in Bing and Duck Duck Go and Yahoo you do need to look at that side of things and also it's definitely considered doing ads in those engines as well which we'll come onto in a second when you go over to Bing I actually really like the way that this page is laid out what they do do is in O2 what we've got here is O2 phone deals the actual shopping ads go all the way across the page you've got your three ads, text ads on the left hand side and if you're not aware of this you can have a shopping ad and a text ad from the same company and if you look across here you might find there's three or four ads from the same company as different products are shown depending on how many deals they've got you have to go down to this bit here organic so this is the start of the organic SEO and this is a feature that they produce which is almost like little cards but you'll also notice the brand panel over here on the right which is being fed through there as well so that is really useful if you can get found for your own brand over on the right hand side if you then go to Yahoo basically most people use Yahoo for news and for email etc and you just put a search then produces search results and what's really surprising about this is that you actually haven't got any organic results on this page that is all ads and it goes down I think another four or five before you actually get to the organic results also it's nearly impossible to actually see where it says ads and in fact what it does is it says these ads and then what happens is a bit further down there's a line where the ads start on the organic start so interestingly Yahoo gets really high click through rates on ads but also the cost per click is very cheap but you actually create Yahoo ads from Bing so again another reason to consider Bing because you can then opt for your ads to be shown in some of these other networks and they do have a shopping and they have their own merchant centre which drives the shopping ads as well so again often the cost per click is lower due to lower competition and often the conversion rate is higher as well so if you're already doing Google and you've got a bit of budget to spare you can sync up your ads across to Bing and then you don't even have to set them all up again and most of the features that are in Google Bing copies so they try and make it as seamless as possible. They took a view a couple of years ago that it's not worth reinventing the wheel so that's why a lot of the features are exactly the same. This is the search engine that is all about privacy they've got Bing ads as well so you've got shopping ads at the top just a couple of paper click ads from Bing and then the organic results as well and again these are being fed from Bing as well but it also uses some other sources so it uses an affiliate I think it's price mapper but I can't remember which one it is now you should have wrote that down and it also uses Amazon results as well it does manipulate the results it just doesn't take them straight and it does aggregate with a few other sources of data as well so I'll just do a little take away from the stuff so far the first half of the presentation so according to nearly every single similar web research that I've done and I've done a lot this year getting found in the search engines is still the most important way to get found even if you have to pay for it so even if you're not doing so well SEO found with PPC that is going to be the people that are most likely to convert because they're most active they're actively looking for your products of service and you're most likely to get leads or sales from them building your brand is really important as that will generate direct traffic but also people will search for your brand in Google so if you want to go and see how many people are searching for your brand if you use one of the key phrase tools one of my favourites is topics.seomolitor.com that's a great one for getting key phrase data without having to go into Google ads itself then that one is really good for finding out how many people are actually searching for your brand and if you monitor that over a period of months you can then see if you're actually doing a good job at developing your brand now some sectors will have more paid search than others and this tends to be when there's not a lot of competition or research before purchasing or a lead however this is a great way and the fastest way to get new leads or sales so what you find is that if you've got a sector where there's a lot of brands really big brands then what happens is you get a lot of direct traffic and a lot of organic traffic for that brand but if you're in your sector where there's thousands of websites if you look at something like gardening or certain products where there's literally hundreds and hundreds of websites that do something similar then you can bet there's going to be a lot of PPC in that sector. Interestingly and I do concur with Daniel, he said earlier on about the fact that people spend a huge amount of time in social media but actually they sort of expect to drive a lot of traffic to their website and that is not always the case I have very much a view of creating site centric content create a great blog or a great webinar use that, share it on social media put it on YouTube put it on your blog as well and then you'll get the SEO benefits of it, send it out in your email and basically from that one piece of content you get multiple uses because when you do a lot of social media, if you're doing organic social it's only your existing audience that will see it and if you're doing paid social a lot of the time it's really about brand awareness and keeping them and people will want to stay on the site. Now I'm not dissing paid social at all we do absolutely loads of it and we do a lot of brand awareness campaigns so I just need to clarify that brand awareness is still really important because that will get you these brand searches and it will get you direct traffic but also it will get you those assisted conversions that Daniel mentioned earlier so if somebody never heard of you before and they see you in Facebook and then at a later stage they then search or they then see you again then that's really powerful and the most powerful way of doing that is to do paid social video ads because they're really cheap, Facebook a couple of pence, YouTube a couple of pence and in LinkedIn 10 to 50 pence and then once they've seen your video you can then create a remarketing audience to do sequential ads and then drive them down the funnel. Now the other scary thing about all this is just because someone does a search doesn't mean to say that even if you're in the first page you'll get a click through and in fact it might not be your site, anybody's site on that page so and this is really because search engines are a bit like social media platforms are trying to keep you on their platforms and answer your questions and they don't particularly want you to go off anywhere else and then another thing about this is is that you know don't forget the other search engines as Google has more and more court cases against it all around the world these are happening all the time there's a growing popularity particularly if you're in Europe to use the more privacy focus search engines such as DuckTuckGo and I definitely recommend that if you use Bing ads that will get your ads into the other search engines such as Yahoo and DuckTuckGo so it's definitely worth doing that as well. Okay so just a quick summary on how search engines work and this is purely on organic SEO now so basically your website is crawled using something called the Googlebot if you imagine that every time this little piece of code comes over to your website it follows links and then it goes and it will come back to your site probably weekly depending on how popular site is it will then grab that content and it will have a really good idea of what's on your page and then what will happen then is there will be an algorithm that decides whether your content is relevant to the search phrase that is being typed in and then those results will be displayed and so in this particular case what we're really looking at is the content side of it if it's great content but if the spider or the bot can't even get into your site or it's very slow or it's not secure or there's other issues then that is going to influence what actually happens and whether you get shown or not and there's hundreds of factors that determine what actually gets shown and what websites, what pages get shown so when we talk about SEO we tend to talk about the three main elements of SEO there is more to this I haven't mentioned local on here but I just thought I'd quickly go through this and focus on some of the technical side of things so first of all we've got all the content so this is this is the area that you control the most it's about optimizing your page around topics and groups related key phrases we also optimize around something called entities or things of that sort of stuff that you know you get an entry in Wikipedia and it's the way that the content is written on the page but it's also the title and the descriptions and so how that the way that that page has got the content that you would see related to that topic so it's not just having those specific key phrases we then talk about off page SEO this is often described as the earned part this is often the hardest part and it's reliant on other people linking to your site you can do other things like digital PR local SEO, brand building that can be used to sort of speed up that process but it is rather lengthy process it can take years to develop the domain authority of your website you know there's various tools like Mars, Ahrefs which you can use to see what your current domain authority is like and basically in most cases it's a score of 100 and if you're lower than about 40 you're going to really have to work on the off page SEO and build links in order to increase the chances of the other side of things working I think technical last in this case because this is often the area that's controlled by your web developer or you have a technical SEO specialist we've obviously got a technical SEO team with Annika and we are trying to fix any issues on your site it's the area that changes the fastest and it usually overlaps with user experience so things like having secure site fast, mobile friendly making sure that the pages are indexed properly and you're not blocking them accidentally those are the sorts of things that are really important and what we see is that the changes in the Google algorithm which happen really regularly much more regularly than most people realise are generally designed to stop spam or to increase user experience so when you're looking at your site there's a load of best practices that I'm going to refer you to in a minute but basically what we're trying to do is we're trying to sort of reverse engineer these factors that Google take into consideration when determining your rank and then making sure that you address all of them so what I thought I'd do now was just talk through some of the big algorithm updates and the way that I look at this is I go into analytics and I look at just the organic traffic obviously there'll be algorithm changes within the other search engines as well but I just look at the Google organic traffic and if I sort of see a massive drop particularly if you do a year on year because sometimes websites can be highly seasonal so at the end if you've got a camping website you're not expecting to get much traffic when you go into October because most people have already bought their tent by then so I would definitely recommend doing a year on year comparison analytics just look at the Google traffic and see if you see any sudden unexpected changes and of course with a Google update this can be both positive and negative so you could see a drop or an increase. So the first thing I wanted to talk to you about was back in June and July and this is an interesting one because Google gave everybody a lot of notice about how they were going to make these changes around page experience and it was also include these elements of core vitals which is the sort of technical term for the way that your site loads the speed of how it loads but also things like as you load it, you've got your cursor in one place and then as it loads the page jumps around but what I can do is I can actually show you an example of a website and whether it passes or not so the tool that you need to use is this is Google's own tool is pagespeed.web.dev and you type in the URL basically what happens is you get a result for the mobile and for the desktop now you can see in this case the desktop site passes the core vitals test and you can see that with all these different these four different criteria we're in the green so the site basically is loading pretty quickly within 2.5 seconds and it's fine although it can be approved because overall it's got a performance score of 71 and you really need to be 90 plus this is a brand new site and I know that it's being currently optimised to improve these things it's also got a lot of big images on the site trying to improve it but the thing about this tool and the other tools that you can use if you are a techie SEO you would have been aware there's a Chrome plugin called Lighthouse that gives you a lot more data is that it actually makes recommendations of what is what you can improve and also if you go into if you go over to Google Analytics you can see additional data as well now if you compare that to the mobile site you get a completely different picture it was okay for this one but the rest is just slightly too slow they're over 2.5 and the score is only 21 so this is an example where the mobile site is not doing as well as the desktop and that is often the case and this is a WordPress site and we know that sometimes WordPress sites can be slightly slow and you often have to do quite a lot of positive activity to improve them I'm just going to click through a couple of others I won't read through all now but this is some of the other ones that came out last year there's some nice links in here I'll make reference to the quality raters guidelines expertise of authoritiveness and trustworthiness that's what Google asked its quality checkers to look into and so this is all about the quality of the content on the page this is an important one I'm not scared about this everybody's rewritten their title tags to be optimised but actually there was a report out yesterday that in 61% of the cases Google is rewriting the title tag that is actually the actual snippet that's shown in Google so they're not using your nicely created title tag at all so I think this means that you really need to be going to look at your H1 headings the heading at the top of the page in order to improve that as well and then this is all about links spam there's been many algorithm changes to try and reduce spam over the last few years so this is quite a common one big update this allows you to submit your pages into being through an API which is much faster this is obviously going to be useful if you're trying to be found in DuckDuckGo as well so if you're a techie or you can talk to your techie that's definitely worth considering and then there was another broad core algorithm update in November but not much information sometimes they give you loads sometimes it sort of it quietly goes past and everybody's talking about it on the blogs you see I refer to search engine land a lot that's one of my favourite blogs for information in this area and then also if you've got a review site or you've got a lot of reviews in on your website this is all about just improving the quality of the reviews and making sure that you're not and it's really about trying to get rid of some of the fake and low quality reviews out there so that they get less visibility and then with regards to looking forward the nice thing is DuckDuckGo has now passed 100 billion searches this was in January Google's got a new tag to help you deal with duplicate content Google doesn't really like content that's in more than one place on your site so for example if you've got a content that's on your site or maybe use an iframe for delivering a video or an image then you can also deal with that as well Yoast most of you will be aware of Yoast it's a plugin that's used mainly in WordPress but Shopify is one of the most popular e-commerce websites at the moment and there's lots of limitations around optimising for Shopify so this is a very sought after plugin that is going to happen soon and the one that I really wanted to mention was that page experience ranking that we were talking about for mobile it's going to come in this month for desktops as well so please go and check using that tool to see whether you've got a problem with your page experience because Google wants users to have the best possible page experience it's fast and works great on both mobiles and desktops I just wanted to mention AI and machine learning actually Daniel covered this in a little bit more detail but we're now seeing quite a lot of content right in apps which use AI so I've given you a reference there to go and have a look to see what you can do about doing SEO at scale so we've seen this massive increase in paid search after the drop in 2020 when everybody sort of withdrew their advertising when people stopped in a lot of sectors stopped advertising due to the pandemic however e-commerce really grew after that and we've seen a really big increase and what you see on the right hand side is that search has continued to grow the other thing that is really massive is social display which is obviously social advertising it wasn't really spread previously so it was included in the previous years but it wasn't split out as a separate but I know you guys had a great presentation from the IAB yesterday so I'm sure quite a few would have seen some of this yesterday what I wanted to show you was changes in paid search by sector so this is it's US data but it's pretty relevant to us because there are quite similar patterns so what you'll see in certain sectors like B2B and non-profit the cost per clicks have gone down but anything to do with e-commerce, travel and finance the cost per clicks have gone up a huge amount and also the amount of ad spend that's gone up even though in some cases the volume of clicks so if you have a look at those on an individual basis so this is B2B you can see that the spend and the number of clicks has gone up significantly in Google and organic clicks have also gone up as there's just been so many more searches and competitions increased when you look at e-commerce driving is completely driving the costs up so the actual clicks in Google have gone down but the costs clicks and the budgets have gone up just to compensate for the level of competition and you'll see the clicks have gone down in organic search the other thing you may not be aware if you're doing retail it's just how powerful Amazon ads are not only do you have to pay a percentage for advertising on Amazon if you actually want to get any visibility you need to advertise as well so you've got a big increase the year before which means this year it's dropped quite considerably compared with what it was like to look at the cost of clicks massive increases in competition and then the other thing I just wanted to show you was the increase in Google shopping this is the ones at the top and that's just because when you have got a big increase in e-commerce traffic a lot of that 80% or so will go to Google shopping ads as they're so dominant and obviously they take up a lot of space so and they do convert really well so that's why we get such an increase in Google shopping okay just a couple more slides then and then I'll pass over to a few questions so if you've not read about this already there was an Australian lawsuit about trying to ban Google because of the IP and other cookie identifiers Google is going to fight this and appeal but there's been so many people trying to basically control Google's power and I think this is going to be really interesting because we're not in the UK at the moment but we do still have the GDPR regulations so it's difficult to know what will happen in the UK and whether that's going to apply to us but this is going to apply to any cloud service that transfers identical days over to the US because of government surveillance if you've got a CRM system that's based with the USA or any other software this is going to apply to you so there's two things that can happen they're either going to have to move their servers over to the EU or the government are going to have to start doing things differently which I think is less likely so it's difficult to know exactly what will happen and it's also difficult to know what's going to happen to UK businesses because are we going to adopt the same guidelines with regards to cookies there was something called Flock which was basically federated learning of cohorts which is a way of trying to disguise individual identities and put them in a flock with similar browsing activities there was lots of criticisms about this because it put too much power in their hands so they've delayed this until 2023 and they've moved over to something called Topics which only last for three weeks and there's going to be 350 categories so other advertisers can use it as well but again watch this space it's difficult to know exactly where that will go so just a summary then search engine marketing has become even more important since the first lockdown and it's usually the main way that brands get traffic to their website there's creased competition in paid search across many sectors driving up cost and clicks market is increasingly using paid social advertising to try to grow brand awareness and that's often at a lower cost than paid search and that will obviously increase direct traffic and brand searches there's been a rapid increase in the use of digital PR although I've not talked about that too much today there's been a real merging of PR and SEO the proportion of clicks that you will actually get even if you're in the top 10 is decreasing because search engines prefer to show the answer themselves or push you down the results with more ads the algorithms are changing really quickly but you need to be aware that the page experience and core vitals is now going to apply to desktops as well as mobile there's lots of changes to analytics and tracking and that's a big concern and uncertainty so watch this space it was good to see Daniel referred to an article he'd written definitely recommend having a look at that and then tip on page SEO and paid search will start to converge this is because of the tendency to use machine learning I mentioned something dark called dynamic search ads or DSAs and that's where Google it's almost like a paid SEO where Google and being now as well uses the content on your website to decide what key phrases you're being found for so if you can optimise a page for SEO then that's going to be better for PPC as well and vice versa so really interesting developments going in that direction Thanks Sam that was just amazing fantastic amount of content so I'm going to go straight into questions I'm going to see if I can get in as many as I possibly can over the last five or so minutes the question is how important is it for a website to be accessibility compliant where can I find more information about this okay so there is legal requirements that your website is passes the basic levels of accessibility there is various websites if you do a search but I know the WZW consortium W3 consortium has got a load of advice on that the interesting thing about accessibility a lot of the time it's about marking up the content on the page so it's easy to for screen readers and that's also something that we need to do in SEO so yeah absolutely if you've got an audience that you know are likely to be need a higher level then you need to build that in but unfortunately a lot of the nice tricks and things that look pretty on a site like JavaScript tend not to be great from accessibility so if you have to go to the higher levels you may compromise some of the design elements so it's about finding the right level that's appropriate for your audience a lot of these questions are going over my head Ann but I'm sure you know the answers to them is schema an essential part of technical SEO yes absolutely so schema is the way you mark up the page sometimes you see it so for example if you were looking for Western tickets you'll see a load of extra snippets underneath the listing of the dates when the next shows will be so it can be something as simple as that but you know it's very difficult for Google to understand if you've got a series of numbers whether that's a phone number or you know some product ID number so the more you can mark the page up the better and there are lots of tools and WordPress plugins and Google search console has also got a lot of tools to help you with that as well right thank you so next question what do you see as the importance of microdata in SEO optimization okay so microdata and schema are often interchangeably used so it's almost the same question so although I didn't mention it today the answer sort of applies so anything that you can do to make and there's a you know there's a belief that websites will become more and more almost like a database where you know there's you know you fill in the field do you see it with a product page of course on the e-commerce website but I think that's will definitely be the way things move in the future if you want any information on this the other person I recommend you look at is Jono Alton from Yoast he writes on this subject all the time he's a very close colleague of mine and absolute superstar and knows this stuff a lot better than I do okay just remember there's one or two people at the start of the presentation asked for you to repeat the link for the topics oh yes SEO SEOmonitor.com is a ranking tool that we use for a measuring SEO which is relatively cost effective and allows you to create key phrases and see the ranks and see the volumes see a difficulty score but it also has a sub-domain called topics.SEOmonitor.com which is free to use and it pulls in the data from Google Ads Planner or Keyword Planner but you can use it without needing to go into your ads account and I find it really useful because it also suggests to the competitors are for your group of key phrases or that search and it also has quite a lot of trends data cost-by-click data as well so it's a really useful tool if you're just doing experiments to try and find obviously there's lots of others but I particularly like that one okay great when you spoke about paid speeds you mentioned a Google Chrome extension that the viewer missed yeah Lighthouse so Lighthouse is the developer tool it's quite technical I wouldn't personally use it but Sook, my technical SEO and Brad our technical SEO team they would use it but it gives a lot more information about what's happening on the page so if you are a technical SEO you probably already know about it but if you do some searches on things like Google page speed, Google core check my Google cool vitals data you'll find a range of sites and one of the things I would recommend is where because at the end of the day it's Google that's making a decision on this it might not actually be you know you can use something like a CDM which is a content network which will speed up your site but at the end of the day if Google thinks your site is slow or it's not passing it it's Google's decision whether you get you know I don't think you'd be penalized but I think it's likely that you know you can get a bit of a boost if you are compliant to these tests probably time for a couple more questions and first one is are there any different approaches required to maximize organic SEO optimization for Bing that are different from Google? Well there is this isn't an area that I know a lot about but the most important thing is that in addition to Google search console there's the equivalent in Bing so I definitely recommend that you download that and install that so that you've got the code so that you can get that data in Bing. Bing uses slightly different parameters. There's lots of good articles on comparing Google and Bing. Also the Google my business pages the Bing local results come from a completely different source as well and you've put me on the spot because I can't remember the name of it now it's completely gone out of my head but yeah so they do use different data and slightly different things are more important in each of the two search engines but there's lots of really interesting articles comparing the two that I've seen in the last couple of weeks to be honest so I'm not going to claim that this is my specialist area. Thank you Doki. Final question then I think this refers to mobile search on mobile so you mentioned that a lot of traffic doesn't actually go through to the web page that people will sometimes call is it damaging not to have a phone number for your service for this reason are there any other ways to combat this? I definitely recommend having your telephone number anyway because it's a massive trust factor I really don't like websites that don't have a very visible telephone number on the site you should be setting up a Google business page or business profile I think the name's changed in the last couple of months and put your telephone number in there I know that some people don't want a telephone number because they don't want to deal with loads of calls but I know that this is a problem and when you look at local SEO the phone number is an important part of determining we call it NAP name address and phone number is an important part of determining whether you'll get listed at all so you definitely really should find a solution for that Brilliant okay that's really great thanks very much and again we had so many questions we were unable to get through them all but thank you very much so sadly that's all the time we have for our digital marketing conference today I'd like to say a big thank you to both Daniel and Anne for their excellent presentations and of course the CIM East of England group for organising the conference so on behalf of CIM that just leaves me to thank our speaker Daniel Rowles and Anne Stanley once again and also to say thank you for joining us today we do hope that you have enjoyed the sessions and we look forward to hopefully welcome you to our webinars in the near future take care everybody goodbye