Content, Shares, and Links: Insights from Analyzing 1 Million Articles

Posted by Steve_Rayson

This summer BuzzSumo teamed up with Moz to analyze the shares and links of over 1m articles. We wanted to look at the correlation of shares and links, to understand the content that gets both shares and links, and to identify the formats that get relatively more shares or links.

What we found is that the majority of content published on the internet is simply ignored when it comes to shares and links. The data suggests most content is simply not worthy of sharing or linking, and also that people are very poor at amplifying content. It may sound harsh but it seems most people are wasting their time either producing poor content or failing to amplify it.

On a more positive note we also found some great examples of content that people love to both share and link to. It was not a surprise to find content gets far more shares than links. Shares are much easier to acquire. Everyone can share content easily and it is almost frictionless in some cases. Content has to work much harder to acquire links. Our research uncovered:

• The sweet spot content that achieves both shares and links
• The content that achieves higher than average referring domain links
• The impact of content formats and content length on shares and links

Our summary findings are as follows:

1. The majority of posts receive few shares and even fewer links. In a randomly selected sample of 100,000 posts over 50% had 2 or less Facebook interactions (shares, likes or comments) and over 75% had zero external links. This suggests there is a lot of very poor content out there and also that people are very poor at amplifying their content.
2. When we looked at a bigger sample of 750,000 well shared posts we found over 50% of these posts still had zero external links. Thus suggests while many posts acquire shares, and in some cases large numbers of shares, they find it far harder to acquire links.
3. Shares and links are not normally distributed around an average. There are high performing outlier posts that get a lot of shares and links but most content is grouped at the low end, with close to zero shares and links. For example, over 75% of articles from our random sample of 100,000 posts had zero external links and just 1 or less referring domain link.
4. Across our total sample of 1m posts there was NO overall correlation of shares and links, implying people share and link for different reasons. The correlation of total shares and referring domain links across 750,000 articles was just 0.021.
5. There are, however, specific content types that do have a strong positive correlation of shares and links. This includes research backed content and opinion forming journalism. We found these content formats achieve both higher shares and significantly more links.
6. 85% of content published (excluding videos and quizzes) is less than 1,000 words long. However, long form content of over 1,000 words consistently receives more shares and links than shorter form content. Either people ignore the data or it is simply too hard for them to write quality long form content.
7. Content formats matter. Formats such as entertainment videos and quizzes are far more likely to be shared than linked to. Some quizzes and videos get hundreds of thousands of shares but no links.
8. List posts and videos achieve much higher shares on average than other content formats. However, in terms of achieving links, list posts and why posts achieve a higher number of referring domain links than other content formats on average. While we may love to hate them, list posts remain a powerful content format.

We have outlined the findings in more detail below. You can download the full 30 page research report from the BuzzSumo site:

Download the full 30-page research report

The majority of posts receive few shares and even fewer links

We pulled an initial sample of 757,000 posts from the BuzzSumo database. 100,000 of these posts were pulled at random and acted as a control group. As we wanted to investigate certain content formats, the other 657,000 were well shared videos, ‘how to’ posts, list posts, quizzes, infographics, why posts and videos. The overall sample therefore had a specific bias to well shared posts and specific content formats. However, despite this bias towards well shared articles, 50% of our 757,000 articles still had 11 or less Twitter shares and 50% of the posts had zero external links.

By comparison 50% of the 100,000 randomly selected posts had 2 or less Twitter shares, 2 or less Facebook interactions, 1 or less Google+ shares and zero LinkedIn shares. 75% of the posts had zero external links and 1 or less referring domain links.

75% of randomly selected articles had zero external links

Shares and links are not normally distributed

Shares and links are not distributed normally around an average. Some posts go viral and get a very high numbers of shares and links. This distorts the average, the vast majority of posts receive very few shares or links and sit at the bottom of a very skewed distribution curve as shown below.

This chart is cut off on the right at 1,000 shares, in fact the long thin tail would extend a very long way as a number of articles received over 1m shares and one received 5.7m shares.

This long tail distribution is the same for shares and links across all the domains we analyzed. The skewed nature of the distribution means that averages can be misleading due to the long tail of highly shared or linked content. In the example below we show the distribution of shares for a domain. In this example the average is the blue line but 50% of all posts lie to the left of the red line, the median.

There is NO correlation of shares and links

We used the Pearson correlation co-efficient, a measure of the linear correlation between two variables. The results can range from between 1 (a total positive correlation) to 0 (where there is no correlation) to −1 (a total negative correlation).

The overall correlations for our sample were:

Total shares and Referring Domain Links 0.021

Total shares and Sub-domain Links 0.020

Total shares and External Links 0.011

The results suggest that people share and link to content for different reasons.

We also looked at different social networks to see if there were more positive correlations for specific networks. We found no strong positive correlation of shares to referring domain links across the different networks as shown below.

• Facebook total interactions 0.0221
• Twitter 0.0281
• Linkedin 0.0216
• Pinterest 0.0065
• Google plus 0.0058

Whilst there is no correlation by social network there is some evidence that very highly shared posts have a higher correlation of shares and links. This can be seen below.

Content sample	Average total shares	Median shares	Average referring domain links	Median referring domain links	Correlation total shares - referring domains
Full sample of posts (757,317)	4,393	202	3.77	1	0.021
Posts with over 10,000 total shares (69,114)	35,080	18,098	7.06	2	0.101

The increased correlation is relatively small, however, it does indicate that very popular sites, other things being equal, would have slightly higher correlations of shares and links.

Our finding that there is no overall correlation contradicts previous studies that have suggested there is a positive correlation of shares and links. We believe the previous findings may have been due to inadequate sampling as we will discuss below.

The content sweet spot: content with a positive correlation of shares and links

Our research found there are specific content types that have a high correlation of shares and links. This content attracts both shares and links, and as shares increase so do referring domain links. Thus whilst content is generally shared and linked to for different reasons, there appears to be an overlap where some content meets the criteria for both sharing and linking.

The content that falls into this overlap area, our sweet spot, includes content from popular domains such as major publishers. In our sample the content also included authoritative, research backed content, opinion forming journalism and major news sites.

In our sample of 757,000 well shared posts the following were examples of domains that had a high correlation of shares and links.

Site	Number of articles in sample	Referring domain links - total shares correlation
The Breast Cancer Site	17	0.90
New York Review of books	11	0.95
Pew Research	25	0.86
The Economist	129	0.73

We were very cautious about drawing conclusions from this data as the individual sample sizes were very small. We therefore undertook a second, separate sampling exercise for domains with high correlations. This analysis is outlined in the next section below.

Our belief is that previous studies may have sampled content disproportionately from popular sites within the area of overlap. This would explain a positive correlation of shares and links. However, the data shows that the domains in the area of overlap are actually outliers when it comes to shares and links.

Sweet-spot content: opinion-forming journalism and research-backed content

In order to explore further the nature of content on sites with high correlations we looked at a further 250,000 random articles from those domains.

For example, we looked at 49,952 articles from the New York Times and 46,128 from the Guardian. These larger samples had a lower correlation of links and shares, as we would expect due to the samples having a lower level of shares overall. The figures were as follows:

Domain	Number articles in sample	Average Total Shares	Average Referring Domain Links	Correlation of Total Shares to Domain Links
Nytimes.com	49,952	918	3.26	0.381
Theguardian.com	46,128	797	10.18	0.287

We then subsetted various content types to see if particular types of content had higher correlations. During this analysis we found that opinion content from these sites, such as editorials and columnists, had significantly higher average shares and links, and a higher correlation. For example:

Opinion content	Number articles in sample	Average Total Shares	Average Referring Domain Links	Correlation of Total Shares to Domain Links
Nytimes.com	4,143	3,990	9.2	0.498
Theguardian.com	19,606	1,777	12.54	0.433

The higher shares and links may be because opinion content tends to be focused on current trending areas of interest and because the authors take a particular slant or viewpoint that can be controversial and engaging.

We decided to look in more detail at opinion forming journalism. For example, we looked at over 20,000 articles from The Atlantic and New Republic. In both cases we saw a high correlation of shares and links combined with a high number of referring domain links as shown below.

Domain	Number articles in sample	Average Total Shares	Average Referring Domain Links	Correlation of Total Shares to Domain Links
TheAtlantic.com	16,734	2,786	18.82	0.586
NewRepublic.com	6,244	997	12.8	0.529

This data appears to support the hypothesis that authoritative, opinion shaping journalism sits within the content sweet spot. It particularly attracts more referring domain links.

The other content type that had a high correlation of shares and links in our original sample was research backed content. We therefore sampled more data from sites that publish a lot of well researched and evidenced content. We found content on these sites had a significantly higher number of referring domain links. The content also had a higher correlation of links and shares as shown below.

Domain	Number articles in sample	Average Total Shares	Average Referring Domain Links	Correlation of Total Shares to Domain Links
FiveThirtyEight.com	1,977	1,783	18.5	0.55
Priceonomics.com	541	1,797	11.49	0.629
PewResearch.com	892	751	25.7	0.4

Thus whilst overall there is no correlation of shares and links, there are specific types of content that do have a high correlation of shares and links. This content appears to sit close to the center of the overlap of shares and links, our content sweet spot.

The higher correlation appears to be caused by the content achieving a higher level of referring domain links. Shares are generally much easier to achieve than referring domain links. You have to work much harder to get such links and it appears that research backed content and authoritative opinion shaping journalism is better at achieving referring domain links.

Want shares and links? Create deep research or opinion-forming content

Our conclusion is that if you want to create content that achieves a high level of both shares and links then you should concentrate on opinion forming, authoritative content on current topics or well researched and evidenced content. This post falls very clearly into the latter category, so we will shall see if this proves to be the case here.

The impact of content format on shares and links

We specifically looked at the issue of content formats. Previous research had suggested that some content formats may have a higher correlation of shares and links. Below are the details of shares and links by content format from our sample of 757,317 posts.

Content Type	Number in sample	Average Total Shares	Average Referring Domain Links	Correlation of total shares & referring domain links
List post	99,935	10,734	6.19	0.092
Quiz	69,757	1,374	1.6	0.048
Why post	99,876	1,443	5.66	0.125
How to post	99,937	1,782	4.41	0.025
Infographic	98,912	268	3.67	0.017
Video	99,520	8,572	4.13	0.091

What stands out is the high level of shares for list posts and videos.

By contrast the average level of shares for infographics is very low. Whilst the top infographics did well (there were 343 infographics with more than 10,000 shares) the majority of infographics in our sample performed poorly. Over 50% of infographics (53,000 in our sample) had zero external links and 25% had less than 10 shares in total across all networks. This may reflect a recent trend to turn everything into an infographic leading to many poor pieces of content.

What also stands out is the relatively low number of referring domain links for quizzes. People may love to share quizzes but they are less likely to link to them.

In terms of the correlation of total shares and referring domain links, Why posts had the highest correlation than all other content types at 0.125. List posts and videos also have a higher correlation than the overall sample correlation which was 0.021.

List posts appear to perform consistently well as a content format in terms of both shares and links.

Some content types are more likely to be shared than linked to

Surprising, unexpected and entertaining images, quizzes and videos have the potential to go viral with high shares. However, this form of content is far less likely to achieve links.

Entertaining content such as Vine videos and quizzes often had zero links despite very high levels of shares. Here are some examples.

Content	Total Shares	External Links	Referring Domain Links
Vine video http://ift.tt/1NwBaQX	347,823	0	0
Vine video http://ift.tt/1wSaAHI	253,041	0	1
Disney Dog Quiz http://ift.tt/1LgMLzp...	259,000	0	1
Brainfall Quiz http://ift.tt/1LgMLzr...	282,058	0	0

Long form content consistently receives more shares and links than shorter-form content

We removed videos and quizzes from our initial sample to analyze the impact of content length. This gave us a sample of 489,128 text based articles which broke down by content length as follows:

Length (words)	No in sample	Percent
<1,000	418,167	85.5
1-2,000	58,642	12
2-3,000	8,172	1.7
3,000-10,000	3,909	0.8

Over 85% of articles had less than 1,000 words.

We looked at the impact of content length on total shares and domain links.

Length (words)	Total Shares Average	Referring Domain Links Average
<1,000	2,823	3.47
1-2,000	3,456	6.92
2-3,000	4,254	8.81
3-10,000	5,883	11.07

We can see that long form content consistently gets higher average shares and significantly higher average links. This supports our previous research findings, although there are exceptions, particularly with regard to shares. One such exception we identified is IFL Science, that publishes short form content shared by its 21m Facebook fans. The site curates images and videos to explain scientific research and findings. This article examines how they create their short form viral content. However, IFLS Science is very much an exception. On average long form content performs better, particularly when it comes to links.

When we looked at the impact of content length on the correlation of shares and links. we found that content of over 1,000 words had a higher correlation but the correlation did not increase further beyond 2,000 words.

Length (words)	Correlation Shares/Links
<1,000	0.024
1-2,000	0.113
2-3,000	0.094
3,000+	0.072

The impact of combined factors

We have not undertaken any detailed linear regression modelling or built any predictive models but it does appear that a combination of factors can increase shares, links and the correlation. For example, when we subsetted List posts to look at those over 1,000 words in length, the average number of referring domain links increased from 6.19 to 9.53. Similarly in our original sample there were 1,332 articles from the New York Times. The average number of referring domain links for the sample was 7.2. When we subsetted out just the posts over 1,000 words the average number of referring domain links increased to 15.82. When we subsetted out just the List posts the average number of referring domain links increased further to 18.5.

The combined impact of factors such as overall site popularity, content format, content type and content length is an area for further investigation. However, the initial findings do indicate that shares and/or links can be increased when some of these factors are combined.

You can download the full 30 page research report from the BuzzSumo site:

Download the full 30-page research report

Steve will be discussing the findings at a Mozinar on September 22, at 10.30am Pacific Time. You can register and save your place here http://ift.tt/1Uy1U9H...

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Clean Your Site's Cruft Before It Causes Rankings Problems - Whiteboard Friday

Posted by randfish

We all have it. The cruft. The low-quality, or even duplicate-content pages on our sites that we just haven't had time to find and clean up. It may seem harmless, but that cruft might just be harming your entire site's ranking potential. In today's Whiteboard Friday, Rand gives you a bit of momentum, showing you how you can go about finding and taking care of the cruft on your site.

Click on the whiteboard image above to open a high resolution version in a new tab!

Video transcription

Howdy, Moz fans, and welcome to another edition of Whiteboard Friday. This week we're chatting about cleaning out the cruft from your website. By cruft what I mean is low quality, thin quality, duplicate content types of pages that can cause issues even if they don't seem to be causing a problem today.

What is cruft?

If you were to, for example, launch a large number of low quality pages, pages that Google thought were of poor quality, that users didn't interact with, you could find yourself in a seriously bad situation, and that's for a number of reasons. So Google, yes, certainly they're going to look at content on a page by page basis, but they're also considering things domain wide.

So they might look at a domain and see lots of these green pages, high quality, high performing pages with unique content, exactly what you want. But then they're going to see like these pink and orange blobs of content in there, thin content pages with low engagement metrics that don't seem to perform well, duplicate content pages that don't have proper canonicalization on them yet. This is really what I'm calling cruft, kind of these two things, and many variations of them can fit inside those.

But one issue with cruft for sure it can cause Panda issues. So Google's Panda algorithm is designed to look at a site and say, "You know what? You're tipping over the balance of what a high quality site looks like to us. We see too many low quality pages on the site, and therefore we're not just going to hurt the ranking ability of the low quality pages, we're going to hurt the whole site." Very problematic, really, really challenging and many folks who've encountered Panda issues over time have seen this.

There are also other probably non-directly Panda kinds of related things, like site-wide analysis of things like algorithmic looks at engagement and quality. So, for example ,there was a recent analysis of the Phantom II update that Google did, which hasn't really been formalized very much and Google hasn't said anything about it. But one of the things that they looked at in that Phantom update was the engagement of pages on the sites that got hurt versus the engagement of pages on the sites that benefited, and you saw a clear pattern. Engagement on sites that benefited tended to be higher. On those that were hurt, tended to be lower. So again, it could be not just Panda but other things that will hurt you here.

It can waste crawl bandwidth, which sucks. Especially if you have a large site or complex site, if the engine has to go crawl a bunch of pages that are cruft, that is potentially less crawl bandwidth and less frequent updates for crawling to your good pages.

It can also hurt from a user perspective. User happiness may be lowered, and that could mean a hit to your brand perception. It could also drive down better converting pages. It's not always the case that Google is perfect about this. They could see some of these duplicate content, some of these thin content pages, poorly performing pages and still rank them ahead of the page you wish ranked there, the high quality one that has good conversion, good engagement, and that sucks just for your conversion funnel.

So all sorts of problems here, which is why we want to try and proactively clean out the cruft. This is part of the SEO auditing process. If you look at a site audit document, if you look at site auditing software, or step-by-step how-to's, like the one from Annie that we use here at Moz, you will see this problem addressed.

How do I identify what's cruft on my site(s)?

So let's talk about some ways to proactively identify cruft and then some tips for what we should do afterwards.

Filter that cruft away!

One of those ways for sure that a lot of folks use is Google Analytics or Omniture or Webtrends, whatever your analytics system is. What you're trying to design there is a cruft filter. So I got my little filter. I keep all my good pages inside, and I filter out the low quality ones.

What I can use is one of two things. First, a threshold for bounce or bounce rate or time on site, or pages per visit, any kind of engagement metric that I like I can use that as a potential filter. I could also do some sort of a percentage, meaning in scenario one I basically say, "Hey the threshold is anything with a bounce rate higher than 90%, I want my cruft filter to show me what's going on there." I'd create that filter inside GA or inside Omniture. I'd look at all the pages that match that criteria, and then I'd try and see what was wrong with them and fix those up.

The second one is basically I say, "Hey, here's the average time on site, here's the median time on site, here's the average bounce rate, median bounce rate, average pages per visit, median, great. Now take me 50% below that or one standard deviation below that. Now show me all that stuff, filters that out."

This process is going to capture thin and low quality pages, the ones I've been showing you in pink. It's not going to catch the orange ones. Duplicate content pages are likely to perform very similarly to the thing that they are a duplicate of. So this process is helpful for one of those, not so helpful for other ones.

Sort that cruft!

For that process, you might want to use something like Screaming Frog or OnPage.org, which is a great tool, or Moz Analytics, comes from some company I've heard of.

Basically, in this case, you've got a cruft sorter that is essentially looking at filtration, items that you can identify in things like the URL string or in title elements that match or content that matches, those kinds of things, and so you might use a duplicate content filter. Most of these pieces of software already have a default setting. In some of them you can change that. I think OnPage.org and Screaming Frog both let you change the duplicate content filter. Moz Analytics not so much, same thing with Google Webmaster Tools, now Search Console, which I'll talk about in a sec.

So I might say like, "Hey, identify anything that's more than 80% duplicate content." Or if I know that I have a site with a lot of pages that have only a few images and a little bit of text, but a lot of navigation and HTML on them, well, maybe I'd turn that up to 90% or even 95% depending.

I can also use some rules to identify known duplicate content violators. So for example, if I've identified that everything that has a question mark refer equals bounce or something or partner. Well, okay, now I just need to filter for that particular URL string, or I could look for titles. So if I know that, for example, one of my pages has been heavily duplicated throughout the site or a certain type, I can look for all the titles containing those and then filter out the dupes.

I can also do this for content length. Many folks will look at content length and say, "Hey, if there's a page with fewer than 50 unique words on it in my blog, show that to me. I want to figure out why that is, and then I might want to do some work on those pages."

Ask the SERP providers (cautiously)

Then the last one that we can do for this identification process is Google and Bing Webmaster Tools/Search Console. They have existing filters and features that aren't very malleable. We can't do a whole lot with them, but they will show you potential site crawl issues, broken pages, sometimes dupe content. They're not going to catch everything though. Part of this process is to proactively find things before Google finds them and Bing finds them and start considering them a problem on our site. So we may want to do some of this work before we go, "Oh, let's just shove an XML sitemap to Google and let them crawl everything, and then they'll tell us what's broken." A little risky.

Additional tips, tricks, and robots

A couple additional tips, analytics stats, like the ones from GA or Omniture or Webtrends, they can totally mislead you, especially for pages with very few visits, where you just don't have enough of a sample set to know how they're performing or ones that the engines haven't indexed yet. So if something hasn't been indexed or it just isn't getting search traffic, it might show you misleading metrics about how users are engaging with it that could bias you in ways that you don't want to be biased. So be aware of that. You can control for it generally by looking at other stats or by using these other methods.

When you're doing this, the first thing you should do is any time you identify cruft, remove it from your XML sitemaps. That's just good hygiene, good practice. Oftentimes it is enough to at least have some of the preventative measures from getting hurt here.

However, there's no one size fits all methodology after the don't include it in your XML sitemap. If it's a duplicate, you want to canonicalize it. I don't want to delete all these pages maybe. Maybe I want to delete some of them, but I need to be considered about that. Maybe they're printer friendly pages. Maybe they're pages that have a specific format. It's a PDF version instead of an HTML version. Whatever it is, you want to identify those and probably canonicalize.

Is it useful to no one? Like literally, absolutely no one. You don't want engines visiting. You don't want people visiting it. There's no channel that you care about that page getting traffic to. Well you have two options -- 301 it. If it's already ranking for something or it's on the topic of something, send it to the page that will perform well that you wish that traffic was going to, or you can completely 404 it. Of course, if you're having serious trouble or you need to remove it entirely from engines ASAP, you can use the 410 permanently delete. Just be careful with that.

Is it useful to some visitors, but not search engines? Like you don't want searchers to find it in the engines, but if somebody goes and is paging through a bunch of pages and that kind of thing, okay, great, I can use no index, follow for that in the meta robots tag of a page.

If there's no reason bots should access it at all, like you don't care about them following the links on it, this is a very rare use case, but there can be certain types of internal content that maybe you don't want bots even trying to access, like a huge internal file system that particular kinds of your visitors might want to get access to but nobody else, you can use the robots.txt file to block crawlers from visiting it. Just be aware it can still get into the engines if it's blocked in robots.txt. It just won't show any description. They'll say, "We are not showing a site description for this page because it's blocked by robots."

If the page is almost good, like it's on the borderline between pink and green here, well just make it good. Fix it up. Make that page a winner, get it back in the engines, make sure it's performing well, find all the pages like that have those problems, fix them up or consider recreating them and then 301'ing them over if you want to do that.

With this process, hopefully you can prevent yourself from getting hit by the potential penalties, or being algorithmically filtered, or just being identified as not that great a website. You want Google to consider your site as high quality as they possibly can. You want the same for your visitors, and this process can really help you do that.

Looking forward to the comments, and we'll see you again next week for another edition of Whiteboard Friday. Take care.

Video transcription by Speechpad.com

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New Study: Data Reveals 67% of Consumers are Influenced by Online Reviews

Posted by Dhinckley

This post was originally in YouMoz, and was promoted to the main blog because it provides great value and interest to our community. The author's views are entirely his or her own and may not reflect the views of Moz, Inc.

Google processed over 1 trillion search queries in 2014. As Google Search continues to further integrate into our normal daily activities, those search results become increasingly important, especially when individuals are searching for information about a company or product.

To better understand just how much of an impact Google has on an individual’s purchasing decisions, we set up a research study with a group of 1,000 consumers through Google Consumer Surveys. The study investigates how individuals interact with Google and other major sites during the buying process.

Do searchers go beyond page 1 of Google?

We first sought to understand how deeply people went into the Google search results. We wanted to know if people tended to stop at page 1 of the search results, or if they dug deeper into page 2 and beyond. A better understanding of how many pages of search results are viewed provides insight into how many result pages we should monitor related to a brand or product.

When asked, 36% of respondents claimed to look through the first two pages or more of search results. But, looking at actual search data, it is clear that individuals view less than 2% of searches below the top five results on the first page. From this, it is clear that actual consumer behavior differs from self-reported search activity.

Takeaway: People are willing to view as many as two pages of search results but rarely do so during normal search activities.

Are purchasing decisions affected by online reviews?

Google has integrated reviews into the Google+ Local initiative and often displays these reviews near the top of search results for businesses. Other review sites, such as Yelp and TripAdvisor, will also often rank near the top for search queries for a company or product. Because of the prevalence of review sites appearing in the search results for brands and products, we wanted a better understanding of how these reviews impacted consumers’ decision-making.

We asked participants, “When making a major purchase such as an appliance, a smart phone, or even a car, how important are online reviews in your decision-making?”

The results revealed that online reviews impact 67.7% of respondents' purchasing decisions. More than half of the respondents (54.7%) admitted that online reviews are fairly, very, or absolutely an important part of their decision-making process.

Takeaway: Companies need to take reviews seriously. Restaurant review stories receive all the press, but most companies will eventually have pages from review sites ranking for their names. Building a strong base of positive reviews now will help protect against any negative reviews down the road.

When do negative reviews cost your business customers?

Our research also uncovered that businesses risk losing as many as 22% of customers when just one negative article is found by users considering buying their product. If three negative articles pop up in a search query, the potential for lost customers increases to 59.2%. Have four or more negative articles about your company or product appearing in Google search results? You’re likely to lose 70% of potential customers.

Takeaway: It is critical to keep page 1 of your Google search results clean of any negative content or reviews. Having just one negative review could cost you nearly a quarter of all potential customers who began researching your brand (which means they were likely deep in the conversion funnel).

What sites do people visit before buying a product or service?

Google Search is just one of the sites that consumers can visit to research a brand or product. We thought it would be interesting to identify other popular consumer research sites.

Interestingly, most people didn't seem to remember visiting any of the popular review sites. Instead, the brand site that got the most attention was Google+ Local reviews. Another noteworthy finding was that Amazon came in second, with half the selections that Google received. Finally, the stats show that more people look to Wikipedia for information about a company than to Yelp or TripAdvisor.

Takeaway: Brands should invest time and effort into building a strong community on the Google+, which could lead to receiving more positive reviews on the social platform.

Online reviews impact the bottom line

The results of the study show that online reviews have a significant influence on the decision-making process of consumers. The data supports the fact that Internet users are generally willing to look at the first and second page of Google search results when searching for details about a product or company.

We can also conclude that online review sites like Google+ Local are heavily visited by potential customers looking for information, and the more negative content they find there, the less likely they will be to purchase your products or visit your business.

All this information paints a clear picture that what is included in Google search results for a company or product name will inevitably have an impact on the profitability of that company or product.

Internal marketing teams and public relation firms (PR) must consider the results that Google displays when they search for their company name or merchandise. Negative reviews, negative press, and other damaging feedback can have a lasting impact on a company’s ability to sell their products or services.

How to protect your company in Google search results

A PR or marketing team must be proactive to effectively protect a company’s online reputation. The following tactics can help prevent a company from suffering from deleterious online reviews:

• First, identify if negative articles already exist on the first two pages of search results for a Google query of a company name or product (e.g., “Walmart”). This simple task should be conducted regularly. Google often shifts search results around, so a negative article—which typically attracts a higher click-through rate—is unfortunately likely to climb the rankings as individuals engage with the piece.

• Next, monitor and analyze the current sentiment of reviews on popular review sites like Google+ and Amazon. Other sites, like Yelp or Trip Advisor, should also be checked often, as they can quickly climb Google search results. Do not attempt to artificially alter the results, but instead look for best practices on how to improve Yelp reviews or other review sites and implement them. The goal is to naturally improve the general buzz around your business.
• If negative articles exist, there are solutions for improvement. A company’s marketing and public relations team may benefit by highlighting and/or generating positive press and reviews about the product or service through SEO and ORM efforts. By gaining control of the search results for your company or product, you will be in control of the main message that individuals see when looking for more information about your business. That's done by working to ensure prospects and customers enjoy a satisfying experience when interacting with your brand, whether online or offline.

Being proactive with a brand’s reputation, as viewed in the Google search results and on review sites, does have an impact on the bottom line.

As we see in the data, people are less likely to make a purchase as the amount of negative reviews increase in Google search results.

By actively ensuring that honest, positive reviews appear, you can win over potential customers.

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A Beginner's Guide to Google Search Console

Posted by Angela_Petteys

This post was originally in YouMoz, and was promoted to the main blog because it provides great value and interest to our community. The author's views are entirely his or her own and may not reflect the views of Moz, Inc.

If the name "Google Webmaster Tools" rings a bell for you, then you might already have an idea of what Google Search Console is. Since Google Webmaster Tools (GWT) has become a valuable resource for so many different types of people besides webmasters—marketing professionals, SEOs, designers, business owners, and app developers, to name a few—Google decided to change its name in May of 2015 to be more inclusive of its diverse group of users.

If you aren't familiar with GWT or Google Search Console, let's head back to square one. Google Search Console is a free service that lets you learn a great deal of information about your website and the people who visit it. You can use it to find out things like how many people are visiting your site and how they are finding it, whether more people are visiting your site on a mobile device or desktop computer, and which pages on your site are the most popular. It can also help you find and fix website errors, submit a sitemap, and create and check a robots.txt file.

Ready to start taking advantage of all that Google Search Console has to offer? Let's do this.

Adding and verifying a site in Google Search Console

If you're new to Google Search Console, you'll need to add and verify your site(s) before you can do anything else. Adding and verifying your site in Search Console proves to Google that you're either a site's owner, webmaster, or other authorized user. After all, Search Console provides you with all sorts of incredibly detailed information and insights about a site's performance. Google doesn't want to hand that kind of information over to anybody who asks for it.

Adding a site to Search Console is a very simple process. First, log into your Search Console account. Once you're logged in, you'll see a box next to a red button which says "Add Property."

Enter the URL of the site you're trying to add in the box and click "Add Property." Congratulations, your site is now added to your Search Console account!

Next, you will be asked to verify your site. There are a few different ways you can go about this. Which method will work best for you depends on whether or not you have experience working with HTML, if you have access to upload files to the site, the size of your site, and whether or not you have other Google programs connected to your site. If this sounds overwhelming, don't worry—we'll help you figure it out.

Adding an HTML tag

This verification method is best for users and site owners who have experience working with HTML code.

From the Search Console dashboard, select "Manage Property," then "Verify this property." If the "HTML Tag" option does not appear under "Recommended method," then you should click on the "Alternate methods" tab and select "HTML tag." This will provide you with the HTML code you'll need for verification.

Copy the code and use your HTML editor to open the code for your site's homepage. Paste the code provided within in the <Head> section of the HTML code. If your site already has a meta tag or other code in the <Head> section, it doesn't matter where the verification code is placed in relation to the other code; it simply needs to be in the <Head> section. If your site doesn't have a <Head> section, you can create one for the sake of verifying the site.

Once the verification code has been added, save and publish the updated code, and open your site's homepage. From there, view the site's source code. The verification code should be visible in the <Head> section.

Once you're sure the code is added to your site's homepage, go back to Search Console and click "Verify." Google will then check your site's code for the verification code. If the code is found, you will see a screen letting you know the site has been verified. If not, you will be provided with information about the errors it encountered.

When your site has been verified by Search Console, do not remove the verification code from your site. If the code is removed, it will cause your site to become unverified.

Uploading an HTML file

To use this method, you must be able to upload files to a site's root directory.

From the Search Console dashboard, select "Manage site," then "Verify this site." If "HTML file upload" is not listed under "Recommended method," it should be listed under the "Alternate method" tab.

When you select this method, you will be asked to download an HTML file. Download it, then upload it to the specified location. Do not make any changes to the content of the file or the filename; the file needs to be kept exactly the same. If it is changed, Search Console will not be able to verify the site.

After the HTML file has been uploaded, go back to Search Console and click "Verify." If everything has been uploaded correctly, you will see a page letting you know the site has been verified.

Once you have verified your site using this method, do not delete the HTML file from your site. This will cause your site to become unverified.

Verifying via domain name provider

The domain name provider is the company you purchased a domain from or where your website is hosted. When you verify using your domain name provider, it not only proves you're the owner of the main domain, but that you also own all of the subdomains and subdirectories associated with it. This is an excellent option if you have a large website.

From the Search Console dashboard, select "Manage site," then "Verify this site." If you don't see the "Domain name provider" option listed under "Recommended method," look under the "Alternate method" tab.

When you select "Domain name provider," you will be asked to choose your domain name provider from a list of commonly used providers, such as GoDaddy.com. If your provider is not on this list, choose "Other" and you will be given instructions on how to create a DNS TXT record for your provider. If a DNS TXT record doesn't work for your provider, you will have the option of creating a CNAME record instead.

Adding Google Analytics code

If you already use Google Analytics (GA) to monitor your site's traffic, this could be the easiest option for you. But first, you'll need to be able to check the site's HTML code to make sure the GA tracking code is placed within the <Head> section of your homepage's code, not in the <Body> section. If the GA code is not already in the <Head> section, you'll need to move it there for this method to work.

From the Search Console dashboard, select "Manage site," then "Verify this site." If you don't see the "Google Analytics tracking code" option under the "Recommended method," look under the "Alternate method" tab. When you select "Google Analytics tracking method," you'll be provided with a series of instructions to follow.

Once your site has been verified, do not remove the GA code from your site, or it will cause your site to become unverified.

Using Google Tag Manager

If you already use Google Tag Manager (GTM) for your site, this might be the easiest way to verify your site. If you're going to try this method, you need to have "View, Edit, and Manage" permissions enabled for your account in GTM. Before trying this method, look at your site's HTML code to make sure the GTM code is placed immediately after your site's <Body> tag.

From the Search Console dashboard, select "Manage site," then "Verify this site." If you don't see the "Google Tag Manager" option listed under "Recommended method," it should appear under "Alternate method."

Select "Google Tag Manager" and click "Verify." If the Google Tag Manager code is found, you should see a screen letting you know your site has been verified.

Once your site is verified, do not remove the GTM code from your site, or your site will become unverified.

How to link Google Analytics with Google Search Console

Google Analytics and Google Search Console might seem like they offer the same information, but there are some key differences between these two Google products. GA is more about who is visiting your site—how many visitors you're getting, how they're getting to your site, how much time they're spending on your site, and where your visitors are coming from (geographically-speaking). Google Search Console, in contrast, is geared more toward more internal information—who is linking to you, if there is malware or other problems on your site, and which keyword queries your site is appearing for in search results . Analytics and Search Console also do not treat some information in the exact same ways, so even if you think you're looking at the same report, you might not be getting the exact same information in both places.

To get the most out of the information provided by Search Console and GA, you can link accounts for each one together. Having these two tools linked will integrate the data from both sources to provide you with additional reports that you will only be able to access once you've done that. So, let's get started:

Has your site been added and verified in Search Console? If not, you'll need to do that before you can continue.

From the Search Console dashboard, click on the site you're trying to connect. In the upper righthand corner, you'll see a gear icon. Click on it, then choose "Google Analytics Property."

This will bring you to a list of Google Analytics accounts associated with your Google account. All you have to do is choose the desired GA account and hit "Save." Easy, right? That's all it takes to start getting the most out of Search Console and Analytics.

Adding a sitemap

Sitemaps are files that give search engines and web crawlers important information about how your site is organized and the type of content available there. Sitemaps can include metadata, with details about your site such as information about images and video content, and how often your site is updated.

By submitting your sitemap to Google Search Console, you're making Google's job easier by ensuring they have the information they need to do their job more efficiently. Submitting a sitemap isn't mandatory, though, and your site won't be penalized if you don't submit a sitemap. But there's certainly no harm in submitting one, especially if your site is very new and not many other sites are linking to it, if you have a very large website, or your if site has many pages that aren't thoroughly linked together.

Before you can submit a sitemap to Search Console, your site needs to be added and verified in Search Console. If you haven't already done so, go ahead and do that now.

From your Search Console dashboard, select the site you want to submit a sitemap for. On the left, you'll see an option called "Crawl." Under "Crawl," there will be an option marked "Sitemaps."

Click on "Sitemaps." There will be a button marked "Add/Test Sitemap" in the upper righthand corner.

This will bring up a box with a space to add text to it.

Type "system/feeds/sitemap" in that box and hit "Submit sitemap." Congratulations, you have now submitted a sitemap!

Checking a robots.txt file

Having a website doesn't necessarily mean you want to have all of its pages or directories indexed by search engines. If there are certain things on your site you'd like to keep out of search engines, you can accomplish this by using a robots.txt file. A robots.txt file placed in the root of your site tells search engine robots (i.e., web crawlers) what you do and do not want indexed by using commands known as the robots Exclusion Standard.

It's important to note that robots.txt files aren't necessarily guaranteed to be 100% effective in keeping things away from web crawlers. The commands in robots.txt files are instructions, and although the crawlers used by credible search engines like Google will accept them, it's entirely possible that a less reputable crawler will not. It's also entirely possible for different web crawlers to interpret commands differently. Robots.txt files also will not stop other websites from linking to your content, even if you don't want it indexed.

If you want to check your robots.txt file to see exactly what it is and isn't allowing, log into Search Console and select the site whose robots.txt file you want to check. Haven't already added or verified your site in Search Console? Do that first.

On the lefthand side of the screen, you'll see the option "Crawl." Click on it and choose "robots.txt Tester." The Robots.txt Tester Tool will let you look at your robots.txt file, make changes to it, and it alert you about any errors it finds. You can also choose from a selection of Google's user-agents (names for robots/crawlers) and enter a URL you wish to allow/disallow, and run a test to see if the URL is recognized by that crawler.

If you make any changes to your robots.txt file using Google's robots.txt tester, the changes will not be automatically reflected in the robots.txt file hosted on your site. Luckily, it's pretty easy to update it yourself. Once your robots.txt file is how you want it, hit the "Submit" button underneath the editing box in the lower righthand corner. This will give you the option to download your updated robots.txt file. Simply upload that to your site in the same directory where your old one was (http://ift.tt/1iHdc5m). Obviously, the domain name will change, but your robots.txt file should always be named "robots.txt" and the file needs to be saved in the root of your domain, not http://ift.tt/1hb5sfW.

Back on the robots.txt testing tool, hit "Verify live version" to make sure the correct file is on your site. Everything correct? Good! Click "Submit live version" to let Google know you've updated your robots.txt file and they should crawl it. If not, re-upload the new robots.txt file to your site and try again.

Fetch as Google and submit to index

If you've made significant changes to a website, the fastest way to get the updates indexed by Google is to submit it manually. This will allow any changes done to things such as on-page content or title tags to appear in search results as soon as possible.

The first step is to sign into Google Search Console. Next, select the page you need to submit. If the website does not use the 'www.' prefix, then make sure you click on the entry without it (or vice versa.)

On the lefthand side of the screen, you should see a "Crawl" option. Click on it, then choose "Fetch as Google."

Clicking on "Fetch as Google" should bring you to a screen that looks something like this:

If you need to fetch the entire website (such as after a major site-wide update, or if the homepage has had a lot of remodeling done) then leave the center box blank. Otherwise, use it to enter the full address of the page you need indexed, such as http://ift.tt/1WPMHPX. Once you enter the page you need indexed, click the "Fetch and Render" button. Fetching might take a few minutes, depending on the number/size of pages being fetched.

After the indexing has finished, there will be a "Submit to Index" button that appears in the results listing at the bottom (near the "Complete" status). You will be given the option to either "Crawl Only This URL," which is the option you want if you're only fetching/submitting one specific page, or "Crawl This URL and its Direct Links," if you need to index the entire site.

Click this, wait for the indexing to complete, and you're done! Google now has sent its search bots to catalog the new content on your page, and the changes should appear in Google within the next few days.

Site errors in Google Search Console

Nobody wants to have something wrong on their website, but sometimes you might not realize there's a problem unless someone tells you. Instead of waiting for someone to tell you about a problem, Google Search Console can immediately notify you of any errors it finds on on your site.

If you want to check a site for internal errors, select the site you'd like to check. On the lefthand side of the screen, click on "Crawl," then select "Crawl Errors."

You will then be taken directly to the Crawl Errors page, which displays any site or URL errors found by Google's bots while indexing the page. You will see something like this:

Any URL errors found will be displayed at the bottom. Click on any of the errors for a description of the error encountered and further details.

Record any encountered errors, including screenshots if appropriate. If you aren't responsible for handling site errors, notify the person who is so they can correct the problem(s).

We hope this guide has been helpful in acquainting you with Google Search Console. Now that everything is set up and verified, you can start taking in all the information that Google Search Console has for you.

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Consumer Survey Reveals the Efficacy of Inbound vs. Outbound

Posted by KelseyLibert

We've all heard the decades-old myth that the average consumer is bombarded with up to 5,000 ads a day. But if someone wanted to, he or she could get that number closer to zero. Just search for "how to block ads" and you'll find more than 700 million answers.

Ad-avoidance is a growing issue for marketers and advertisers; recent data from Adobe made a stir due to their finding that 198 million people are blocking ads. Since ad blocking is mostly a desktop browsing phenomenon, there's a lot of room for it to become commonplace across all devices. For example, Apple's upcoming iOS9 will include support for ad-blocking extensions in Safari, so we may see a lot of people adopting ad blockers as part of their mobile browsing experience too.

Additionally, a recent survey by Fractl and Moz found that 58% of respondents were using some form of ad-blocking software.

With the growing resistance to interruptive marketing, it's clear that consumers are fed up with low-value, high noise marketing. But are some of these tactics and channels still an effective ingredient within a holistic marketing approach? Better yet, is inbound marketing any better in the eyes of the consumer?

Fractl and Moz have once again teamed up for exclusive research, examining various marketing tactics' efficacy and efficiency.

The first part of our research focuses on marketing efficacy. For this, we'll share consumer survey results regarding different traditional and digital marketing and advertising channels' ability to gain awareness, drive action, and influence purchasing decisions. For the second part, we'll look at the efficiency of these same media by breaking down what a $10,000 spend can achieve across several different channels.

I. Efficacy: What Gets Results?

Survey Methodology

For this study, we went straight to the source: the consumer. In July 2015, we conducted an online survey of more than 1,000 people. Participants were asked 13 questions regarding their opinions on and recent engagement with various marketing and advertising media as well as tactics, including traditional advertising (TV, radio, print, billboards), direct mail, social media, content marketing, online search, display ads, ad retargeting, email marketing, paid search ads, mobile app ads, and sponsored story links.

A few considerations:

• Within the survey questions, "traditional advertising" was defined as TV, radio, billboards, and print ads.
• We provided participants with visual examples of terms they may not have been familiar with, such as pay-per-click ads in the SERPs, retargeting, and sponsored story links.
• Participants skewed young; the majority were between 18 and 34 (73.2%).
• A majority of respondents were male (58.4%).

Survey Overview

Before we dive into the full survey results, here’s a glimpse into our findings:

• Most likely to have a positive influence on buying decisions: Customer reviews, search, online articles, traditional advertising, and direct mail
• Most likely to have a negative influence on buying decisions: Mobile app ads, display ads, paid search, and email marketing
• Most effective for attracting business: Direct mail, content marketing, and appearing in search results
• Popular methods for self-education: Search, visiting a company’s website, and customer reviews
• Most-noticed digital ads: Display ads, media ads, and mobile app ads
• Best outbound channels for grabbing attention: Traditional advertising, email marketing, and social ads

The resulting findings are not an all-encompassing, all-knowing guide to which types of marketing people want. Rather, these insights may give you a new perspective on approaches you may not have considered before or may have believed to have dubious efficacy. For example, you may be just as surprised as we were to see how effective consumers find direct mail. Furthermore, these findings may simply reinforce the efficacy of your current marketing mix or what you already know about consumer behavior, especially the section about online discovery preferences.

1. Awareness of online advertising is high, but more than half of respondents are not engaging with these ads and/or actively preventing them from showing up.

The majority of survey respondents are aware of and notice the various online ad formats. Around three-quarters noticed display ads within 30 days of being surveyed. The majority had noticed all of the ad formats we asked about.

More than half (53.8%) reported they had not clicked on any ads within a week of being surveyed.

• Nearly a quarter (24.4%) clicked on a social media ad in the last week, the highest of any online ad.
• Somewhat surprisingly, sponsored story links were the second-most clicked, at almost 18%.
• More than 16% clicked on a display ad, which seems high considering a majority of respondents are using ad blockers (57.5%).
• Under 10% of respondents clicked on PPC ads.

2. Out of outbound and paid channels, traditional advertising, email marketing, and social media ads are most effective at grabbing attention.

More than half of our respondents rate traditional advertising high for grabbing their attention. There is arguably no better way to reach a mass audience than through traditional advertising. Plus, studies show it remains effective for not only awareness but driving other KPIs. A study by Nielsen found that radio commercials are effective at driving brick-and-mortar traffic, with advertisers gaining an average $6 return for every $1 spent. And a recent MarketShare study rated TV as the most effective ad medium, citing "TV is a major driver of indirect outcomes such as inbound calls, organic search query volumes, and website visits."

With a direct line to consumers' virtual centers of attention – their inboxes – promotional emails were next best for grabbing users' attention, at 41.3%. Social media ads were the third-most attention-grabbing, catching the eye of 35.8% of respondents.

Which ad formats aren't particularly attention-grabbing?

• PPC ads were found attention-grabbing by just under 10% of respondents.
• 16.5% found that mobile app ads grabbed their attention.
• Sponsored story ads were attention-grabbing for about 18%.

3. More than 88% use online search to seek out more information about a company, and greater than 93% had done so within a week's time.

Online queries are a ubiquitous part of daily life, so it's not surprising that 88.3% of respondents use online search to research a product or company. Just over 85% visit a company's website and 81.9% read customer reviews to learn more.

Other self-education methods are significantly less popular than using search, visiting a company's website, and reading reviews. More than a quarter (27.4%) follow a company's social media accounts to learn more about it, and 10.7% learn about a company by downloading content from its website.

Asking respondents about their online behavior within the last week gave insight into how often they're seeking out information online – allowing companies to market to them – and consuming online content.

A whopping 93.2% – almost the entire survey sample – used online search to find information about a company or product within the last week. Also within a week's time:

• 89% read an online article.

• More than half (50.8%) downloaded content from a website and gave a company their email address (50.2%).
• Over a quarter (28.5%) followed a company on social media.

Notice almost just as many people downloaded content from a website as gave a company their email address, which may signal a relationship between handing over their email address in exchange for the content they downloaded.

4. Customer reviews, online search, and online articles have a positive effect on buying decisions for a majority of respondents.

About 85% are positively influenced by customer reviews. 45% are significantly more likely and 40% are slightly more likely to buy something they hear about via customer reviews.

More than three-quarters (77%) are positively influenced by online search. 25.7% are significantly more likely and 51.3% are slightly more likely to buy something they hear about via online search.

More than half (56.7%) are positively influenced by online articles. 9.3% are significantly more likely and 47.4% are slightly more likely to buy something they hear about via online articles.

Interestingly, email marketing was most likely to negatively impact buying decisions, with about 44% of respondents slightly less likely (22.9%) or significantly less likely (21.4%) to buy something they hear about via email marketing.

Feelings tend to be neutral toward a company's social media posts and press releases, which don't affect purchasing decisions for 42.8% and 48.6% of respondents respectively.

5. Compared to other outbound and paid tactics, traditional advertising has the most positive effect on buying decisions, followed by direct mail.

Traditional advertising has a positive effect on purchasing decisions for about two-fifths (42%) of respondents. 6.2% are significantly more likely and 35.8% are slightly more likely to buy something they hear about via traditional advertising.

Direct mail positively impacts buying decisions for just over 30 percent. 4.2% are significantly more likely and 27.7% are slightly more likely to buy something advertised via direct mail.

Still, it's worth noting traditional advertising and direct mail are significantly less impactful than hearing about a company or product through other sources such as customer reviews, online search, or online articles:

• Customer reviews are two times more likely to positively influence buying decisions than traditional advertising.
• Online articles' positive effect on buying decisions is 56% greater than direct mail.
• Hearing about a company through online search is 1.8 times more likely than traditional advertising to have a positive impact on purchasing decisions.

On the other end of the spectrum, some ads have a negative effect on a person's likelihood to buy something. Mobile app ads, display ads, and paid search ads are more likely to have a negative effect on buying decisions, compared to other methods:

• More than half (54.3%) say mobile app ads have a negative influence. 31.4% are significantly less likely and 22.9% are slightly less likely to buy something advertised via mobile app ads.
• Nearly half (48.1%) are less likely to buy something advertised in display ads. 25.7% are significantly less likely and 22.4% are slightly less likely to buy something advertised via display ads.
• Paid search has a negative effect on just under half (49.4%). 25.3% are significantly less likely and 24.1% are slightly less likely to buy something advertised via pay-per-click ads in search engine results.

6. Direct mail, online content, and search are the most effective ways to attract customers.

Direct mail and content marketing come out on top, with more than half of respondents rating these as smart ways to attract their business. Nearly half (48.3%) say showing up in search results when they have a want or need can help attract their business.

Additionally:

• Well over a third of respondents consider traditional advertising (37.6%) and email marketing (34.6%) effective ways to win them over.
• About a quarter of respondents rate social media posts (27.4%) and social ads (24.8%) as smart tactics for attracting their business.
• Only 6.6% of respondents consider mobile app ads an effective tactic for earning their business.

While our survey results tip in favor of inbound (search, content) and third-party endorsements (customer reviews), our respondents do find several outbound tactics effective, especially traditional advertising, for grabbing their attention and direct mail for attracting their business. But efficacy is only part of the marketing equation ...

II. Efficiency: What's the Best Value?

In addition to efficacy, the cost of getting results, or efficiency, should be given significant consideration for what to include in your marketing mix. Marketers are continuously tasked with doing more with less, so finding the most cost-effective methods for getting the greatest results is the holy grail for marketers.

Cost Comparison of Various Marketing Channels

Cost is typically touted as a large benefit of inbound marketing while being a barrier for choosing more costly outlets like TV and print media. To get a better sense of the efficiency of different channels, let's look at the potential costs of a campaign designed to generate awareness.

CPM (cost per mille) is commonly used across a variety of ad mediums to measure the cost of a thousand impressions.

CPM = (Cost of Ad x 1,000)/Audience Size

In the ad-buying world, this is used to measure the efficiency of an ad medium. Focusing on this CPM makes sense for campaigns that want to achieve high awareness by getting a message in front of a substantial audience.

Since so many variables impact the actual CPM rate you would pay for a given medium, the chart below should be used for informational purposes only. However, these figures do give an idea of the huge difference in the price you will pay to reach a certain audience size across various advertising and marketing channels.

Direct Mail Pricing

You'll notice direct mail is missing from the chart above. With a CPM of $583 for a letter-sized envelope direct mail piece, it didn't exactly fit nicely in our chart.

Paid Search Pricing

Although CPM is used in paid search, cost-per-click (CPC) is the more commonly used measurement, so we'll use that as our benchmark rather than CPM.

Paid search costs can vary greatly depending on vertical, keywords, and targeting. While some keywords may only cost a handful of change per click, extremely competitive keywords can cost more than $5 per click. The chart below shows average CPC pricing data across nearly 700,000 keywords for a variety of verticals during 2014.

Based on the figures above, the lowest CPC is $0.38 and the highest CPC is $4.41. This puts our median CPC at $2.40. The average CPC for this data set is $1.70.

A note on CPC vs. CPM: Both are typically offered as options for paid search, display, and social ads. The chosen pricing model depends on campaign goals and budgets. CPM is often chosen for awareness-based goals and CPC is better for performance-based goals like traffic or conversions.

What a $10,000 Budget Can Buy

Based on the above pricing, let's look at how far a $10,000 budget would get you.

Extremely High CPM: Direct Mail

With a CPM of $583, for $10,000 you could send a letter-sized direct mail piece to 17,152 households. According to the Direct Marketing Association, the median ROI for direct mail campaigns using a prospect list is 12–14%, so this type of return on investment may be worth the high upfront costs.

High CPM: Local Market Primetime TV

A primetime spot TV commercial has the highest median CPM, at $33.85. (Spot TV means your commercial only plays for a local market, not a national market.) With a $10,000 budget, you can reach almost 300,000 local market viewers at that CPM rate. That's actually not such a bad deal – but keep in mind, it's for a one-time, 30-second spot and this is just the price to air the ad. Other cost considerations include producing the commercial, which may include script writing, editing, voiceover or acting talent, etc.

Mid-CPM: Magazines

Magazines fall somewhere in the middle of the pack, with a median CPM of $14.00. With a $10,000 budget, you could afford an ad in a magazine with a circulation of about 715,000 readers. Pricing varies based on the size of the ad, color or black and white, page position, and position within the magazine. Also consider the cost of the ad creative, such as copywriting and design.

Low CPM: Facebook Ads

With a CPM of $1.54, Facebook advertising is the most budget-friendly of the bunch. At that rate, $10,000 can pay for almost 6.5 million impressions. This budget would allow you to reach a ton of Facebook users at once or target the same people with multiple ads over a long period of time. Keep in mind, Facebook ad CPMs and CPCs typically become more expensive the more granular your targeting becomes.

CPC: Paid Search

A $10,000 campaign with a CPC of $2.40 would guarantee at least 4,167 clicks. The same amount spent for a $1.70 CPC would yield 5,882 clicks. For some perspective on how many people would see the ad, assuming a 5% click-through rate, the ad with a $2.40 CPC would get about 83,330 impressions and the $1.70 CPC ad would get about 117,640 impressions.

The CPM of Content Marketing

Content marketing is a little trickier to cost out since there's no industry-wide standard unit of measurement for things like impressions and costs-per-click, which makes an apples-to-apples comparison between the cost of outbound, paid, and inbound difficult. However, we do have a recent, relevant example of the price of content marketing versus TV.

Content marketing can garner viewership similar to a sizable TV audience – but for a fraction of the price. We recently had a Fractl client campaign placed on BuzzFeed that achieved more than 3.2 million views within several days of publication.

According to the rates above, you would have to pay around $75,000 for a 30-second TV spot on a primetime network TV to reach a similarly-sized audience.

Add the additional viewership from syndications and social sharing, and the equivalent in terms of viewership is probably similar to what more than $200,000 would buy you for a TV commercial. Not to mention the SEO value derived from the content.

With a Fractl campaign of this scope averaging $10,000 for end-to-end strategy, production, and promotion, that makes the CPM roughly $3.13.

While a $10,000 Facebook ad spend can garner the most impressions, the same budget going toward a large-scale content marketing campaign can include benefits beyond exposure to a huge audience, such as increased rankings, syndication, and long-term visibility.

Key Takeaways

Choosing the right marketing mix depends not only on how well a given channel and tactic are for the KPIs you want to achieve, but also your available budget. Striking a balance between efficacy and efficiency is crucial for a long-term, sustainable marketing strategy.

In summary, below are some of the main takeaways from our findings:

Awareness:

• Traditional advertising Loudmouths digital advertising when it comes to grabbing attention. Email marketing and social media ads came in second and third, respectively, for grabbing viewers' attention.
• The majority of respondents used search engines and or read online content within a week of being surveyed, making these effective avenues for getting in front of your target audience.
• To learn more about a company, a majority of survey participants turn to search, the company's website, or customer reviews.
• Display ads were the most-noticed digital ads, but had low engagement.

Conversions:

• More than half had downloaded content or given a company their email address within a week of being surveyed, which may be due to opting-in for content offers in exchange for their email.
• Customer reviews, search, and online articles have the most positive effect on buying decisions.
• Of the outbound channels, traditional advertising and direct mail were most likely to have a positive effect on buying decisions.
• Respondents rated direct mail as the most effective way to attract their business.
• Survey participants also said offering them free content or appearing in search results are some of the best ways to win their business.

Cost:

• Based on our cost analysis, content marketing and Facebook advertising are the most cost-friendly ways to reach a wide audience.

Want to see more data from our consumer survey? We've also filtered out the Millennial segment within the survey responses (18- to 34-year-olds) to extract additional insights. For our findings on how Millennials feel about various marketing tactics, be sure to download our free white paper.

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