Is Google Judging You Based on a Template?

Posted by ajfried

Thinking in templates

We all judge people on first impressions. When we see someone for the first time, we're quick to decide what type of person they are — based on the clothes they wear, how they style their hair, and anything else we notice that immediately puts them in a group.

It’s certainly not fair, but it’s human nature. And I'd like to keep my faith in humanity and argue that lots of us try NOT to prejudge others.

Google is judging you

Believe it or not, Google is the same. It judges, too. Some might disagree with this theory, but our internal research supports it, as you'll see in the data below. Google pre-classifies every single search term into a group for later recall.

Is that fair?

Is Google fair about how it does this?

Imagine, for a moment, that you're about to walk onto the stage of MozCon. You've spent months preparing and you have new and thought-provoking research to share. You are legend and you're about to blow everyone’s mind. And as you make your way up... SPLAT! You fall right on your face. I mean, really wipe out.

You'll probably recover, because you're dynamic and you'll still nail your presentation. However, you'll also be forever stamped as the one that fell on your face during the conference.

Is it fair that people treat us this way? Or how about Google? Is it fair that Google judges us like this, that we're classified into select groups, or that Google may show years-old negative content about us or our clients?

I think most people would agree: it’s not. Something that's truly not relevant to an individual's or brand’s storyline shouldn't be appearing prominently in a query for their name. An event that's nothing more than a blip on the radar shouldn't become the most important thing you see about them.

Yet, often it is. More often than you think. Some of the biggest brands in the world are dealing with this problem — having unfavorable content appearing for their name — and desperately try to get rid of it.

How does Google feel about ranking content?

On Google’s About page, Larry Page describes a perfect search engine as something that "understands exactly what you mean and gives you back exactly what you want."

As an example, it states: "This means making search smarter and faster, so it can understand that when you type in [jaguar] you’re looking for the car, not photos of the animal."

Well, first of all, they might want to find a different example, because queries without context can't hint at intent, as you'll see below.

Intent is really difficult

It’s a basic issue of not knowing what the context is for the query. And, arguably, some of the most important searches don’t have context. A brand? An individual? There's nothing necessarily unique about these searches to give them context. For example, if I search for "Applebee's" from my phone, there's context behind it. I'm on my phone, I'm in the vicinity of a restaurant, I'm probably hungry. But a query for, say, a gentleman named "James Young" is useless, as it gives Google no context or basis for figuring out which results might be most relevant. Do I want to know where he lives? When he was born? What kind of work he's in?

Arguably, these queries without context are the most important queries, and they're where audiences form opinions about brands. [Tweet this]

So, is Google out to get you?

Sometimes, it can seem like it is when your search results don’t reflect who you are or the content you're putting out into the world. Truth is, though, Google's probably not out to get you — in reality, it's an emotionless machine.

As I've mentioned previously, I don't believe it's evil. I think it's a machine controlled by an algorithm, with imperfections and flaws. Choices must be made based on the information available. Sometimes there isn’t enough to work with, or the right information that it'd like to show is missing, so it makes the wrong choices.

So... How do we change what Google wants to show?

Learning from Google’s templates

Google’s job is to show you what you're looking for. This can only be done by finding patterns and trends. Behind all the search results are templates that every query needs to fit in to.

When you perform a search in Google, you're effectively seeing whatever information it wants to show you on that day. It's a ton of information — but it’s not data. If you're able to collect all that information and trend it, an unbelievable amount can be learned.

For example, among the top 100 hedge funds:

• 74% have their homepage at position 1
• 72% have a knowledge graph
• 38% have Wikipedia at average position 4.41
• 74% have LinkedIn on page 1

Having this data, you start to uncover a deeper meaning behind the search results. You expose the template Google has created for this "type" of query. It should come as no surprise that these templates will change from industry to industry.

Understanding search result templates and trends by industry

The graph below gives a breakdown of what shows up in search results for these industries. (Note: the percentages are the percentage of Google page 1 results.)

Some notable observations:

• Telecommunications companies have more results that are corporate on page 1 of Google than pharmaceutical companies do.
• Pharmaceutical companies will have significantly more media content appearing in their search results than an engineering/construction company.
• Food/drug stores don't usually get stock quotes appearing in their results.

Using data to create the content Google wants to show

Armed with this information, you can now identify what kind of content Google wants to show for you or your brand.

While we've all heard a million times that "content is king" and we should create more content, the reality is that only the RIGHT content is what’s going to make the difference. Content is not churning out post after post after post of products and other junk. Rather, content is about creating an impression that enhances the brand in the viewer's mind.

Practically, this idea of templates becomes extremely important in planning the right content for your brand. If you can use these templates to identify certain trends appearing for brands similar to your own, you can create the content Google wants to show.

Case studies and analysis

To help articulate this point, I want to share a few case studies.

Case study #1: The not-for-profit president that seems unfavorable

Take, for example, a client we had in the not-for-profit industry. He was the president of an organization and notable enough to have a Wikipedia profile, as did all of his competitors. His corporate site and social profiles were ranking relatively consistently with everyone else, and he authored content regularly. However, he had a disproportionate amount of media coverage about him compared to his competitors, causing negative content to rank prominently.

What became clear was that all the authored content was on his corporate sites, as opposed to a leading industry publication. Content creation was happening, but it was being put in the wrong place. According to the data, someone like this individual should be generating content on reputable industry publications.

Result: We worked to migrate some of his content to relevant publications. With a few relevant links, it began ranking within a few weeks.

Case study #2: The CEO gets all the news!

Another example was the CEO of an asset management company who had a disproportionate amount of news content appearing about them, some of which was negative. This caused frequent changes to the search results for the individual's name and a lack of branding around their name.

When you examine the results closer, you notice that on average, the CEO of a company like this would have two non-owned, executive-style profiles on sites like Forbes, Bloomberg, or Fortune.

Result: This individual was missing from notable lists, specifically the Forbes billionaire list. Working with the communications team, he was included in the list, displacing some of the negative content.

Case study #3: The need for more ownership

The final example I'll offer was of a client who had been trying to brand themselves through the use of content, blogging, press releases, and other similar information.

The biggest problem they had? They already had a nice amount of “ownership” within their search results. That means they had full and total control over half of the results appearing. Based on the peer analysis, it was going to be highly unlikely that they'd get more than that.

However, when we ran a frequency analysis, we noticed that every single one of their competitors has a GuideStar profile appearing.

The only differentiator between our client and their competitors was the level of their profile, which is earned by completing it. They were at silver, while everyone else had gold status (Note: there's some speculation about the level of status).

Once we helped them build up their profile to gold, we added a few easily-attainable and relevant links pointing to the profile. Easy ones, like from their corporate website. It doesn’t get more legit than that.

Result: Within a matter of weeks, we saw the profile ranking at the bottom of page 1, displacing negative content about the brand.

Practically using this information

At the end of the day, Google is nothing more than an organized system. We sometimes give it too much credit because it happens to be REALLY good at understanding what we want and mean. But this is based on an organized understanding of how we (all humans that use Google) use the search engine.

Not all content can rank for all types of queries. Just because a certain result appears for one query doesn’t mean that another will; randomly creating a bunch of profiles is not going the solution. For example, if you happen to be one of the 200 richest Americans in the world, Pinterest is not likely to rank for you. (It appears for 3 of them on page 2: Randa Williams, Milane Frantz, and H. Ross Perot Sr).

Using historical and competitor analysis, understanding what type of content is frequently appearing will give you tremendous insight into the kind of content you should be building to fit into the template Google has built for your brand.

One final note

The only loose end in this process is the thought that you're now "stuck" in a template. Once Google perceives you a certain way, is that it? Are you stuck? Can the CEO who loves arts and crafts convince Google that Pinterest should rank prominently for queries with their name?

There is some subjectivity to this, to be sure, but the entire process above is by far the path of least resistance. This is the content Google wants to show for queries about you or your brand, based on trends of others in your industry.

If you create an experience on that network that's highly popular, engaging, and something in which you invest a lot of time and effort, I think it's fair to say that it could change how search engines classify you. But convincing someone to blog or use social media when it’s not something they'll do aggressively or passionately usually doesn’t end well. Most people have these profiles, but that doesn’t mean they actively use them.

These templates exist because of the type of information that typically shows for these queries. It’s low-hanging fruit. If you have info that doesn’t make sense for who you are, it likely won’t appear right away without really hard work.

Work with the algorithm and make sense of which content it's clear that the search engine wants to show. If you create that content, it will rank.

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Accidental SEO Tests: How 301 Redirects Are Likely Impacting Your Brand

Posted by Wayfair

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.

At Wayfair.com, we conduct a lot of SEO tests. We're constantly measuring and evaluating our strategies, some of which were shared in our last post for YouMoz, Accidental SEO Tests: When On-Page Optimization Ceases to Matter. Sometimes, however, we stumble across what we call "accidental SEO tests." This typically happens when a bad code deploy unintentionally hurts our SEO, and we end up learning something useful from our mistake.

Tens of thousands of 301 redirects

One of our accidental tests involved regularly 301-redirecting large batches (i.e., tens of thousands) of product pages. On average, we found a consistent (and essentially permanent) traffic loss of about 15% for 301-redirected URLs.

In the past, Google has said a small amount of PageRank is lost through a 301 redirect, which is the same as through a link. Now, for the first time, we can put a hard number to how much that loss is.

Structure of an accidental SEO test

Like any good SEO team, our product pages were set to use the name of the product in the URL. Furthermore, if for any reason a product URL was changed, the old URL was set to automatically redirect to the new one.

What we didn’t realize, though, is that our merchandising teams were also busy being good at their jobs, part of which involved changing the naming standards of products on a regular basis. Every change they made was good for the customer. But when the the naming standards changed, it caused thousands of products to change names. This, in turn, updated the URLs of those product pages, triggering a 301 redirect on every page.

For example, when updating for the purpose of having a consistent style, the merchandising team changed “barstools” to the more accurate two-word version of the product name, “bar stools.” Wayfair had over 8,000 bar stools, all of which 301-redirected to a new URL following the name change. Then, a couple of months later, the merchandising team found that they were getting better results by including the height of the bar stool in the product name, so they updated the product names again, which resulted in the product pages 301-updating once more to a brand new set of URLs.

This process of updating product names was being implemented across dozens of different product classes, with multiple updates per month. It quickly added up to a lot of 301 redirects.

Measuring the impact

After reshaping our URL logic to prevent the constant redirects, we realized that we had a great opportunity to find out exactly how 301 redirects affect organic traffic. Nailing down data was easy. We had the exact dates of the changes; groups of thousands to tens of thousands of pages, with tens of thousands of organic visits; and could compare those classes against others that we knew didn’t change to exclude the impact of Wayfair’s overall increase in organic traffic.

We found with surprising consistency that we had a drop very close to 15% of organic traffic for any product class that changed URLs. In our bar stools example, we lost just under 15% of organic traffic at the first change. When the URL changed again over a month later, we lost another 15%.

Every product class we looked at showed the same drop within one to two weeks of the change. Sometimes the drop was almost immediate (like with bar stools); other times, however, it was spread out over a couple weeks (e.g., area rugs, with over 30,000 products).

We did not see any evidence of recovery from the impact of the 301 redirects, even after many months. There was the appearance of recovery — class traffic levels eventually returned to where they started — but that was because our overall organic traffic was increasing across the entire site. We were still 15% below where we would have been without the redirects.

What’s particularly fascinating about this number, 15%, is that it is exactly the amount of PageRank loss Google described in the original PageRank paper. So our measured results matched theory with surprising precision. Perhaps the broader authority signals Google now measures follow the same logic for flowing through pages as they did in 1998? Or perhaps it’s just a happy coincidence.

What it means

We’ve always known there was a “small” cost to implementing a 301 redirect, but our accidental SEO test showed us that the cost is quite significant, and it becomes much greater with every hop in a redirect chain.

It’s worth stressing, however, that we are not saying that 301-redirecting any particular page is going to cost you 15% of your organic traffic. If you rank in position #1 for competitive terms, a redirect could drop you to position #2 or #4. That would cost you far more than 15% of your organic traffic. On the other hand, your page could be so strong that you may not not see any loss in rankings after redirecting it.

What our data suggests is that, on average, there’s a 15% traffic loss following a 301 redirect; but any individual redirect could be much better, or much worse.

While 301-redirecting a dead or changed page to the new location is still good practice, the best practice of all is not to change your URL in the first place.

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Leverage This Social Network Mind Trick for More Effective Influencer Marketing

Posted by KelseyLibert

Did it feel like everyone you knew was watching “Making a Murderer” at the same time? It may have just been an illusion, thanks to a few key members of your social network.

Researchers at the University of Southern California recently uncovered that when something appears more popular than it actually is, it can create the right conditions for it to be widely spread. They named this social network phenomenon the majority illusion, which happens due to highly-connected individuals within a social network skewing the group’s perception. These findings explain something we already knew — well-connected individuals can wield extraordinary influence. The majority illusion may also explain why it can take only a handful of the right influencers to make something go viral.

Marketers can leverage the majority illusion to create the tipping point needed to drive action or spread a message far and wide. It starts with identifying influencers who have the potential to create the majority illusion among your target demographic, and then encouraging those influencers to help amplify your message.

How social influencers can create the illusion of popularity

Are you surprised when your non-marketer friends are completely unaware of something that was major news in the marketing world? You may think it’s popular because you kept seeing it discussed by key members of your network, which can give the impression that it’s universally popular.

Image source

Let’s say that in the figure above, each of the colored nodes is a Nickelback fan. The networks are identical, except different people are Nickelback fans in each figure. Since the Nickelback fans in figure A have more connections, it may appear to their network that Nickelback’s music is popular. This is how the majority illusion can create the impression within a group that an idea, behavior, or attribute is common, even if the opposite is true.

How a social network is structured

By illustrating how a social network is organized, we can see how an idea can potentially spread across communities or stay within a select group.

We modeled a network graph of 77 Twitter influencers across eight different verticals: automotive, business, entertainment, finance, health, lifestyle, technology, and travel. Influencers were chosen based on criteria including relevance to a vertical and engagement. In order to create a usable graph, we then narrowed down the influencers’ 19 million followers to about 8,600 second-degree influencers. We chose those users based on a set of criteria that signaled mid-level influence: a following greater than 30,000, a follower to following ratio of at least 1:1, and a “lists per followers” rate of at least 6.5 (the number of times they have been added to a Twitter list per thousand of followers). Side note: Wondering why you can’t find Rand? He’s too popular to meet the parameters we set for a “mid-level” influencer.

The resulting network illustrates the hierarchical relationships of first- and second-level influencers within a social network. Click here to see the full interactive graph.

The nodes represent individuals, while the relationships between individuals are expressed as lines. The larger a node, the more relationships the individual has within the network. It’s important to understand this does not mean the large nodes have the most followers within the network; rather, they have the most connections within a particular network (some being first-degree, second-degree, third-degree connections, etc.).

By examining this graph, you can see that social influence is more like six degrees of Kevin Bacon than a popularity contest. Because of this, marketers should focus on getting their message spread by influencers within a focused niche or strategically-positioned influencers to maximize reach, rather than looking for influencers who merely have a large following.

Finding strategically-positioned influencers

Tools such as BuzzSumo and Followerwonk are a good jumping off point for finding influencers within a vertical. But you want to look at more than the number of followers, because influence depends on far more than popularity.

There are three main factors for determining the most powerful members of a network:

• Betweenness Centrality: An individual’s location between different sections of a network
• Degrees: The number of connections, or edges, an individual has
• Closeness: The average number of degrees between the individual and others in the network

So which of these variables are most important? It depends on your goals.

Do you want people to take an action? Niche influencers may be best to create the majority illusion and give the impression of popularity, thus spurring others to mimic their behavior. An influencer’s closeness may be the most important factor in this case, since it signals they share a lot of connections with other individuals in their network. When you consider all of the common relationships within a niche group, it’s easy to see how these groups are susceptible to the majority illusion effect.

Are the goals for your content expanding brand awareness or increasing viral potential? Influencers with connections to other communities may be most effective for reaching a large audience. Betweenness centrality is the greatest signal of strategic positioning, since it shows the individual’s potential to influence and connect different groups.

Influencing a niche group

If you want to create the majority illusion within a niche-focused group, target influencers with followers similar to them who have a low number of followers.

Notice how some groups are isolated on the edges of the graph. We can assume the “majority illusion” is likely to happen within these groups since they have little to no overlap with the other communities.

The researchers found that the majority illusion occurs most frequently in networks where individuals with a low degree of connections tend to connect with individuals with a high degree of connections. Those with a low number of connections may be easier to influence since they aren’t exposed to a wide range of ideas and opinions — plus they have less noise in their stream, so they are likely to see what the influencer posts.

Getting a handful of niche influencers talking about your brand within the same time period may be the key to creating an impression of popularity. I see this happen all the time on niche blogs, where several blogs do a sponsored post or review of the same product within a short time period. It does have the effect of making it feel like you’ve seen something everywhere, even though only a few people are talking about it.

Influencing a wide audience

If you want your content amplified to the widest possible audience, target influencers who are followed by other influencers and have diverse connections across different communities.

The closer an influencer is to the center of the graph, the more visibility they have across multiple verticals. This gives your content a better chance of escaping the echo chamber likely to occur within the more isolated groups. Individuals strategically positioned within their network, rather than those who are the most popular, may be the most effective at influencing a large number of people.

Two great examples of this within our network model are Ann Handley (@MarketingProfs) and Daniel Pink (@DanielPink). Notice how their connections are spread across different groups.

Example: @MarketingProfs

Example: @DanielPink

You don’t need to build your own social network graph to identify influencers with high betweenness centrality. Look for a mix of these two factors to spot strategically-positioned influencers:

1. Influencers who are followed by other influencers. Consider the ripple effect that can happen when an influencer shares something and then other influencers following them share it.
2. Influencers who are followed by people across multiple verticals. Potential reach is greater among influencers who have a diverse following, since their followers can spread things throughout multiple networks.

Need help finding the right influencers? Check out our guide to identifying effective influencers. Once you pinpoint the influencers who can help you achieve your desired goal, be sure to deploy Rand’s advice on getting influencers to amplify your message.

By visualizing the structure of a social network, you can see that having a lot of followers doesn’t necessarily equate to influence. Influencers within closely-knit groups may be best suited for influencing their followers to take action or adopt an opinion, since this type of group is primed for creating the majority illusion that "everyone’s doing it." To reach a large audience, marketers should enlist the help of influencers who are strategically positioned between social communities, rather than those with a Kardashian-sized following.

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Revisiting "Navigational," "Informational," & "Transactional" Searches in a Post-PageRank World

Posted by Tom-Anthony

SEOs traditionally say that a specific search query can be classified as either navigational, informational, or transactional. The categories were originally published in 2002 in a peer-reviewed paper by Andrei Broder who worked for Altavista (remember them?!) at the time.

The categories that Broder came up with have been invaluable to SEOs for many years, helping many of us explain the different types of search query that we should consider.

However, it's time to revisit these categories to see if we can improve their usefulness in a world of direct answers, apps, intelligent personal assistants, and other developments.

Recap

For those who haven't reminded themselves recently, here is a quick recap of the three categories:

• Transactional – Here the user wants to get to a website where there will be more interaction, e.g. buying something, downloading something, signing up or registering etc.
• Informational – This is when the user is looking for a specific bit of information.
• Navigational – The user is looking to reach a particular website. There's only one likely destination that they're looking to reach.

Google, in their human rater guidelines, call these three categories:

• Do
• Know
• Go

Google also widened the definition of the categories slightly from their original paper. Interestingly, Andrei Broder, who created the original categories, now works at Google.

Beyond the Web

However, what is important to understand is that Broder's was proposing "A taxonomy of Web search" — i.e. the categories were designed for web searches. Even though Google widened the definition of these queries in their Do-Know-Go framework, they also still discuss them in terms of web search.

Here's the thing — so many of the searches we do nowadays are not web searches at all. Various papers have estimated differently, but most estimates (here, here, and here) are that around 50–80% of searches fall into the "informational" category, which is the category that often lends itself to a direct answer:

Furthermore, we are more and more frequently searching, not via a web-powered search bar on a desktop machine, but instead via an Intelligent Personal Assistant app (IPA):

In the most recent revision of their human rater guidelines, Google introduced a new category — Know Simple — for informational queries that can be answered with a short (< 2 sentences) answer that has an uncontroversial answer, i.e. the type of answer that is suited for these direct answer-type responses. You should read this great post on takeaways from the latest quality rater guidelines from Jennifer Slegg to read more about Know Simple and other interesting tidbits from the Google document.

New considerations

Google's addition of Know Simple indicates that Google understands that the Do-Know-Go categories are no longer broad enough for the modern search landscape. However, I believe that, even with the addition of "Know Simple," the model could be improved upon.

SEOs have traditionally used the navigational / informational / transactional framework to classify the searcher's intent. We believe that a large part of this (maybe not all) can be captured by considering how user intents may change and be better served when they've been conducted via an Intelligent Personal Assistant app.

The last couple of years has seen an explosion in the functionality and usage of an increasing number of personal assistants:

• Apple Siri – Built into every iPhone. Now also "Proactive" in a fashion similar to Google Now.
• Google Now –Technically, the name refers to a certain set of functionality, but people are increasingly referring to the "assistant" app and its functionality with this name.
• Microsoft Cortana – Originally just in Windows phones, but now available for Android as well. Microsoft has a great research team and are working hard on Cortana.

There are also a couple of newcomers that look very promising, but which are not fully released yet:

• Facebook M – An interesting cross between Artificial Intelligence and human workers who help with certain tasks, Facebook is looking to really take things to the next level with an assistant that can do things for you.
• SoundHound Hound – A preview video the company put out last year got a lot of attention for Hound's speed of understanding and flexibility with complex chained queries. I've tried it myself and it's pretty awesome.

Upgrading Do-Know-Go

At Distilled, we've been thinking about this a bit, and have gone through many iterations trying to work out how a new model should look. We still aren't sure we've cracked it, but wanted to share what we have so far.

We propose adding a second axis or a second row to the model, such that we have something like this:

Notice we've moved "Go" to the side, because we don't think it changes in a very meaningful way (you're just looking to go to a certain destination, be it app or web or whatever) — but it's also the least interesting category!

The logic of this model is that previously, the navigational / informational / transactional categorization allowed you to two things:

1. Understand the user's intent for a query
2. Frame how an appropriate landing page (or set of landing pages) should be formed for this category of queries on your site

None of that has changed when we're still in the the "web model," but we now need to extend that model so we can do those same two things above when considering IPAs.

In our model, we can see that "Informational/IPA" is where a huge amount of Know Simple queries exist. Then we have a box for "Transactional/IPA," which is also very interesting.

What's fascinating is that, in the case of both "Informational/IPA" and "Transactional/IPA" instances, SEOs don't yet have a good understanding of how to do any sort of optimization of improvements (which is to be expected as they are still developing). Let's discuss each.

Informational/IPA

Google puts their Know Simple queries into this cell but, as you'll see, Informational/IPA also covers slightly more ground.

Know Simple queries are for short, relatively factual searches; a good example is [how old is barack obama], which Google can answer from their own knowledge as it's something that changes infrequently.

However, there are other searches that fall into the Informational/IPA category, such as our example of [are the trains to London on time]. Google says that "queries where different users may want different types of information" are not considered Know Simple, but such queries clearly fit into our structure there.

These latter queries are the interesting ones, as they're the types of queries that search engines will be looking to fill by connecting to APIs. These are very related to "data-driven search." Also worth noting is that if 50–80% of queries are Know queries, we can imagine that this cell could serve a huge number of queries.

An Informational/IPA query via Google, served via the facts in their Knowledge Graph.

An Informational/IPA query via Hound, pulling live and context-based data via an API.

A particularly interesting variant of Informational/IPA queries are those which involve some sort of computation. I don't mean requests such as [the square root of 1764], as they have no "search" aspect. However, a query such as [100 US dollars in British pounds] requires the IPA to fetch the exchange rate for you, and then do something with that answer before giving you a response.

Currently, the capabilities here are still hit and miss; only Amazon's Evi IPA successfully answered my query [is barack obama older than his wife], whilst Google, Siri, Hound, and Cortana all sent me to a web search.

As the capabilities of IPAs improve, you could imagine some complex compound queries that could fit into this category.

Transactional/IPA

Transactional/IPA queries, which are the transactional relative to Informational/IPA, are queries where there's an intent to do something further after getting the query response. The initial response may be served within the IPA where you can do some additional filtering before you move to an app to complete the purchase (though, in the future, that part may be unnecessary), or the initial response may be opening an app right away.

A Transactional/IPA query via Siri; you're able to go several steps into the funnel before finally the "Buy Tickets" button takes you to an app.

This category feels like it's going to become absolutely huge in the near future; currently on iOS, full integration with Siri is only available to selected partners, but it seems likely that wider integration is going to become available. With Google Now and other platforms, we're likely to see similar patterns. Once apps can integrate right into the personal assistant apps and add functionality in terms of being able to do things, then the range of available queries available will explode. Being able to "rank" is going to be very heavily based upon being a flexible and comprehensive service for that niche.

Future and wrap up

It seems inevitable that search is moving away from just being about web search and 10 blue links, and so it seems inevitable that we'll need to update our models to keep up. The original navigational / informational / transactional categories were designed for the web, and the model proposed above was built to allow us to extend that model into this new world.

The original framework was used by SEOs to help us understand and categorize queries and to help educate and persuade clients. This new framework allows us to do these same things, but expand them to cover searches done via Intelligent Personal Assistants.

I would love to hear from everyone on in the comments on whether you think there are more opportunities to improve this model. Distilled's R&D team is working on better understanding how to do SEO in a world of Intelligent Personal Assistants, so be sure to watch this space!

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11 Well-Made Print Advertisements From the Last Century (And How They Hold up Now)

In the history of American advertising, print has played a vital and interesting role.

Print advertising has been around as long as any medium, surviving the advent of radio, television, and internet, maintaining its steady influence all the while. There’s something truly iconic about a well-crafted print ad, and the agencies and brands that have done it well over the years have seen immense benefits as a result.

Here’s a look at some well-designed print ads from the last 115 years (one from each decade) and an attempt to understand what we can learn from the progression. Changes in taste, disruptive new technologies, and the natural evolution of our cultural propriety have completely transformed the way brands use print mediums to advertise – but certain patterns and threads hold true.

Using a modern interpretive lens to reexamine those strategic patterns (and the ads that made use of them) makes for an interesting case study of where we’ve been and where we’re headed - as advertisers and consumers.

1) 1906 - Kodak Story

Using content marketing to ‘tell the story’ of a brand is nothing new. While the platforms we use to display our content marketing change drastically, the same underlying concepts have been exploited by businesses as far back as the turn of the 20th century.

In this ad from 1906, camera-maker Kodak (whose continued success, over a century later, serves as evidence that they were and continue to be ahead of the curve marketing-wise) created a series of print advertisements that targeted parents buying gifts for their adolescent children. The ads promised a technologically advanced way for young people to capture the essence of their experiences with Kodak cameras, requiring little-to-no expertise but delivering reliably breathtaking results.

While the model’s hair and fashion choices betray the ad’s century-old status, the concept could apply to a magazine ad today. She is contentedly going over the stunningly mounted prints that she took with her Kodak. The background is accented by a beautifully somber twilight scene, which gives the viewer an idea of what her photographic subjects might have been. Another connection to today’s modern marketing is the call-to-action at the end of the ad: “The Kodak catalogue tells the details. Free at the dealers or by mail.”

Free ebook download, anyone?

2) 1917 - Our Boys in France Tobacco Fund

Throughout World War I, American advertisers used the contextual backdrop of the war to promote their products. This glorified propaganda was used by companies in many industries to put their brand in the good graces of the American people. If the buying public believed a company was in some way supporting the war effort in a meaningful way, they’d be much more inclined to spend their hard-earned dollars on it. This was based in factual reality for many industries: gramophones, for example, vital to Allied soldiers’ communication while in the trenches, sold extremely well during the war years.

Other, less impactful industries took part in in the strategy as well. This ad in (and for) The Morning Telegraph, a daily newspaper that was devoted primarily to horse racing results and theatre news, shows how widespread the practice had become by 1917. Since the paper itself couldn’t rightly be positioned as benefitting American soldiers in any direct way, they positioned themselves as the “Official Organ in New York City for the ‘Our Boys in France Tobacco Fund.’”

Today, this would likely be seen as exploitative (or at least lacking in subtlety). Brands like McDonald’s, for example, have been rightfully reprimanded by the public for being a bit too heavy-handed while linking their brand to American crises and national spirit. Patriotism still sells – it just requires a bit more subtlety from the brands using it, lest the buying public react negatively.

3) 1929 - Dr. West's Toothbrushes

This ad presents an interesting case study in the cyclical nature of visual design trends. In many ways, this toothbrush company (or whomever it hired to do its advertising) shows itself to be well ahead of its time aesthetically.

As far as color palette, the full rainbow is used for a strikingly immediate visual effect. The way the toothbrushes overlap in a grid-like fashion makes the ad feel symmetrical and comfortable. It’s interesting to think about how visual symmetry is now seen as an important design tool to evoke a brand’s strong organizational structure and trustworthiness. Being used in this context, almost 90 years ago, lends legitimacy to the theory itself. If it’s been working for that long, there really must be some innate truth to it.

The only aspect of this ad that would make today’s design experts cringe is the decentralized positioning of the brand itself. If modern viewers were to give this ad a 2-3 second gander and then look away, a very small percentage of them would be able to recall the name of the company. Not only is “Dr. West’s” relegated to the bottom of the page, but it’s depicted at such an angle that it makes it less memorable. Aside from that, this is a particularly forward thinking example of ad design considering when it was created.

4) 1938 - Carefree film poster

Historian Carlos Stevens offers the following about American filmmaking during the Great Depression: “The movies offered a chance to escape the cold, the heat, and loneliness; they brought strangers together, rubbing elbows in the dark of movie palaces and fleapits, sharing in the one social event available to everyone.”

During the time this film was made, the average movie ticket was $.27, offering struggling families a relatively cheap way to escape the harsh realities of their daily lives. Along with the pricing and promotional efforts of the theatres, Hollywood filmmakers recognized that there was a demand for a cheap product: one light on dramatic intensity and heavy on comedic gags. The filmmakers of the era recognized this demand and adjusted: resulting in titles like Carefree.

The ad for the film fits its tone extremely well, with a happy, dancing couple surrounded by swirling patches of bright pink, yellow, and orange. This colorful arrangement - especially in its use of adjacent pastels - would actually come back into fashion in the advertisements of the 1990s. The film's stars – Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers – were among the biggest draws of the era, starring in ten films together from 1933 to 1949. In an era when financial security was lacking for a majority of the movie-going audience, films like Carefree (and the accompanying advertisements) provided a welcome escape.

5) 1946 - Spam 'n' Limas Recipe

In 1946, America was reaching the height of its World War II involvement. Much like during WWI, the advertising of the era was greatly affected by the nation’s wartime status. Consumers were confronted with government-enforced rationing practices that affected the way they purchased everything from gasoline to meats and cheeses.

Enter: Spam. Spam is a canned, precooked ham product that was created by Hormel in the late 1930s and became popular throughout the country for its price and convenience. For a time, the tag of being a canned, precooked, processed meat meant modernity, not unhealthiness and questionable meat sources. This ad is representative of the product and the era in its arrangement – with all prominent real estate devoted to the end result of the recipe included below. Throw in a punny 1940s-friendly catchphrase and – voila – there’s your ad.

In this case, though, I think the end result is far from “‘Ah’ inspiring” – no matter how much "sugar lard" you add.

6) 1950 – Truval creative like the men who wear them

Much like visual elements of design can be cyclical, fashion trends can be as well. Popular fashions for today’s millennials borrow extensively from that of previous decades, and this 1950 ad from shirtmaker Truval is no exception.

The men in the ad are all donning colored plaid shirts, seemingly both comfortable and durable. They appear to be architects and/or engineers, standing around blueprints discussing the best way to get some kind of building job done. The copy reinforces these themes of strength and resourcefulness: “Creative … like the men who wear them.”

This ad holds up surprisingly well (other than the overtones suggested by its all-male, all-white cast of characters) against today’s fashion advertising standards. The shirts themselves are exactly the kind of hipster-chic flannel numbers you’d seen populating any number of New York City graphic design firms. The layout evokes the spreads seen in magazines like GQ, with most of the space devoted to highlighting the product itself and leaving the copy down below. Aside from the aforementioned demographic issue, the only element that really dates this example is the illustration style: heavily bordered and cartoon-like, these types of drawings were great for ads of the time because they were similar to what one would find in the popular fiction of the day – think Hardy Boys books and Superman comics. Now, brands are far more interested in allowing high-quality photography to highlight the product being sold.

7) 1968 – Sony personal televisions

The effect of technology on modern relationships has been well documented. Smartphones and the apps contained therein have revolutionized the way we meet, date, and communicate with significant others, for better or worse. Movies, TV shows, and advertisements have all parodied the now ubiquitous extreme of this phenomenon: a couple out to eat at a restaurant, paying no attention to each other, instead staring at their phones. The reality, though, is that technology has always affected our collective approach to romance.

In this Sony advertisement from 1968, a couple is shown lying down in bed, each facing the opposite direction and glaring into their own personal televisions. The humor isn’t missed on the makers of the ad, with the caption reading: “There comes a time in everyone’s life when they just want to be alone with the person they love.”

The room surrounding the couple’s bed is completely dark, highlighting the alluring glow of the screens and the zombie-like entrancement of the man and woman. The screens themselves offer a glimpse into the nature of that entrancement as well, with the man’s screen showing a beautiful woman and the woman’s showing the reverse. Ultimately, the ad does a good job of addressing the negative viewpoints many would’ve had about personal televisions: not inclusive enough, too isolating, etc. Instead of shying away from those claims, Sony decided to embrace their comedic weight.

Generally speaking, companies today are less willing to do this. The companies that make smartphones and the apps that power them tend to advertise in ways that showcase how we connect via the technology, as opposed to poking fun at the ways we isolate ourselves with them.

8) 1972 – Tareyton Cigarettes

If you’ve seen the mega-popular AMC show Mad Men, you’re familiar with the interesting and controversial history of advertising in the cigarette industry. Precisely when tobacco companies became aware of how dangerous their products were is the subject of much contention and many legal battles throughout the last four decades. Ultimately, there was no contest. It became overwhelmingly clear to the companies, the Surgeon General, and the American public that, without exaggeration, cigarettes are killers.

As that process unfolded, however, there were many different phases during which those companies had to constantly adjust how much they were willing to admit. After the 1964 Surgeon General’s report officially recognized the health risks of cigarettes, the fight for respectability took a turn for the worse for those brands. Despite this, it still wasn’t anywhere near the situation we have today, with less than 7.5% of 12th graders identifying themselves as daily smokers (versus about 30% in 1972.) So how did they pull this off? Well, the Surgeon General’s reports – while well researched and vital to maintain public health – don’t always have the immediate influence we would like them to. In the aftermath of that report, the companies were still able to jostle for position amongst the public opinion as the “healthy” cigarette brand. That’s precisely what you see in this ad, with Tareyton using the drinking water analogy as a way to prove how much of a cleansing effect its charcoal filters had.

This, of course, was a hoax. And a morally repulsive one, at that.

9) 1983 – Yamaha piano

As disco died on the dancefloor and the 70s turned into the 80s, design trends started to change dramatically as well. The color schemes that were in vogue in the 70s were immediately ditched for a sleeker, more simplistic approach. Stark contrasts were king, and glossy finishes helped brands deliver messages that popped right off the page.

In this ad from Yamaha, we see the beginning of another advertising design trend that began around the same time and has continued to this day: product integration. As more and more homespun companies gave way to global corporations with tentacles reaching many different industries, it became more difficult for ad-men and women to capture the essence of a brand with a single concept. To accomplish this, they would use visual analogies that linked the different product and service types they offered.

Here, we see Yamaha (a multinational conglomerate that deals in musical instruments, electronics, motorcycles, and power sports equipment) trying to demonstrate the engineering prowess of their most recent model keyboard synthesizer, as reflected by the shiny, modernistic glare of a motorcycle helmet. The ad works extremely well because of its crisp design and well-written copy. “Because this machine is so powerful, it can take you places just standing still.”

10) 1990 – Absolut 19th

Much as we saw the cyclical nature of aesthetic fashion trends with the Truval ad from 1950, the aesthetics of advertising can be very cyclical as well. With this ad from Absolut Vodka from 1990, we see a return to the hand-sensibilities of the 1950s.

This is a smart matching of form and content, as the concept behind the ad is based on the allure of sharing some Absolut-based cocktails with your golfing buddies after a long day out on the links (the relaxing drinks being the “19th,” following 18 holes of golf.) This comes in a series of ads on which Absolut places a bold image that takes up most of the print space, supplemented by “Absolut _______” at the bottom (always in that same bold white font). Recurring ad themes are great for the print medium because you can constantly tailor the concept to your audience. In this case, the “19th” wordplay is clever, but not overwhelmingly so – in other words, the perfect dad joke.

What’s the audience being targeted here? You guessed it – dads. Throw in the fact that the aesthetic framework – the hand-drawn golf course, the heavy-handed visual “bottle as island” pun – is also perfectly tailored for that demographic, and you’ve got yourself a perfect example of a tried-and-true theme that’s been smartly remolded for its intended audience.

11) 2002 – T-Mac Got Milk

While the vodka -> milk transition may seem a bit abrupt, in this case it’s fitting.

The “got milk?” campaign – created by the advertising agency Goodby Silverstein & Partners for the California Milk Processor Board – ran throughout the 90s and early 00s and aimed to promote milk as a healthy source of calcium for kids and teens. The ads became iconic for their uniquely written copy and larger-than-life spokespersons.

As compared to the Absolut ad, it provides a perfect counterexample in terms of audience. Here the advertisers are targeting adolescents; they want to strip milk of its old, lame connotations and repurpose it as a cool drinking option for kids who want to grow up to be like their heroes. Aesthetically, it couldn’t be more different from the classic illustration of the Absolut ad. NBA legend Tracy McGrady is seen mid-flight against a black and grey background (reminiscent of high school yearbook backgrounds), ready to finish one of his trademark slam dunks into an unseen net.

The copy is smart and achieves the perfect tone for its audience – coming off like the popular kid in a sitcom without being too sappy. Also, it’s always a good idea to match an iconic catchphrase with a similarly memorable visual callback. It unifies the campaign and helps tie all of the different ads together, making them easier to engage with. In this case, the milk mustache couldn’t be more perfect for accomplishing this – it makes the ads playful without being childish; funny without being frivolous.

Ultimately, despite all of the recent claims that its time has passed, print maintains its influence in the American cultural landscape. While the internet has changed the way we engage with all forms of content, there remains (at least for now) a market for the printed word.

That doesn’t mean things aren’t changing, though. In all likelihood, we will continue to spend more and more time engaging with digital content as our lives become busier and our tools become more connected. The lessons of print advertising, though – be they aesthetic, conceptual, or even emotional – will continue to influence the way we engage with brands and each other.

Case Study: How We Gained More than 100 Links for a Travel Website via Content Marketing

Posted by tommcloughlin

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.

Many small businesses see content marketing as something that you can only be successful with if you are a huge company with a big budget. I was in the same boat for a long time, but after much research, many (many) failed attempts, and a lot of perseverance, I’ve finally started to see some predictability in how to get results from content marketing. Nothing illustrates this better than a project we managed for a travel company that was inspired by the finale to the fifth season of the television series Game of Thrones.

To sum up how effective this effort was, let me break down the results:

• 111 linking domains acquired (and counting)
• 19 linking domains on sites with DA of 70+
• 33 linking domains on sites with DA of 50+
• 12 all-time-high days of traffic
• Referral traffic was 245 percent higher than the previous year
• Coverage in The Washington Post, Business Insider, Mashable, Yahoo, Bored Panda and other top-tier publications.

This was done very simply by creating a map showing all the filming locations used throughout the Game of Thrones series and then promoting it in the right place at the right time. You can see below how this impacted referral traffic to the site:

Before I get into the nitty gritty of the exact process we went through to gain these results, I want to highlight the turning point for me when I truly believed I could make a content marketing approach work. My epiphany came courtesy of Ryan Holiday, who helped me realize there were hundreds of hugely powerful media sites out there desperate for content.

Our job, then, is simple: Find something newsworthy and create great content around it.

Here’s the process we're now using to bridge this gap:

The idea

The very first thing you have to come up with is an idea good enough to gain some traction. Don’t think this needs to be directly connected to your (or your client’s) brand. Even a loose connection is sufficient, as you’ll gain the links and brand mentions when you are referenced as the source of the content. Obviously a closer connection to your offering is better, but if you wait around until you found something sufficiently linked to your product/service in the news, then you might be waiting a long time.

For our example, the company focused on Moroccan holidays since Morocco was used as a filming location in Game of Thrones.

I find the best way to get ideas is by surfing the web, particularly the bigger news and entertainment websites (e.g., Mashable, Buzzfeed, Bored Panda etc). Buzzsumo is also an excellent tool for finding similar kinds of successful content in your niche.

Identify targets

Once you have an idea, the next job is to find the people you will target with your outreach when the content is ready. It’s crucial to do this before you create the content, as this process may highlight particular elements your targets are receptive to, which you can then incorporate to make it more appealing to them. For example, you may find that some publications enjoy featuring maps, while others prefer stats and surveys.

The key is to find specific people who have written about something similar to your topic before. We sifted through hundreds of sites to find the specific journalists and writers who had written pieces around Game of Thrones so we knew they had an interest in it and were more likely to be receptive when it came to the outreach process.

Another way to do this is to find a similar piece of content that has been successful and has gained a lot of coverage, then use a tool like Open Site Explorer to examine which websites and authors have linked to it. We found this Google Maps version of Westeros, for example, which we used to mine potential targets for outreach.

The golden nugget in this kind of scenario is identifying the sites which other sites use as as sources for their information. If you can get your content featured in those places, it is almost a guarantee that you will see it republished on a variety of other powerful sites. For example, Business Insider articles are republished on Yahoo, and we’ve found that a story will often get picked up in a lot of places if you can seed it there originally. Therefore, offering your content as an exclusive to those kinds of sites can be a great approach to follow.

Pre-outreach

One possible addition at this stage, depending on the kind of content you’re producing, would be to send an initial feeler email to one or two of your key targets to gauge their interest in the piece. (Hat tip to Brian Dean of Backlinko for this tip.) This can be a great way of getting on your target's radar without being pushy.

"Hi John: We’re currently putting together a comprehensive map which features every single Game of Thrones filming location. Obviously, excitement is at fever pitch ahead of the season finale next week. I saw you’d covered GOT earlier this year, so I thought I’d see if it was something you’d be interested in featuring?

If so, let me know, and I’ll send it over when it’s ready to go."

Be sure to let them know why it’s newsworthy and why it’s relevant to them.

If you receive a reply, that’s great. But the real goal is to create familiarity for when your content is ready for sharing.

Once you have a great idea and have identified the people you are going to target with outreach, it’s now time to produce your content.

You don’t need to have huge budgets to create great-looking graphics and interesting images. Websites like Fiverr and Upwork are fantastic resources for finding freelancers who do great work. It simply takes a bit of initial time to sift through and separate the wheat from the chaff. Once that’s done, give the freelancers a detailed brief and tell them exactly what you want.

There are a wide variety of different types of content you could create in this way, including infographics, maps, charts, graphs, slideshows, interactive graphics, and videos. If your idea is interesting and newsworthy enough, then packaging it up in any one of these formats should give you a great opportunity to gain coverage.

Another useful point to consider, in this stage and the "ideas" one, is that the wider the audience you can cover with your content, the more likely you are to get it featured in lots of places. If your content is relevant to people in the US, UK, and around the world, then any site on the Internet may write about it. Limit it to a study about the UK and US, though, and sites are unlikely to pick it up. Fortunately, pretty much everyone on the globe now loves Game of Thrones.

Given that our idea centered on filming locations in Game of Thrones, it made sense to structure the content in a map format. We added in some nice images of each place and gave it a GOT feel and we were good to go!

Contact your exclusive target

Once your content is ready to go, contact your outreach targets and tell them about the content. Provide a concise summary of what you have and why it's valuable to them. The key here is to offer it as an exclusive feature for that site before reaching out to anyone else. If the writer sees an opportunity to win those clicks before any other site features it, then they're more likely to pounce on your offer.

If they aren’t interested and don’t reply, though, move on until you find one or more takers. Remember, you only need one solid placement to be successful.

Promote, promote, promote!

Immediately after getting our content featured, we begin the process of promoting it. The more we help the post perform well, the more likely it is that other people will pick it up.

Do everything you can to get more visibility for that post: Share it on your social networks, hijack hashtags, add it to a relevant sub-reddit on Reddit, ask friends to share it, etc.

Boost the post with ads on Facebook and Twitter to enhance its visibility and give it the best possible chance of getting as much social proof as possible. It may seem counter-intuitive to spend money promoting someone else’s site, but the benefit you’ll get from the additional social proof will be well worth it.

Another benefit of this is that many of these sites promote the most popular content they publish to their homepage feeds. If you can get enough early buzz around your piece, then it will only enhance its visibility further by pushing it onto the homepage.

Once you have your exclusive feature in place, the next action is to publish it on your own site.

When you add it to your site, ensure that you add plenty of additional information to it. Make sure that your enhanced version is better than the original piece of content.

Ride the wave

So, you’ve got your first piece of exclusive content placed, promoted it like crazy so that it has irresistible social signals, and published an enhanced (i.e., new) version of it on your site. Now it’s time for the second wave of outreach. Return to your list of highly relevant targets and start contacting them. The only difference this time is that you are not offering exclusive content. Instead, you are pointing them to the exclusive and highlighting how much people are loving it — and how much success (and clicks) they could have a share of if they published the content on their own site.

“Hi Joan: In collaboration with Lawrence of Morocco, we've created a map featuring every real life location used through the series Game of Thrones that I thought you might like. Would you be interested in featuring it on Bored Panda?

Obviously, anticipation and interest is building around the upcoming finale of Season 5, as well as their recent announcements about locations for Season 6, so it's a bit of a hot topic at the moment. Plus, everyone loves GOT!

The map has already received some really great feedback since being featured on Business Insider (http://uk.businessinsider.com/game-of-thrones-set-...), and has taken off on social media since we published it on the LOM site - http://www.lawrenceofmorocco.com/news/game-of-thro....

I've attached the map here for you to take a look. If you publish it, if you could link to lawrenceofmorocco.com as the source, that'd be great. If you need anything else, just let me know.

Hope you like it!"

Keep digging

Now is the time to work down your list and contact those third-tier sites to ask about featuring your content. They might not be the strongest sites on the web individually, but provide great value collectively.

For us, this effort involved us contacting the self-proclaimed "nerd sites" (i.e., sites that cater to fans of comics, video games, and cosplay). Our third effort at outreach successfully targeted these groups. As a result, we gained links on Unreality Mag (DA of 57) and Nerdist (DA of 80), among others.

Once the dust has settled and you’re sitting back all pleased with yourself, remember that there are still things you can do to make the job easier next time.

Follow up with the sites that used your content to thank them for featuring it, comment on how well it did (in case they didn’t realize that themselves), and ask them if they’d be happy to receive more ideas from you in the future.

One other thing you can do is to make a note in your calendar of future dates when your content may be relevant again. For us, we’re ready to go when the next Game of Thrones season approaches. That's when we’ll start reaching out to a new batch of sites, possibly with an updated map.

Final thoughts

I bought into the idea and benefits of content marketing a long time ago, but struggled to put the recommendations I'd read about into practical action to gain (relatively) consistent and predictable results for a long time.

Hopefully, this post will help you, too, to take the plunge and find success.

Do share your own experiences and difficulties with content marketing in the comments below, along with any questions.

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How to Create Audience Personas on a Budget Using Facebook Insights

Posted by tallen1985

We know Facebook has a huge amount of data on people. For the last 18 months, they've been sharing more of this information than ever before through their platform, Audience Insights. As a result, we can begin to pull together audience personas for very little cost other than time, effort, and a Facebook account.

This post is going give a whirlwind tour of how we can begin to use Audience Insights to build personas for our business that will allow us to target content better and keep people in mind rather users & sessions.

What is a persona and why should we build them?

A persona is the summary of research or observations based on a key group of users who show similar behaviours and lifestyle choices.It allows us to collectively group users into buckets, rather than having to focus on thousands of individual needs and wants.

This is then distilled into a fictitious person that can be referenced to guide business decisions, whether they be the type of design we use, the content of our email marketing, the tone of voice we use for our brand, or even the types of products we may look to be selling.

We may end up generating multiple personas to connect to various users we are looking to share our brand with. This will help guide business decisions, rather than taking a one-size-fits-everyone approach.

Three things to be aware of

1. Facebook offers two audience options — “All of Facebook” or “People connected to your Page.” In the past, if we have paid for Facebook followers or used extremely broad advertising options, the “People connected to your Page” data could potentially be an inaccurate representation of our target audience.
2. If our audience segment is less than 1,000 people, Audience Insights won’t display any information.
3. If you select more than one option in the faceted navigation, this uses an “or” functionality. This can make data hard to dissect, particularly if you input multiple interests.

How to build a persona using Facebook Audience Insights

Let’s assume here that we are building a persona using all of Facebook’s data, either because we are a new brand, doing some client research and we don’t have access to their Facebook account, or as mentioned earlier, our existing Facebook followers have been dirtied by either buying followers or previous advertising campaigns being too broad.

*If we decide to build personas based on existing Facebook followers, the process is extremely similar; however, if the number of followers is low, we may not be able to segment our audience interests as much as in the steps that follow.

1. First thing, head over to Facebook Audience Insights. You don’t need an advertising account — all you need is a Facebook profile.

2. Let’s assume we have a fictitious sports clothing brand who are trying to appeal more to runners. Enter an interest closely aligned to your brand or products; in this instance, it's “running.”

3. The initial search gives us some pretty broad options that probably aren’t that useful. However, they do indicate that of those interested in running, 60% of them are women, so let’s narrow by gender for our first audience persona. Remember, we will end up creating multiple personas for our brand — this is just one demographic we are targeting.

4. The results show that a large portion of our audience sits between the ages of 18 and 44 — however, that is once again a quite broad segment of our audience. Let’s focus on where the bulk of the market appears to be by also filtering by age, 25–34.

5. From the Demographics screen we can start to dig into the type of people who might be interested in our product and start building their persona.

Audience Insights categorizes our audience into Lifestyle demographics and provides us with a brief description about the type of lifestyle they may lead from which we can extract relevant information to filter our audience further. The table below indicates those lifestyles that fit best with our running brand for the demographics defined so far.

Lifestyle	Definition
Tots and Toys	Affluent, well-educated working couples, with preschool-aged children. They are homeowners, mainly in single-family houses.
Truckin’ and Stylin’	Mid-to-late 30s and live in rural towns. On average, they earn middle incomes; they rank below average for income when compared to the nation.
Shooting Stars	Childless couples in their 30s and early 40s. Home-owning households often include professionals with postgraduate degrees.
Career Building	Young, childless singles. Mixture of mobile renters and first-time homeowners, living in condos and single-family houses.

6. From here we can build a better picture of the type of person that may be interested in our products. Using the above information, we now know the following information about one group of potential customers.

They are:

• Females aged between 25-34
• Mainly homeowners
• Both singles and couples
• Working
• Mixture of childless or young children families.

Adding all of this information as facets and we have cut our audience down to between 300k and 350k monthly active people.

7. From here, we can drill into each of the individual tabs to extract relevant information about our target persona, such as:

• Demographics: Age, gender, job title, relationship status, education level
• Interests: Categories and page likes
• Location: Where they live
• Activity: Frequency of online activity and device usage
• Household: Income, home ownership, home market value, spending methods
• Purchase Behavior: Likelihood of online purchases, purchase behavior

Example of a persona that can be built using Audience Insights

We now have a decent amount of information that we can pull together to start to build the profile of the type of person we want sell our products to. We can keep this person in mind when pulling together any content or carrying out any type of marketing activities.

Below is just one audience persona that we might look to target for our fictitious running brand.

Name: Mummy Michelle

Age: 25–34

Relationship Status: In a relationship

Education Level: University

Household: Homeowner

Estimate Household Income: $125,000

Interests:

• Running events
• Jewelry (brands such as Tiffany & Co. and Verragio Engagement Rings)
• Clothing Boutiques
• Romance Novels/Movies (The Notebook)
• Reality TV (The Hills and Keeping Up with the Kardashians)

Device Usage: Her primary device is the mobile phone and she is more likely to be using an iPhone

Spending Habits: Michelle primarily spends using a credit card rather than cash. She is also highly likely to complete an online purchase, particularly on clothing.

So, that’s all we have to do?

We would need to rinse and repeat this process for different demographics that we believe may be interested in our brand. But yes, these are some initial steps we can take to building audience personas that we can target our products and brand towards.

However, I’m not saying that this is the only task we have to complete to build audience personas.

Yes, Facebook has a lot of data, but they're still piecing together all the parts. In the same way we know we shouldn’t completely trust the numbers that Google Keyword Planner gives us, they just give us a ballpark to play in. As such, the data we are given by Audience Insights should be just one of multiple research methods we should be looking to use to build audience personas.

Big brands spend huge volumes of their budget trying to understand their customers. Many of us can’t compete on that level. We need to look to the tools and data we have available to us, and build the best personas we can for our budget.

Here are a handful of resources that can be used to help develop personas that won’t cost a lot, other than perhaps in time:

• Dig around Google (other search engines are available) for other surveys that have previously been carried out within your niche. Everett Sizemore discussed this in a post on inbound.org on how to carry out audience persona research on a budget.

• My colleague Craig Bradford took a look at how to use the the Alchemy API to build personas from users Twitter profiles
• Google Analytics has been giving us demographic data for a while now (if you’ve turned it on). A quick insight on how to do this can be found from Steven Sparber here.
• Actually speaking to people. Zachary Cohn has a great slide deck discussing 18 tips on running customer interviews.

What other processes do you use to help build audience personas? Have you used Audience Insights to build personas, and if so, do you have any further tips? Please share in the comments below or reach out to me on Twitter @the_timallen.

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