Google Analytics 360 Suite: What You Need to Know

In a marketing world that's buzzing with phrases like “marketing stack integration”, it's no big surprise that Google is in the early stages of releasing a new suite of enterprise-level products that together, form a more comprehensive platform.

Google Analytics 360 aims to help marketers get a holistic view of their online marketing efforts via fewer standalone tools.

But the question is: Will Google Analytics 360 truly make online marketing a more seamless experience, or will users still be missing the key information they need to make more informed marketing decisions–that previously has been supplied by third party solutions?

The verdict is still out on whether or not this new suite of products will be an instance of “jack of all trades, but a master of none.” In the meantime, let's look at what's new, the details of the DMP, and how Kissmetrics compares to Google Analytics 360.

What's New

Within the Google Analytics 360 suite, there are six products (four new, two re-branded) aimed at connecting a marketer's daily work. The new products are still in limited beta testing, and introductions to current Premium customers is just rolling out now::

Google Analytics 360: Formerly known as Google Analytics Premium–the paid, enterprise level tool for large companies.

Google Optimize 360: This product in the suite allows marketers to A/B test experiences without having to write any code. From here, marketers can pinpoint which site/ad variation is most successful for different audience segments.

Google Audience Center 360: The data management platform that ties in with Google DoubleClick and Adwords (as well as other third-party providers and demand-side ad platforms) to help marketers connect with customers on different channels and devices.

Google Tag Manager 360: Home to tag management of APIs and site code for streamlined workflows and more efficient decision-making.

Google Data Studio 360: Tool for quickly and easily sharing real-time marketing data visualizations across company departments.

Google Attribution 360: Cross-channel attribution tool that tracks all marketing spend information (online and offline) to determine overall marketing performance by channel.

Limited screenshots of the suite have been released, but this image from Business Insider helps us get a better feel for what the dashboard will look like for users:

The intent of the products in the suite is to help enterprise marketers connect the data across platforms, including mobile, PPC, and offline marketing channels, to name a few.

Why this?

Google commissioned a study by Forrester Research to discover what pain points marketers were truly struggling with today. According to the study's findings, marketers reported that their success depended largely on their ability to integrate analytics with other advertising and marketing technologies.

The study also found that found that the most successful marketers tied their marketing data directly to business goals.

Details of the New Data Management Platform (DMP)

One of the big questions so far is: How's it different? While Oracle and Adobe are already offering cloud-based DMPs, Google Analytics 360 enters the market as a DMP add-on for more data quality control–meaning users will likely use it in addition to an existing, more robust DMP–not as a standalone.

One of the unique details of Google Analytics 360 is that while it of course integrates with Google resources like AdWords and DoubleClick, it also integrates with other standalone tools like Optimizely that allow marketers to test sales funnel workflows, page layouts, offers, and more. Optimize 360 extends these testing capabilities to PPC advertising, too.

The open system helps marketers ensure they're not duplicating remarketing efforts by allowing imports of both first-party and third-party data. The suite also touts its focus on user privacy, and the fact that users can be tracked safely without putting their personal data at risk.

What Google Analytics 360 Means for SMB

Currently, SMBs are not being targeted as Google Analytics 360 customers at this point in time. That being said, the free tools offered in Google Analytics 5 will still be available for SMB users–but it appears that Google's hope is to build up more premium, paid GA users via the new suite's increased functionality.

For those enterprise-level marketers who are interested in the suite's products, there will be an opportunity to purchase products a la carte, but specific details on price point have not yet been released. The good news is that since the platform is open, users won't be forced into using only Google-based products–and that means more PPC advertising options.

Early Testing

Early testing of Google Analytics 360 has been opened to a few select customers, such as L'Oreal Canada, Progressive, and Google-owned Nest. A few case studies with these companies showed positive results, but it's still unclear how the initial enterprise users will view the product once it is fully released.

Kissmetrics Vs. Google Analytics 360

If you're wondering how Kissmetrics is different from Google Analytics 360 (as opposed to the free version of Google Analytics), here's what you need to know:

• 360 seems to be targeted for the enterprise, going head-to-head against companies like Omniture and Adobe Analytics. Kissmetrics, in contrast, is targeted towards small and medium-sized companies.


• Cost is likely to keep comparison shoppers in different swim lanes.

Kissmetrics is a people-based analytics platform, tying all visits back to a person across whatever devices they use.

Our tools let you see how specific users found you, help identify who your power users are, and allow you to study cohorts of different people. Google Analytics 360, however, still takes a more session-based analytics approach–so despite the new focus on mobile, user data on multiple devices can become cloudy and confusing at times.

It also appears that Google Analytics 360 is still lacking an effective conversion optimization resource beyond testing. Kissmetrics helps marketers optimize their marketing with tools like Engage, which allows marketers to target the right people and nudge them towards conversion.

Google Analytics 360: Is it the Right Stack Integration?

Will the Google Analytics 360 Suite be worth the investment for all enterprise-level companies?

It's hard to say at this point. However, the open system and early case studies do show some promise. As marketing integration becomes even more of a top-priority for harried marketers across multiple departments, this new suite may rolling out at just the right moment.

About the Author: Kaleigh Moore is a social media consultant and copywriter who helps SaaS companies craft intelligent content with a charming human element. Visit her website or follow her on Twitter.

Why Every SaaS Employee Is A Part of Customer Success

Customer success is a necessity.

For your SaaS business to survive, your team must focus on solving the consumer's problem.

Lincoln Murphy, founder of Sixteen Ventures, defines it even better: “Customer success is when your customers achieve their desired outcome through their interactions with your company.”

So, how are you serving your customer? What keeps them satisfied with your solution?

Customer success isn't a lonely department. It should be engrained in every employee's position. Work with your entire team to fully engage your customers and to add more value at every stage of the buyer's journey.

Let's explore your team's role within customer success.

It Takes A Village

Justification is one hurdle associated with customer success. Senior management may have doubts about allocating specific resources for this function.

The question is usually the same: Is this worth the expense?

Despite reluctance, the answer is yes.

At the 2015 Gainsight Pulse conference, Jason Lemkin noted that “customer success is where 90% of the revenue is.” Therefore, it's important to stress the power of customer success to your team.

Think of customer success as a long-term strategy. It should focus on how every team member can help customers accomplish their goals.

The image below depicts how Mike McKee of Rapid7 structures his customer success team. It shows how the company “sells a contract, deploys its software, engenders adoption and expands accounts.”

Sarah Brown, a growth marketer at ServiceRocket, suggests investing early in customer success:

“There's no such thing as too early for starting to define a Customer Success model - in fact, it's smart to think about it as soon as you do a customer acquisition model. This may start as: “How do we do great customer onboarding, promote adoption, and deliver value in the first 30-60-90 days?” and then scale into a full-blown Customer Success program over time.”

Avoid pinning customer success to one particular person. Prepare a strategy today and get everyone to take part in the customer's journey.

Before the Sale

In this new era of shopping, customers have more information at their fingertips. They surf the web diligently and compare prices at their leisure.

To stand out from the competition, start engaging your prospects with value. That translates to offering product benefits and prices upfront.

People want to know now. Sometimes, they don't want to wait for a phone call from a sales rep, which will only waste their time with a long sales pitch. Instead, nurture your leads.

MarketingSherpa reports that “businesses that nurture their leads experience a 45% increase in lead generation ROI when compared with businesses that don't.”

Prepare content that will entice prospects to learn more. For example, you may want to try creating a 60-second explainer video or hosting a webinar.

“By dripping your sales team with new marketing content that they can use to help sell your product, you can position marketing as a valuable resource to sales,” writes Jenna Hanington, Senior Content Strategist at Pardot.

“This includes content like data sheets, new eBooks, competitive one-sheeters, and even educational videos that provide selling tips from other sales reps.”

In a blog post, Steli Efti of Close.io dissects the Hubspot's email drip campaign. Here's the first email he received after signing up for their free trial:

The key is to understand that lead nurturing shouldn't be a sales or marketing goal. Think about how everyone's core skills can transform prospects into customers.

Onboarding Engagement

Most SaaS companies fall short in the onboarding process. They don't realize that once the sale is complete nurturing doesn't stop.

It's up to your team to ensure that customers accomplish their intended goals. Because if they don't, customers will see not see the value in keeping your service.

Meet with your marketing, sales, and product teams to create a specific approach. An integrated plan will provide a clear perspective on everyone's role.

Guy Marion, CMO of AutopilotHQ, states, “By mapping these processes into the onboarding nurture journey, vendors can codify their best practices, help more customers get started 'the right way', and enjoy improved user satisfaction and fewer support inquiries from new customers. Satisfied customers produce higher lifetime values…”

Begin by welcoming your new customer into your brand's culture. Create videos introducing them to your team. Let users know who will be helping them achieve success.

Furthermore, send tailored emails to your users based on their behaviors, because no two customers are alike.

Studies reveal that “trigger emails have a 152% higher open rate compared to traditional email.” These emails appeal to your users and keep them engaged.

Set easy milestones for your customer. What do you want them to accomplish on the first day? What about the second week?

There should be a natural progression toward the goal. And the customer should know the timeline. Process Street offers its users milestones in the form of lessons via in-app messaging.

Use onboarding as a tool to gain valuable insight on how to improve the customer experience. Ask users questions and gauge their satisfaction.

If you're using Kissmetrics, you can also use the Funnel Report to optimize your onboarding process.

Retention Maintenance

Research reveals, “companies with a dedicated customer success team see a 24% lower churn rate than companies without customer success.”

In other words: If you make customer success a priority, your SaaS will experience growth.

To retain more customers, build quality relationships with your customer base. And this doesn't mean, sending emails to them when you need something.

Des Traynor, co-founder Intercom, agrees:

“Trying to be cute and saying 'We miss you, please log in' doesn't work. You have to motivate a user to log in. There are often some features that will bring customers back, or prevent them from switching. By offering churning customers a glimpse of what's coming down the line, you can excite them about future releases.”

Similar to the pre-sale process, offer your current customers undeniable value. Have they set new goals? How can your team help?

When you understand their objectives, then you will have a foundation to build a solid retention strategy. Team meetings should focus on providing more value, not increasing logins.

Identify your brand advocates. These customers love your products.

Enlist these users into a special referral program. Give them discounts for signing up new customers or cool swag bags for spreading the word about your services.

For instance, Evernote offers their customers premium services for referrals.

Retention is all about relationships. How will each team member build a better relationship with your customers?

Training Necessary

Customer success is still a fairly new concept for SaaS companies.

The best way to approach it is by educating your employees. Plus, according to the Workplace Research Foundation, “increasing employee engagement investments by 10% can increase profits by $2,400 per employee, per year.”

Recommend blog posts covering the topic to your team. Suggest webinars that will expand their knowledge about the subject.

You can also offer specialized in-house training to your team. That way, your employees know what customer success looks like for your particular organization. Trainings should provide real-world examples and scenarios on how to approach different situations.

“Know your ideal customer. Communicate with your ideal customer. Understand what that customer wants, and track whether or not they're getting it. Then, help them get more of it,” says Nichole Elizabeth DeMere, a SaaS consultant and customer success evangelist.

In the end, your team should understand the value of customer success and its purpose.

Customer Success At Every Level

How your SaaS approaches customer success matters. Everyone in your company plays an integral part in ensuring that consumers achieve their desired outcomes.

Entice prospects with content that captures their attention. Help your customers exceed their expectations. And improve your services by encouraging customer feedback.

Customer success－a team effort.

About the Author: Shayla Price lives at the intersection of digital marketing, technology and social responsibility. Connect with her on Twitter @shaylaprice.

5 Content Distribution Metrics Your Marketing Team Should Be Obsessing Over

Output is seductive. It feels great to crank out lots of content and call your strategy a success.

But prolific doesn't always mean effective. Marketers must resist the allure of vanity metrics to ensure their content actually resonates with their intended audience.

Consumers' social feeds and dashboards are flooded with content from colleagues, friends, family, and the high school sweethearts they stalk on social media. A brand might publish stellar long-form articles, but what's the point if people ignore its posts and just keep scrolling?

To cut through the noise, marketers must track and measure the right data and up their distribution games. They need to focus on metrics that reveal which subjects to cover, where to publish, and when to share for maximum impact - not just ones that revolve around page views and traffic.

The Uselessness of Vanity Metrics

Let's be honest - we all love vanity metrics. Racking up likes, follows, page views, and subscriber tallies seems to validate our hard work. If people like our posts on Facebook, we must be doing something right.

Right?

Well, not necessarily. Most of these popular metrics don't accurately reflect ROI.

Big numbers for a blog post, but does it actually do anything for the business?

Marketers often tout web traffic as the No. 1 metric to monitor, but traffic is deceptive, and it often raises more questions than it answers. Who are all these people visiting your site? You might see a million hits a day, but they're worthless if they're coming from the wrong people.

Search engine rankings can also cloud your thinking, leading you to become overly consumed by thoughts of “Are we on the first page?” “Are we moving toward the top of Google's search results?” and “Are we trending in the right direction on Bing?”

Depending on which keywords and search terms relate to your business, obsessing over SEO rankings could be a huge time-waster. If only a few hundred people find your company through search engines, you're spending way too much time, money, and effort fighting a battle that's not worth winning.

The Distribution Data You Need

Without distribution data, creative decisions are tough to quantify. Design, layout, and copywriting choices all tend to rely more on intuition and gut instinct than hard data.

Content distribution, on the other hand, is a numbers game that should drive your creative. Once you complete a masterpiece, its distribution data should dictate the how, when, where, and why of your future content projects.

Focus on the following distribution metrics to best reach your goals:

1. Sharing

Likes may validate your message, but shares are what actually distribute it and help it become viral.

People share content when it's useful, entertaining, informational, and relevant to their overall interests. Use Buzzsumo or another social metrics tool to analyze social shares based on content type. Buzzsumo will also tell you where your content has been backlinked and how many people it's reached through outside platforms.

Widespread sharing is an excellent indicator that you're producing the kind of content your audience craves. Build future articles, blog posts, videos, and other materials around the themes that attract the most attention.

2. Share of voice

People who create and share positive content about your company without being asked to do so are your bonus brand ambassadors. Scour the web for this material, and recognize it on your social accounts. Show your appreciation by sending the content creators a personalized thank-you message. You can even consider inviting them to company events, asking them to review products as beta testers, or including them in any other activity that makes them feel like VIPs.

At the other end of the spectrum, don't ignore your haters; hug them. When people write negative reviews, they usually don't expect to get a response from the company they're complaining about. However, if the company does interact with them, empathize with their struggle, and perhaps offer gifts or incentives to offset their hardships - they'll be much more likely to change their negative opinion.

3. Conversions

Conversions happen when prospects respond to your call to action. Opening an email, clicking a CTA link in that email, and filling out a registration form on a landing page are all conversions. But, of course, buying your product is the ultimate conversion.

Which campaigns are sending you the highest conversions?

Use your content to lead prospects further into the conversion funnel by educating them about your company or by inviting them to download in-depth gated content. You'll get their contact information, and they'll benefit from your ideas. It's a win-win, and it's one step closer to conversion.

4. Retention

There's a fine line between vanity retention metrics and true retention metrics.

The ones you should be tracking are those in which customers exchange personal data for your content or products. The average buyer requires seven touchpoints before he's ready to buy from a brand (known as the Rule of Seven), and content is a great way to demonstrate and reassert your value during this process. Metrics that share or create new content are much better than likes or hearts.

5. Sales pipeline impact

This measurement indicates how much of the sales pipeline has been influenced by one or more pieces of content. You can focus on single articles, a group of pieces, or all content collectively, but the bottom line is the same for each scenario: If your content marketing and distribution aren't impacting the sales funnel, your efforts are being wasted.

Sales pipeline impact metrics should indicate how much money you've earned in potential opportunities and actual sales as a result of your content. Products like Kissmetrics (see how Kissmetrics can tie content to revenue), Marketo, and Salesforce are able to assess how much pipeline a piece of content has generated.

Conclusion

With so much content being pumped into your customers' feeds, distribution is now the code to crack. It's not about who produces the most content; it's about who can get it in front of the right eyes.

About the Author: Russ Fradin is a digital media industry veteran and an angel investor with more than 15 years of experience in online marketing. He is founder and CEO of Dynamic Signal, the leading platform for empowering employees to be effective brand advocates. Learn more here.

The Biggest Mistake Most Companies Make During a Website Redesign (And How to Fix It)

Let's get straight to the point. A website redesign is no small undertaking. Every team, from developers/IT and design, to marketing and sales, has to be on board and understand what's expected of them. Everyone contributes. But in the midst of inevitable page or section additions and improved navigation menu and other major changes, one small but nevertheless vital point is often pushed by the wayside.

Analytics.

It's easy to understand why. After all, you're redesigning layouts and shifting pixels around - you've done everything but put up a “please excuse our digital dust” sign. Restructuring and reorganizing are messy, and it can be incredibly tempting to want to pause your analytics while you're reorganizing and rebuilding.

Don't do it.

The fact is, you can gain some very important information by leaving your analytics on and collecting data during your redesign.

“Why would I want to do that?” You may be asking.

It's completely understandable that you'd want to wait until the new redesign is polished, shiny and ready to roll out before flipping the switch on your analytics again and then keenly watching your visitors interact with your site, but in doing so, you'd be doing a huge disservice to them. If you're running a seasonally-focused business, you'd also be missing out on year-over-year data to determine particular seasonal trends that could affect design tests (such as putting up holiday-related images over Christmas).

Why Leave Analytics On During a Redesign?

Leaving analytics on during a website redesign can give you valuable insights you may not otherwise get

During a redesign, restructuring or rebuilding of your site, leaving analytics on can give you some juicy, revealing information you may not otherwise get after “the big reveal”. For example, let's say you unveil a brand new navigation structure for your menu. Preliminary tests have shown that this new menu is better organized, mobile responsive and easy to use.

But when it all rolls out, things go south in a hurry. Users struggle to find what they're looking for. Stuff isn't where it used to be, and they're frustrated. They try the site search, but partially due to the redesign process, it may not be performing as well as before.

Had you left analytics on during this time and split tested your navigation menus, you would have captured valuable insights on the user's experience (and frustration) with the menu (and the subsequent migration toward search) - taking you back to the drawing board to find a way to blend the best features of the old menu with the responsiveness of the new. You'd have saved time, and most importantly, saved sales.

But navigation and layout aren't the only potential casualties of a redesign. There's also the issue of what's happening behind the scenes.

Making The Right Impression

Leaving analytics on can also help you get better results from split tests during a redesign

You may feel the temptation to shut off analytics during a redesign because you want to make the right impression with your customers. After all, no one wants to see a half baked website. But by split testing the traffic between old and new, you can again learn what's working and what isn't. You can use features like heat maps to see where traffic is dropping off and where the user's attention is primarily focused. And if it's not where you'd hoped, you can make adjustments on-the-fly.

Remember that best practices seldom apply broadly to every product or industry. What works well even for your competition may absolutely crush your own conversion rate. Your analytics will give you the raw data that shows you how well a proposed design change works for you, then you can tweak and refine it to improve it further.

What to Measure for Best Results

So if you leave your analytics on – what exactly do you measure during the building and rollout phases of your redesign? Well, it's not much different than the key metrics you should be measuring ordinarily:

User Engagement – How your users interact with your site. You'll want to focus on incremental conversion here – monitoring the click-through path step-by-step to see where customers may be dropping off in the process. Social media referrals may also affect the degree of engagement and interaction on your site.

Conversion Rate – Many people know that the “conversion rate” is important, but they're not sure why. Essentially, conversion rate is the number of people who take a specific action on your site that you want them to take - whether it's signing up for a subscription or proceeding to checkout. Your conversion rate is affected by many variables, but a redesign is one of the biggest overarching changes possible.

It's entirely possible that your conversion rate could drop initially after a redesign, as customers and visitors alike get accustomed to the changes, but then rise slowly and steadily - showing that the changes you've made are indeed working as intended. What many people don't know about conversion rates is that you can specify various paths that consumers can take to get to the end result – and then judge those paths according to how much of an ROI they bring you. Ideally you'd also get a view into the types of customers who are converting - are they at a higher pricing plan or average spend, for example?

In short, you can see what's working and what isn't - letting you concentrate your efforts on the stuff that works, while trimming the stuff that doesn't. Over time, this leads to a better, laser-focused trail of what resonates with your target audience and keeps bringing them back.

The bottom line is this: when it comes to analytics, leaving them on even during the midst of a website restructuring can provide unusual details, user behavior insights or patterns that you may not ordinarily see. Making these kinds of course corrections in the middle of a redesign (rather than scrambling after the fact to pick up all the pieces) saves time, money and effort in the long run.

Share Your Results with Us!

Have you recently redesigned your site or made it mobile responsive? Did you leave analytics on during that time? What interesting data did you collect? Anything in particular stand out? It's amazing what you can learn, even during an “under construction” phase. We'd love to hear your results and stories. Share your thoughts in the comments below!

About the Author: Sherice Jacob helps business owners improve website design and increase conversion rates through compelling copywriting, user-friendly design and smart analytics analysis. Learn more at iElectrify.com and download your free web copy tune-up and conversion checklist today! Follow @sherice on Twitter, LinkedIn or Google+ for more articles like this!

Effective SEO for All Stages of the Conversion Funnel

In 2013, the data scientists at Wolfgang Digital set out to answer one of digital marketing's greatest questions: What is the average conversion rate?

The answer, according to 56 million visits to 30 different websites, is 1.4%.

How does your site measure up? Do you think you could you do better?

Optimize each stage of your conversion funnel, and yes, you probably could.

What is a conversion funnel?

A conversion funnel is a way of visualizing the stages that prospects go through before they convert. It's called a funnel (rather than a tunnel), because the inverted shape represents how prospects drop off along the way to converting.

How many stages a funnel has will depend on who you ask, but for the purpose of this article, I'm going to keep things simple and talk about a three-stage funnel: top (awareness), middle (evaluation/research), and bottom (conversion).

Most visitors to your site will arrive at the “awareness” stage. Your visitor numbers will drop off as they move closer to the “action” (conversion) stage.

Barring a few exceptions (Amazon for instance, where Prime visitors convert at 74%, and non-Prime visitors at 13%), only a fraction of those who visit you at the “awareness” stage will go on to convert – the 1.4% mentioned above, to be precise.

Rethinking how you use SEO to support your site at each stage of the funnel can get those visitors that make it past the awareness stage that much closer to taking action.

Top Of the Funnel

At the top of the funnel (TOFU), you are trying to capture potential customers at the “awareness” stage.

At this point, the customer has realized they have a problem, and they are searching the web looking for a solution. They may go on to make a purchase; they're just not quite sure what they want to buy, or when.

Yet.

Think of it like the modern-day version of window shopping.

If you want to capture these potential customers (and why wouldn't you?), you need to provide content that's geared around the type of search queries that are asked at this early stage.

The goal is to answer these queries in the hopes that your content will rank in the SERPs and bring searchers to your site. This means setting commercial intent aside, and focusing on query-based keywords. There are a number of tools that can help you to do this.

Most marketers' go-to keyword research tool is Google's own Keyword Planner, but let's forget about that for a moment. It's very useful, but it's also very commercially-minded.

Optimizing your site for customers at the awareness stage entails uncovering longer-tailed phrases that lack the search volume needed to appear in Keyword Planner.

Answer the Public, Ubersuggest, and Infinite Google Suggest are all free, effective tools for identifying long-tailed phrases that customers search for early on in the buying cycle.

So you can begin to understand the sort of information available through these tools, head over to Answer the Public and enter a relevant head search term in the search box.

For the purpose of this exercise let's pretend we own an app design agency. We'll call ourselves “App Design Inc.”

This means I'm going to want to find out what sort of questions companies are asking about application design, so I might search for a phrase like “mobile apps”.

This search has brought back 132 questions in total. Many of them are pretty useless to me at this time, but many more could easily be worked into content that targets companies who are curious about mobile applications and eager to find out more.

The sort of phrases I'm looking for at this stage are things like:

• How mobile apps help generate revenue


• How mobile apps help small businesses


• Are mobile apps worth the investment

These are all questions that are likely to be asked by companies who know mobile apps are popular right now and that there's a reason why – but that's it. In other words, questions that companies right at the top of the funnel will be seeking answers to.

In addition to tools built specifically to assist with keyword research, sites that are geared around users asking and answering questions can provide invaluable TOFU inspiration, too: think Quora, Reddit, and even Yahoo Answers.

Middle Of the Funnel

Customers who move past the awareness stage and into the middle of the funnel (MOFU) are getting pretty serious about making a purchase; they just haven't decided exactly what they're going to buy, or who they're going to buy it from.

If the “top of the funnel” is equivalent to window shopping, then the “middle of the funnel” is equivalent to heading to the mall knowing you want to buy a sharp pair of pants – you just don't know which pair, or where you're going to buy them from.

Customers at this stage are extremely valuable. They're keen to purchase something you offer. You just need to find a way to get yourself in front of them.

Adding content to your own site remains an effective way to do that, although the keywords you target will differ, as might the format you use to present the content.

Customers at the middle of the funnel are researching their options. They want to buy a sharp pair of pants, but first they want to see what different styles of pants are available, and how prices and value compare.

This could mean writing a blog post that targets relevant search terms, or optimizing existing landing pages to capture a wider variety of phrases. Since we're moving into the buying stages of the funnel here, I'd probably use a mixture of long-tail keyword tools and Keyword Planner to help me pinpoint the right words and phrases to include.

We'd be looking for things like:

• Who develops mobile apps


• What mobile apps are popular


• What mobile apps are needed

Other content formats that work well at this stage include infographics (as seen in the example below), checklists, and comparison blog posts (articles that pit your product directly against your competitors').

Image Source

Just remember to pay attention to keyword usage on the page and in your metadata, regardless of the type of content you're creating.

Another great way to capture middle-of-the-funnel searchers involves heading outside the safety of your own site. Instead of waiting for customers to come to you, you go where your customers already are.

Writing guest articles for big-name sites and publications is an awesome way to build your profile and get your brand in front of your target audience. Why do you think I do this? It's not just for fun (even though I enjoy it).

The trick here is to target the right audience without being self-promotional. You want to educate and inform, to give people all the information they need to make their own decision.

Keywords are important here, too – even more so if the publications you're contributing to have the domain authority to rank more easily for key terms than your own site. Use that authority to your advantage.

Bottom Of the Funnel

At the bottom of the funnel (BOFU), you have visitors that are seriously considering making a purchase from you – they just need a little persuading in order to push them over the edge.

To stick with the shopping-for-pants analogy, the BOFU is equivalent to a fitting-room assistant telling you how great you look (as you try on the most expensive pair, naturally).

At this stage, keyword tools become somewhat less important. Prospects at the bottom of the funnel know you exist and may have visited your site multiple times. Your job is to do that last little bit of convincing that persuades them to buy.

At this point, your on-site search becomes a goldmine of data. What questions are visitors to your site trying to get answered? If you've already answered these questions, make the answers easier to find. Create new content for questions which haven't yet been answered.

Returning to our App Design Inc. example this might include questions like…

“How much do you charge for app design?”

“How long will my app take to complete?”

“What happens once my app has been built?”

Beyond your on-site search data, reviews, testimonials, and case studies all make excellent forms of BOFU content – especially when it's been crafted from some in-depth competitor research.

At the BOFU, you're likely to be up against one or two rival companies. If you want to ensure visitors wind up choosing you, you need to be analyzing your competitors' BOFU content and creating your own content that's a (big) cut above it.

If they have written testimonials, you should be making video testimonials. If they've crafted a case study that shows how their product helped a customer cut costs by 40%, find and feature a case in which your product helped a customer cut costs by 50%.

This is where the competition really gets tough, but luckily, it's the simplest round to win – you just have to create content that's better than everything else you're up against.

Beyond Keywords

There's a lot more to optimizing the conversion funnel than just using the right keywords. App Design Inc. would be analyzing their site architecture to ensure there's a clear path for visitors to follow through each stage of the funnel.

They would be using analytics to identify where in the funnel customers leave the site, and will use this information to make changes that will help boost the number of visitors that remain and move closer towards converting.

They will be monitoring user behavior on key pages and adapting content accordingly.

They'll also be executing strategies to gain links and will make the most of the site's internal linking structure to ensure link equity flows freely to critical awareness, comparison, and conversion pages.

On-site and technical SEO plays a key role in optimizing a conversion funnel, as it does in optimizing any element of a site.

The trick to designing a site that's built to capture and convert visitors at all stages is a strategy that combines keyword-driven content with a technically-sound website.

Do you agree? If you have anything to add on how to effectively optimize a conversion funnel, share your thoughts in the comments below:

About the Author: Aaron Agius is an experienced search, content and social marketer. He has worked with some of the world's largest and most recognized brands to build their online presence. See more from Aaron at Louder Online, their Blog, Facebook, Twitter, Google+ and LinkedIn.