Best Facebook Ad Features and Other Top Posts of the Month

April showers bring May flowers…and we are so ready for the showers to cease. After a gray and gloomy April, punctuated by WordStream Live, holiday weekends and a minor bug infestation on the WordStream marketing corner, May is almost here!

In case you went back into winter hibernation this month and missed our best content, we have a recap for you! Check out our best performing posts of the month.

1. The 10 Best Facebook Advertising Features Right Now

Allen Finn outlines the most useful Facebook advertising features that you can start using immediately. He covers everything from ad types to targeting and segmentation. Included in the post are some comprehensive graphics and instructions!

2. 11 Ways to Turn Prospects into Customers

Based on one of our most popular webinars by Allen Finn and Brett McHale, the slides were turned into this (just as popular) blog post! It outlines the best ways to nurture your prospects—and we’re not just talking about email here, people. Plot twist: paid search can be one of the best ways to push your prospects through the funny and get more customers.

3. Value of a #1 Google Ranking Down 37% in Two Years?

Ever get the feeling that your SEO work just isn’t paying off? It might be because the click-through rate for some of your #1 organic rankings just isn’t what it used to be.

4. 13 Urgency-Inducing Tricks to Drive Sales

Everyone has done it; bought that purse because it was one of the “only a few left!” when you put it in your cart, or the limited-edition shoes. Brad Smith outlines the best urgency-inducing hacks he’s seen that are guaranteed to drive sales for your company.

5. The Impact of Google’s New Exact-Enough Match Keywords [Data]

‘Tis the season for some Google changes! Allen uses this data-backed post (thanks to our data analyst, Josh) to outline how the most recent exact match changes will affect your account, and how to remedy the impact.

6. 23 Facts to Pull Out When Someone Says Content Marketing Doesn’t Work

As those on my team can attest, content marketing is important! It’s a reliable way to drive traffic and increase brand awareness—but some people can’t help but talk smack on content. In this post, Dan Shewan lists some impactful facts to throw back in the face of naysayers.

7. LinkedIn’s New Lead Gen Forms vs. Facebook Lead Ads

Despite our previously-thrown shade at LinkedIn ads (or maybe because of it), LinkedIn has introduced lead generation forms. Allen rescinds some of his previous criticism to outline what you need to know about the new form and how it measures up to Facebook lead ads.

8. 16 Ridiculously Easy Ways to Find & Keep a Remote Job

As demand for remote work grows, we thought it would be helpful to outline some great ways to find a remote job—and give some tips on how to make it work. This listicle contains companies that work remotely, sites to find remote jobs, and our best productivity advice.

9. 33 Mind-Boggling Instagram Stats & Facts for 2017

Unless you’ve been living under a rock, you’re probably on Instagram, have seen Instagram posts, or are actively avoiding the platform. As it continues to strive for world dominance, I compiled a list of statistics and facts to tickle your fancy—and possibly convince you to get an account.

10. Coming Soon: Similar Audiences for Search Campaigns [Data]

We like to make sure that you’re on top of all new Google happenings—which is why our brilliant data scientist, Mark, outlines a new feature that is now in beta—similar audiences for search. A thinly veiled copycat of similar audiences for the display network or Facebook’s lookalike audiences, this tool could be a powerful way to reach your prospects and customers.

 

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Pop-Ups, Overlays, Modals, Interstitials, and How They Interact with SEO – Whiteboard Friday

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Have you thought about what your pop-ups might be doing to your SEO? There are plenty of considerations, from their timing and how they affect your engagement rates, all the way to Google’s official guidelines on the matter. In this episode of Whiteboard Friday, Rand goes over all the reasons why you ought to carefully consider how your overlays and modals work and whether the gains are worth the sacrifice.

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Video Transcription

Howdy, Moz fans, and welcome to another edition of Whiteboard Friday. This week we’re chatting about pop-ups, overlays, modals, interstitials, and all things like them. They have specific kinds of interactions with SEO. In addition to Google having some guidelines around them, they also can change how people interact with your website, and that can adversely or positively affect you accomplishing your goals, SEO and otherwise.

Types

So let’s walk through what these elements, these design and UX elements do, how they work, and best practices for how we should be thinking about them and how they might interfere with our SEO efforts.

Pop-ups

So, first up, let’s talk specifically about what each element is. A pop-up now, okay, there are a few kinds. There are pop-ups that happen in new windows. New window pop-ups are, basically, new window, no good. Google hates those. They are fundamentally against them. Many browsers will stop them automatically. Chrome does. Firefox does. In fact, users despise these as well. There are still some spammy and sketchy sites out there that use them, but, generally speaking, bad news.

Overlays

When we’re talking about a pop-up that happens in the same browser window, essentially it’s just a visual element, that’s often also referred to as an overlay. So, for the purposes of this Whiteboard Friday, we’ll call that an overlay. An overlay is basically like this, where you have the page’s content and there’s some smaller element, a piece, a box, a window, a visual of some kind that comes up and that essentially says, maybe it says, “Sign up for my email newsletter,” and then there’s a place to enter your email, or, “Get my book now,” and you click that and get the book. Those types of overlays are pretty common on the web, and they do not create quite the same problems that pop-ups do, at least from Google’s perspective. However, we’ll talk about those later, there are some issues around them, especially with mobile.

Modals

Modals tend to be windows of interaction, tend to be more elements of use. So lightboxes for images is a very popular modal. A modal is something where you are doing work inside that new box rather than in the content that’s underneath it. So a sign-in form that overlays, that pops up over the rest of the content, but that doesn’t allow you to engage with this content underneath it, that would be considered a modal. Generally, most of the time, these aren’t a problem, unless they are something like spam, or advertising, or something that’s taking you out of the user experience.

Interstitials

Then finally, interstitials are essentially, and many of these can also be called interstitial experiences, but a classic interstitial is something like what Forbes.com does. When you visit Forbes, an article for the first time, you get this, “Welcome. Our sponsor of the day is Brawndo. Brawndo, it has what plants need.” Then you can continue after a certain number of seconds. These really piss people off, myself included. I really hate the interstitial experience. I understand that it’s an advertising thing. But, yeah, Google hates them too. Not quite enough to kick Forbes out of their SERPs entirely yet, but, fingers crossed, it will happen sometime soon. They have certainly removed plenty of other folks who have gone with invasive or overly heavy interstitials over the years and made those pretty tough.

What are the factors that matter for SEO?

A) Timing

Well, it turns out timing is a big one. So when the element appears matters. Basically, if the element shows up initially upon page load, they will consider it differently than if it shows up after a few minutes. So, for example, if you have a “Sign Up Now” overlay that pops up the second you visit the page, that’s going to be treated differently than something that happens when you’re 80% or you’ve just finished scrolling through an entire blog post. That will get treated very differently. Or it may have no effect actually on how Google treats the SEO, and then it really comes down to how users do.

Then how long does it last as well. So interstitials, especially those advertising interstitials, there are some issues governing that with people like Forbes. There are also some issues around an overlay that can’t be closed and how long a window can pop up, especially if it shows advertising and those types of things. Generally speaking, obviously, shorter is better, but you can get into trouble even with very short ones.

B) Interaction

Can that element easily be closed, and does it interfere with the content or readability? So Google’s new mobile guidelines, I think as of just a few months ago, now state that if an overlay or a modal or something interferes with a visitor’s ability to read the actual content on the page, Google may penalize those or remove their mobile-friendly tags and remove any mobile-friendly benefit. That’s obviously quite concerning for SEO.

C) Content

So there’s an exception or an exclusion to a lot of Google’s rules around this, which is if you have an element that is essentially asking for the user’s age, or asking for some form of legal consent, or giving a warning about cookies, which is very popular in the EU, of course, and the UK because of the legal requirements around saying, “Hey, this website uses cookies,” and you have to agree to it, those kinds of things, that actually gets around Google’s issues. So Google will not give you a hard time if you have an overlay interstitial or modal that says, “Are you of legal drinking age in your country? Enter your birth date to continue.” They will not necessarily penalize those types of things.

Advertising, on the other hand, advertising could get you into more trouble, as we have discussed. If it’s a call to action for the website itself, again, that could go either way. If it’s part of the user experience, generally you are just fine there. Meaning something like a modal where you get to a website and then you say, “Hey, I want to leave a comment,” and so there’s a modal that makes you log in, that type of a modal. Or you click on an image and it shows you a larger version of that image in a modal, again, no problem. That’s part of the user experience.

D) Conditions

Conditions matter as well. So if it is triggered from SERP visits versus not, meaning that if you have an exclusionary protocol in your interstitial, your overlay, your modal that says, “Hey, if someone’s visiting from Google, don’t show this to them,” or “If someone’s visiting from Bing, someone’s visiting from DuckDuckGo, don’t show this to them,” that can change how the search engines perceive it as well.

It’s also the case that this can change if you only show to cookied or logged in or logged out types of users. Now, logged out types of users means that everyone from a search engine could or will get it. But for logged in users, for example, you can imagine that if you visit a page on a social media site and there’s a modal that includes or an overlay that includes some notification around activity that you’ve already been performing on the site, now that becomes more a part of the user experience. That’s not necessarily going to harm you.

Where it can hurt is the other way around, where you get visitors from search engines, they are logged out, and you require them to log in before seeing the content. Quora had a big issue with this for a long time, and they seem to have mostly resolved that through a variety of measures, and they’re fairly sophisticated about it. But you can see that Facebook still struggles with this, because a lot of their content, they demand that you log in before you can ever view or access it. That does keep some of their results out of Google, or certainly ranking lower.

E) Engagement impact

I think this is what Google’s ultimately trying to measure and what they’re trying to essentially say, “Hey, this is why we have these issues around this,” which is if you are hurting the click-through rate or you’re hurting pogo-sticking, meaning that more people are clicking onto your website from Google and then immediately clicking the Back button when one of these things appears, that is a sign to Google that you have provided a poor user experience, that people are not willing to jump through whatever hoop you’ve created for them to get access your content, and that suggests they don’t want to get there. So this is sort of the ultimate thing that you should be measuring. Some of these can still hurt you even if these are okay, but this is the big one.

Best practices

So some best practices around using all these types of elements on your website. I would strongly urge you to avoid elements that are significantly harming UX. If you’re willing to take a small sacrifice in user experience in exchange for a great deal of value because you capture people’s email addresses or you get more engagement of other different kinds, okay. But this would be something I’d watch.

There are three or four metrics that I’d urge you to check out to compare whether this is doing the right thing. Those are:

• Bounce rate
• Browse rate
• Return visitor rates, meaning the percentage of people who come back to your site again and again, and
• Time on site after the element appears

So those four will help tell you whether you are truly interfering badly with user experience.

On mobile, ensure that your crucial content is not covered up, that the reading experience, the browsing experience isn’t covered up by one of these elements. Please, whatever you do, make those elements easy and obvious to dismiss. This is part of Google’s guidelines around it, but it’s also a best practice, and it will certainly help your user experience metrics.

Only choose to keep one of these elements if you are finding that the sacrifice… and there’s almost always a sacrifice cost, like you will hurt bounce rate or browse rate or return visitor rate or time on site. You will hurt it. The question is, is it a slight enough hurt in exchange for enough gain, and that’s that trade-off that you need to decide whether it’s worth it. I think if you are hurting visitor interaction by a few seconds on average per visit, but you are getting 5% of your visitors to give you an email address, that’s probably worth it. If it’s more like 30 seconds and 1%, maybe not as good.

Consider removing the elements from triggering if the visit comes from search engines. So if you’re finding that this works fine and great, but you’re having issues around search guidelines, you could consider potentially just removing the element from any visit that comes directly from a search engine and instead placing that in the content itself or letting it happen on a second page load, assuming that your browse rate is decently high. That’s a fine way to go as well.

If you are trying to get the most effective value out of these types of elements, it tends to be the case that the less common and less well used the visual element is, the more interaction and engagement it’s going to get. But the other side of that coin is that it can create a more frustrating experience. So if people are not familiar with the overlay or modal or interstitial visual layout design that you’ve chosen, they may engage more with it. They might not dismiss it out of hand, because they’re not used to it yet, but they can also get more frustrated by it. So, again, return to looking at those metrics.

With that in mind, hopefully you will effectively, and not too harmfully to your SEO, be able to use these pop-ups, overlays, interstitials, modals, and all other forms of elements that interfere with user experience.

And we’ll see you again next week for another edition of Whiteboard Friday. Take care.

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How to Compete in Facebook Ads

If you enter into Facebook advertising with the mindset that it’s a self-driving car and you can take a nap in the backseat covered in Cheetos while it delivers you exactly where you want to be…you’re terribly mistaken.

 

Unfortunately for the couch potato marketers of the world, if you want six-pack abs, you’re going to have to put in a little bit more work than that one day at the gym every three weeks that you swiftly chase with 64 Michelob Ultras and 12 hours on Netflix.

The problem with competing in Facebook advertising is the overwhelming level of sophistication and complexity. Like most important things in life, knowledge is key, and not just the poor advice of amateurs and gurus (not mutually exclusive).

In this post I’ll outline everything you need to know about competitive bidding, budgeting, and creative strategy in Facebook ads. I will also explain how the Facebook ad auction works and how to leverage this knowledge to compete at the highest level possible.

 

How the Facebook Ad Auction Works

Facebook’s auction is similar to that of Google AdWords, where value is created for advertisers by giving them the capabilities to reach target audiences and drive results.

The caveat is that the “value” derived for the advertiser must also create a relevant and positive experience for the end user. The Facebook auction is designed to balance these principles and reward the advertiser who does both the best. In a regular auction, the winner is the one with the highest bid. This is not the case with Facebook advertising.

To clarify: Every time an ad is created in Facebook and set live against a target audience, you are entering the Facebook Auction. You enter this auction with the bid that you specify within your ad set:

 

After choosing how your ads will enter the auction, you have two options for bidding: an automatic bid or a manual bid.

Automatic Bidding

In this bidding option, Facebook places an automatic bid within each auction. The bid is calculated to spend the entirety of your specified budget while accumulating the most results for your ad. Facebook wants their users to trust the platform to achieve the most results for the best possible price. If you are still trying to gauge an “average” cost per conversion on Facebook, this may be a better option for you. However, to truly be competitive with your bidding and to ensure that you reach that next-level of quality user, manual bidding is the way to go.

Manual Bidding

As with many aspects of online advertising (and life), you can put faith into a platform that is inherently designed to take your money to make decisions for you…or you can take control of the vehicle and get to where you want to be without all of the fluff.

Manual bidding allows you to have strategic control over the delivery of your ads and could lead to better results for a lower cost than automatic bidding. The method for manual bid is slightly different depending on how you choose to optimize your delivery:

It’s more advantageous to optimize ad delivery for the result you are looking for. Facebook’s delivery system and auction optimize for the desired action within each campaign objective. For example, when optimizing for conversions, Facebook looks for individuals within the audience who are most likely to convert or commit the specified action. The only time I would suggest using the other delivery methods would be if you have a smaller audience and confidence that the audience would convert or commit the action you want.

When you are manually bidding for actions like conversions or clicks, you have two options, maximum or average:

 

Maximum bid allows you to set the absolute limit you are willing to pay for a result, while Average takes your bid and is able to enter the auction with the flexibility of leveraging your specified bid amount as a median, not a ceiling. Average bidding allows for greater flexibility when entering the Facebook auction due to the ability to bid slightly higher than you would with a maximum bid in order to reach “higher quality” users.

Facebook Ad Quality and Relevance

Another element of the auction is your Relevance Score, which takes into consideration the “quality” and relevance of your ad.

These factors are based on how your audience reacts to your ad. For example, if your ad receives negative feedback, that can decrease its total value. If a user is historically interested in what you’re advertising or reacts positively to your ads, those actions can increase the value of an ad. Positive feedback increases your Facebook Relevance Score.

The Truth About Relevance Score

Relevance Score estimates how well your ad is resonating with a specific audience it is being served to. The concept is unsurprisingly similar to that of Google’s Quality Score and can be equally beneficial while many times just as misleading.

 

Relevance score essentially gives you the ability to receive a discount within the Facebook ad auction while simultaneously extending your reach within that audience. The ability to maintain a high Relevance Score can be a crucial competitive advantage when it comes to clicks, visibility, brand awareness, brand engagement, and very top-funnel marketing metrics.

While all of these things are important to running a successful business, Relevance Score does not give you a full picture. If your goal is driving conversions, purchases, or any other form of direct response, judging your Facebook ad’s performance based on its Relevance Score would be like judging a bald eagle on how fast it can run.

You can also think of Relevance Score in terms of music. Pop music produces the equivalent of a high Relevance Score, because a large volume of people, many of which have a fleeting interest in what they are listening to, are being marketed to in the broadest way possible and receiving an overall positive experience. Alternatively, you could have the smaller niche audience who are far more invested in what they are consuming (like a cult following), and your unit of measurement in regards to success is entirely different.

Relevance Score can be an extremely effective metric to focus on when it comes to particular advertising goals, it’s just not the gold standard it is often made out to be.

Estimated Action Rates

An “estimated action rate” is a measure of how likely a person is to take the actions required to get you the result you have optimized for. For example, if you are running an ad for workout equipment that’s optimized for purchase conversions, you would most likely be targeting people interested in fitness.

However, just because someone’s interests are relevant to the ad, it doesn’t necessarily mean they are going to purchase the equipment. That’s why Facebook factors in “estimated action” rates. From the individuals within your audience, Facebook tries to find those who are most likely to commit the action you are looking for. The algorithm will essentially target people who are in the market to buy workout equipment, thus reaffirming why you should bid based on your desired result.

Strategically Using Bids, Budgets, and Creative to WIN on Facebook

Understanding how the ad auction works is the first step to competing in Facebook. The second is understanding how to strategically manipulate this knowledge to your own benefit. The relationship between your budget, bids, and use of creative is the key to victory assuming all other factors (i.e. targeting) are done sufficiently.

Facebook Budget and Bids

Creative aside, there is a direct correlation between your budget and your bid that will have a profound impact on your delivery and overall success. Whether you set a daily or lifetime budget, Facebook’s goal is to spend all of it. When you have an ad set that is NOT on track to spend its full budget (under-delivering) it is ultimately treated differently than if it was. Let’s look at the difference:

According to Facebook:

 

The clear codependence between bid and budget in order to maximize an ad set’s delivery is the key takeaway here.

Let’s use the example of driving leads through a website conversions campaign: Your target cost per lead is $20 and you are using a website offer to drive these conversions. You have $5,000 in total budget to spend and you’ve come to the crossroads – daily or lifetime budget? If you specify a daily budget, you essentially are telling Facebook to spend “X” amount within 24 hours. There is no way to day-part with daily budgets either, so if your decision is to use daily budgets to exhibit more control over an ad set’s spend day-to-day, you should keep in mind that your ads will be showing up around the clock regardless of any geographical mixture of targeting you could be bidding for.

Lifetime budgets on the other hand allow you to select a schedule for which to show your ads to the selected audiences. Dayparting aside there is another element to the equation that I believe is the core reason to choose lifetime over daily. When you increase your budget in an ad set it is likely that your average cost per result may increase as well. How does this happen?

If you increase your budget you have to win more auctions for Facebook to spend it. As I said before, Facebook is in this to spend all of the money you tell it to. Due to the reality that there is a finite number of auctions with the same cost per result that you may have been getting, as you increase your budget, you have to go for increasingly higher cost results.

Let’s say you have a $20 budget and a $10 bid – Facebook will lower your bid to make the most out of the small budget. If the bid is lowered to $4, you could win all of the $4 auctions and ultimately receive an average cost of $4. Conversely, if you raised your budget to $200, it’s not likely that the number of $4 auctions exist even if you won them all. It would be very unlikely that you would even come close to spending that $200 budget. Therefore you have to enter into auctions with more expensive results in order to spend the specified amount.

With this knowledge in hand, if you have a daily budget, you will enter as many auctions as your bid allows in order to reach your budget. With a Lifetime budget, however, you are allowing Facebook’s algorithm to factor in another element into the equation – pacing. If you have a lifetime budget of $5,000 vs. a daily budget of $1,000 (that you intend to run for 5 days) – the fundamental difference is you could actually tell the lifetime campaign that you are going to spend $10,000 within the same timeframe, with the intent of spending the original amount.

Be warned – if you are NOT careful or don’t monitor the progress of your ads, you could easily overspend. This tactic should be used ONLY if you are comfortable with the risks involved.

With that being said, let me explain further: In the past I have had the total budget at $1,000 but given Facebook the lifetime budget of $5,000. Within this Ad Set, I had specified what times during the day I would want my ads to be shown. Now comes the important part, the bid:

 

I took the “suggested bid” per result of this audience and increased it exponentially. My reason being is that I’m attempting to optimize for the conversions that I specified, which are “Content Downloads.” It’s highly unlikely that I will ever pay $150 for an individual to download our content. I do know however, how much others are willing to pay for conversions “on average.”

Facebook’s algorithm is really good but it’s no psychic and I’m well aware that the experience of visiting the landing page, the emotional appeal of the copy, and ease of committing this action are not factored into my suggested bid. My point is that you should get to a place with your creative and offer where you are extremely confident that you can outperform your competition in the auction.

Other advertisers are bidding “$22.19 – $43.61” dollars for conversions, but those “conversions” and experiences for users could vary incredibly. As I mentioned earlier, Facebook will bid lower to get you the most results within your budget. If I specify that I am willing to spend $150 per result, I am bidding with other individuals who have the potential target CPA’s of that amount.

To recap:

Facebook’s algorithm is taking my $150 bid per result, my $5,000 (specified) budget, the time period within 24-hours that I intend to show my ads, and deciding on how to serve them most effectively within these parameters. What Facebook doesn’t know is that I have no intention to spend $5,000 dollars on the campaign and I’m not going to pay $150 per result….but I could…if I wanted to.

 

Instead, my carefully chosen, well designed, and high-converting offer was shown to an audience of individuals who not only had relevant interests and behaviors but who also had needs that the value proposition of that offer was relevant to. I was able to drive 280 content downloads and spend $985 before I paused the ad set. My final CPA was only $3.52 per content download. Facebook took my bid and budget with the specified time frame and served the ads in a way that allowed me to win the majority of the “low hanging fruit” bids within that audience for the desired cost. However, my campaign did not run the entire duration and my offer was good enough for the audience to convert at a rate so that I did not spend $150 per result.

When you have a bid and total budget, the algorithm will figure you will spend $5,000 with $150 per result (at least 33 results). When you out-perform these expectations, Facebook believes it’s driving more results than you anticipated and will try to maximize these results for a period of time. This is a fairly advanced strategy, but I believe it’s an important lesson to showcase how all of the elements that go into the Facebook ad auction play a role in the end result.

Now you probably don’t have the bandwidth for all of these tactics, especially if you’re using Facebook ads as a small business, so I’ll list out the core things you absolutely can do in order to compete in Facebook

TL;DR: How to Compete In Facebook Road Map

Optimize for the results you are looking for: If your goal is to drive conversions on your website, make that your goal. It will further increase your chances of success.

Choose a lifetime budget that works for you: You don’t have to do anything “hacky” with your budget the way I did. If you know what your budget is and the amount of time you want it to spend, you can make it that and still be competitive.

Know Your Promotion: Know what you have to offer and who will want it. Focus on the value proposition, creative, and copy to truly gain a competitive advantage.

Bid and budget Intelligently: Leverage what you know about the Facebook auction to bid competitively within your budget.

Win!

Creative Competitive Advantage

Aside from the vast technical capabilities it offers, what makes Facebook one of the greatest platforms for marketers today is its ability to reward quality advertising. You could know everything I have talked about in this post but if you do not know how to creatively connect with your audience, you’re going to struggle and you’re going to pay more.

If you’re going to spend money on marketing, no matter what the channel, you need to create value in order for that investment to be worthwhile. The beauty of paid channels like Facebook ads and Google AdWords is that if you have the right strategy and capability to play the game well, you can compete with almost any budget.

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Value of a #1 Google Ranking Down 37% in Two Years?

SEO is hard, y’all.

It can take a while to start working, and then, once you get used to seeing double-digit growth in organic traffic year over year – suddenly you hit the dreaded plateau. It’s harder and harder to make serious gains.

WordStream’s traffic growth since 2009

See how the slope of growth is less steep toward the end?

I remember the days where there were lots of spammy tricks you could use to get mediocre content to rank. (Not that I myself would ever create mediocre content. Nope. No way.) That’s not so easy anymore – in part because Google’s algorithms have gotten a lot smarter, and in part because the competition is simply greater. There are more sites and businesses, but the first page of results hasn’t gotten bigger. Not that it would matter if it did – few people scroll to the bottom or click to page 2.

Recently, doing my SEO reporting, I’ve noticed a few cases where a page on our site has seen a dip in organic traffic. However, when I check to see if we’ve lost our ranking, we’re still on the first page, or even ranking at #1. So what gives?

I suspected that changes to the Google SERP, such as the introduction of fancy new SERP features, were lowering our organic click-through rate (CTR), so I did a little digging to find out what exactly was going on.

A note on study methodology

For this study, we looked at 24 keywords (from our own site) where we’ve maintained the same or very close to the same ranking for about two years (between May 2015 and April 2017) according to Search Console data. In most cases the keyword maintained a #1 ranking, but for some keywords the average ranking for the period is reported as 1.1 or 1.2 due to some ranking flux. Results were not filtered by device or country.

I would characterize the majority of these keywords as informational. Only one of them is clearly commercial (“ppc software”) and one is potentially branded or navigational (“free keyword tool” is ambiguous, since it’s both the name of our tool and a generic phrase). More on what these keyword categories mean here.

And thanks to my smarty-pants colleagues Meg Lister and Josh Brackett, who are approximately 9 million times better at Excel and statistics than me, for helping me analyze this data, and to our new designer Kate Lindsay for pretty-ing up the graphs.

The upshot: Median CTR is down by 37%

Looking at all 24 queries on our list, we had an average position change of -0.1% (not significant) and an average CTR change of -28% (a median change of -37%).

CTR only went up for three keywords in the set (by 3%, 4%, and 37%). For all the others, CTR went down. The biggest single change was a drop in CTR of -79%.

It’s important to note that I didn’t cherry-pick keywords to fit a narrative. These were the first 24 keywords I found where our ranking hadn’t changed significantly in two years.

How has organic impression volume changed?

Impressions for this keyword set were up overall (by a hefty 63%) – however, due to the fall in CTR, we weren’t able to capitalize on most of those impressions to drive growth. Clicks only increased by 21% in the same time period.

Bummer.

How do Featured Snippets affect CTR?

Of the 24 keywords, there were 17 queries where we own the featured snippet. For these keywords there was an average position change of 0% and a median CTR change of -39%. That means even with the coveted Featured Snippet, organic CTR for a #1 ranking is lower in 2017 than it was in 2015.

And it’s not because we’re competing with more ads – 16 of these keywords have no ads on the SERP at all.

For keywords without a featured snippet (6 of the 24), median CTR change was only -32%. This suggests that the featured snippet is actually associated with a decrease in CTR(?!)

This would make sense for simple question-type keywords that can be answered right on the SERP, like “how tall was Abraham Lincoln,” “when is the Super Bowl” etc. See also the recent kerfuffle over Celebrity Net Worth – a website that has taken a major hit due to Google’s Featured Snippets making it largely unnecessary to click through to discover what a celebrity is worth.

This is why I think it’s so important to answer COMPLEX questions if you want to drive value from Featured Snippets.

But most of the keywords I looked at weren’t simple questions, or phrased as questions at all. So there’s actually no reason to assume that people were looking for a quick answer. For example, two of the keywords were “great marketing ideas” and “keyword strategy.” To me it’s pretty clear that the intent with these is relatively deep; they’re looking for multiple ideas or a complex strategy, not just a definition.

So why has organic CTR for a #1 ranking fallen?

Here’s the tricky part: Why is this happening? It’s not immediately obvious.

Are we losing clicks to ads?

It would be easy to assume that organic CTR has fallen because Google has increasingly moved to monetize the SERP – for example, just last year Google increased the number of top ads from three to four (while simultaneously removing the right-rail ads).

Old enough to remember when there were ads there

However, that change has minimal impact on this keyword set, since only four of the 24 keywords we looked at were triggering ads at all, and of those four, only one triggered four top ads. Two of the keywords triggered just one top ad, and one triggered no top ad but a panel of sponsored results on the right (on desktop).

Incidentally, the keyword that now triggers four ads showed exactly the median drop in CTR (-32%). It wasn’t an outlier in terms of losing clicks to ads.

Long story short, ads are definitely not the whole story here.

What about other SERP features?

There were a few cases where the keyword triggered a Featured Snippet but the Featured Snippet wasn’t ours (even though we had the #1 ranking). The Featured Snippet was introduced in 2015 and the prevalence of the feature increased a few times during 2016 (thanks to Dr. Pete for confirming). According to current MozCast data, it now appears on about 15% of queries.

10 of the keywords also triggered a “People also ask” feature (Related Questions), like the below.

In a different industry, we might have seen a lot more features in the results – images, videos, knowledge panel, local packs, card-style carousels at the top, etc. That wasn’t the case in this particular keyword set.

Now, Moz recently published some fascinating data (in collaboration with Jumpshot) that reveals a full third of searches result in no clicks at all. People do a Google search and then click nothing. Says Rand Fishkin:

If we look at all search queries (not just distinct ones), those numbers shift to a straight 60%/40% split. I wouldn’t be surprised to find that over time, we get closer and closer to Google solving half of search queries without a click. 

In other words, Rand predicts that CTR will continue to fall even for #1 rankings as Google releases features that make clicking any result unnecessary.

Is this a mobile problem?

One possibility for the drop in CTR is that a greater percentage of our site traffic is mobile now than it was 2 years ago – mobile devices account for about 20% of traffic now, compared to 13% in May 2015.

Here’s the May 2015 breakdown:

And here’s March 2017:

(As mentioned, I didn’t break the above click-through rate data out by device; I download reports from Search Console monthly, but not device reports, and at this point I can’t go back and get that data from 2015.)

On mobile, organic CTR looks a little different than it does on desktop. Again, according to Moz/Jumpshot data, organic CTR is lower on mobile devices than on desktop – Rand says:

We’ve always suspected CTR on mobile is lower than on desktop, and now it’s confirmed. For mobile devices, 40.9% of Google searches result in an organic click, 2% in a paid click, and 57.1% in no click at all. For desktop devices, 62.2% of Google searches result in an organic click, 2.8% in a paid click, and 35% in no click.

So well more than half of mobile searches don’t result in clicks.

Here’s another source – according to Advanced Web Ranking, “ranking #1 in Google has a 23.5% mobile click-through rate, down from 28.6% in 2015.”

That means it’s not just the increase in mobile search share, but that CTR’s are falling across all devices.

None of these explanations (more and larger ads, other organic features, or shifts in mobile usage/behavior) fully explain the dip in organic CTR that we’re seeing, but it could be a combination of these changes along with other, smaller factors. Heck, maybe people are just more distracted than they were two years ago, so we’re seeing a higher incidence of people doing a Google search and then dropping the task to watch a squirrel out the window…

One more caveat…

This was our own, wordstream.com account data so we’re only looking at one vertical: marketing. The results may be very different for different industries. I can actually imagine the average CTR falling much more for industries that do less content marketing than we do, meaning more of their keywords are going to be commercial vs. informational.

How to combat falling organic CTR’s?

Feeling dispirited? Me too, honestly, but your focus shouldn’t change too much:

• Keep working to increase your organic CTR’s by aiming to meet the searcher’s true intent with exceptionally high-quality content, and by writing headlines and meta descriptions that make the value you’re offering crystal-clear upfront.
• Scale your content marketing so you have more opportunities to rank. Consider publishing more off-topic content that reaches a wider audience and increases your brand affinity (then use remarketing to convert more of those visitors).
• Invest in social promotion, email marketing, PPC and other channels that can offset any losses on the organic SERP.

TL;DR

In short, though our data set was limited:

• This study suggests that a #1 ranking on Google is 37% less valuable, at least in terms of click-through rate, than it was just two years ago. That means you can’t take full advantage of gains in impressions.
• Featured Snippets are associated with a bigger decrease in CTR than SERPs without a Featured Snippet – even just looking at keywords where we own the Feature Snippet. Statistical significance on this data point is 99%.

We were surprised, to say the least.

What do you think? Have you seen similar changes in your industry?

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