What’s Your AMP Traffic Really Doing? Set Up Reporting in 10 Minutes

Posted by Jeremy_Gottlieb

The other day, my colleague Tom Capper wrote a post about getting more traffic when you can’t rank any higher. I was really pleased that he wrote it, because it tackles a challenge I think about all the time. As SEOs, our hands are tied: we’re often not able to make product-level decisions that could create new markets, and we’re not Google’s algorithms — we can’t force a particular page to rank higher. What’s an SEO to do?

What if we shifted focus from transactional queries (for e-commerce, B2C, or B2B sites) and focused on the informational type of queries that are one, two, three, and possibly four or more interactions away from actually yielding a conversion? These types of queries are often quite conversational (i.e. “what are the best bodyweight workouts?”) and very well could lead to conversions down the road if you’re try to sell something (like fitness-related products or supplements).

If we shift our focus to queries like the question I just posed, could we potentially enter more niches for search and open up more traffic? I’d hypothesize yes — and for some, driving this additional traffic is all one needs; whatever happens with that traffic is irrelevant. Personally, I’d rather drive qualified, relevant traffic to a client and then figure out how we can monetize that traffic down the road.

To accomplish this, over the past year I’ve been thinking a lot about Accelerated Mobile Pages (AMP).

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What are Accelerated Mobile Pages?

According to Google,

“The AMP Project is an open-source initiative aiming to make the web better for all. The project enables the creation of websites and ads that are consistently fast, beautiful, and high-performing across devices and distribution platforms.”

What this really means is that Google wants to make the web faster, and probably doesn’t trust the majority of sites to adequately speed up their pages or do so on a reasonable timeframe. Thus, AMP were created to allow for pages to load extremely fast (by cutting out the fat from your original source code) and provide an awesome user experience. Users can follow some basic instructions, use WordPress or other plugins, and in practically no time have mobile variants of their web content that loads super fast.

Why use AMP?

While AMP is not yet (or possibly ever going to be) a ranking factor, the fact that it loads fast certainly helps in the eyes of almighty Google and can contribute to higher rankings and clicks.

Let’s take a look at the query “Raekwon McMillan,” the Miami Dolphins second-round pick in the 2017 NFL Draft out of Ohio State University:

Notice how of these cards on mobile, two contain a little lightning bolt and the word “AMP?” The prevalence of AMP results in the SERPs is becoming more and more common. It’s reasonable to think that while the majority of people who use Google are not currently familiar with AMP, over time and through experience, they will realize that AMP pages with that little icon load much faster than regular web pages and will gravitate towards AMP pages through a type of subconscious Pavlovian training.

Should I use AMP?

There are rarely any absolutes in this world, and this is no exception. Only you will know, based upon your particular needs at this time. AMP is typically used by news publishers like the New York Times, Washington Post, Fox News, and many others, but it’s important to note that it’s not limited to this type of entity. While there is an AMP news carousel that frequently appears on mobile and is almost exclusively the domain of large publishing sites, AMP results are increasingly appearing in the regular results, like with the Raekwon McMillan example.

I’m a fan of leveraging blog content on AMP to generate as many eyeballs as possible on our pages, but I’m still a bit leery about putting product pages on AMP (though this is now possible). My end goal is to drive traffic and brand familiarity through the blog content and then ultimately drive more sales as people are either retargeted to via paid or come back from other sources, direct, organic or otherwise to actually complete the purchase. If your blog has strong, authoritative content, deploying AMP could potentially be a great way to generate more visibility and clicks for your site.

I must point out, however, that AMP doesn’t come without potential drawbacks. There are strict guidelines around what you can and can’t do with it, such as not having email popups, possible reduction in ad revenue, analytics complications, and requiring maintenance of a new set of pages. If you do decide that the potential gain in organic traffic is worth the tradeoffs, we can get into how to best measure the success of AMP for your site.

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Now you have AMP traffic — so what?

If your goal is to drive more organic traffic, you need to be prepared for the questions that will come if that traffic does not yield revenue in Google Analytics. First, we need to keep in mind that GA’s default attribution is via last direct click, but the model can be altered to report different numbers. This means that if you have a visitor who searches something organically, enters via the blog, and doesn’t purchase anything, yet 3 days later comes back via direct and purchases a product, the default conversion reporting in GA would assign no credit to the organic visit, giving all of the conversion credit to the direct visit.

But this is misleading. Would that conversion have happened if not for the first visit from organic search? Probably not.

By going into the Conversions section of GA and clicking on Attribution > Model Comparison Tool, you’ll be able to see a side-by-side comparison of different conversion models, such as:

• First touch (all credit goes to first point-of-entry to site)
• Last touch (all credit goes to the point-of-entry of session where conversion took place)
• Position-based (credit is primarily shared between the first and last points-of-entry, with less credit being shared amongst the intermediary steps)

There are also a few others, but I find them to be less interesting. For more information, read here. You can also click on Multi-Channel Funnels > Assisted Conversions to see the number of conversions by channel which were used along the way to a conversion, but was not the channel of conversion.

AMP tracking complications

Somewhat surprisingly, tracking from AMP is not as easy or as logical as one might expect. To begin with, AMP uses a separate Analytics snippet than your standard GA tracking code, so if you already have GA installed on your site and you decide to roll out AMP, you will need to set up the specific AMP analytics. (For more information on AMP analytics, please read Accelerated Mobile Pages Via Google Tag Manager and Adding Analytics to Your AMP Pages).

In a nutshell, the client ID (which tracks a specific user’s engagement with a site over time in GA) is not shared by default between AMP analytics and the regular tracking code, though there are some hack-y ways to get around this (WARNING: this gets very technically in-depth). I think there are two very important questions when it comes to AMP measurement:

1. How much revenue are these pages responsible for?
2. How much engagement are we driving from AMP pages?

In the Google Analytics AMP analytics property, it’s simple to see how many sessions there are and what the bounce and exit rates are. From my own experience, bounce and exit rates are usually pretty high (depending on UX), but the number of sessions increases overall. So, if we’re driving more and more users, how can we track and improve engagement beyond the standard bounce and exit rates? Where do we look?

How to measure real value from AMP in Google Analytics

Acquisition > Referrals

I propose looking into our standard GA property and navigating to our referring sources within Acquisition, where we’ll select the AMP source, highlighted below.

Once we click there, we’ll see the full referring URLs, the number of sessions each URL drove to the non-AMP version of the site, the number of transactions associated with each URL, the amount of revenue associated per URL, and more.

Important note here: These sessions are not the total number of sessions on each AMP page; rather, these are the number of sessions that originated on an AMP URL and were referred to the non-AMP property.

Why is this particular report interesting?

1. It allows us to see which specific AMP URLs are referring the most traffic to the non-AMP version of the site
2. It allows us to see how many transactions and how much revenue comes from a session initiated by a specific AMP URL
   1. From here, we can analyze why certain pages refer more traffic or end up with more conversions, then apply any findings to other AMP URLs

Why is this particular report incomplete?

• It only shows us conversions and revenue that happened during one session (last-touch attribution)
  • It is very likely that most of your blog traffic will be higher-funnel and informational, not transactional, so conversions are more likely to happen at later touch points than the first one

Conversions > Multi-Channel Funnels > Assisted Conversions

If we really want to have the best understanding of how much revenue and conversions happen from visits to AMP URLs, we need to analyze the assisted conversions report. While you can certainly find value from analyzing the model comparison tool (also found within the conversions tab of GA), if we want to answer the question, “How many conversions and how much revenue are we driving from AMP URLs?”, it’s best answered in the Assisted Conversions section.

One of the first things that we’ll need to do is create a custom channel grouping within the Assisted Conversions section of Conversions.

In here, we need to:

1. Click “Channel Groupings,” select “Create a custom channel grouping”
2. Name the channel “AMP”
3. Set a rule as a source containing your other AMP property (type in “amp” into the form and it will begin to auto-populate; just select the one you need)
4. Click “Save”

Why is this particular report interesting?

1. We’re able to see how many assisted as well as last click/direct conversions there were by channel
2. We’re able to change the look-back window on a conversion to anywhere from 1–90 days to see how it affects the sales cycle

Why is this particular report incomplete?

• We’re unable to see which particular pages are most responsible for driving traffic, revenue, and conversions

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Conclusion

As both of these reports are incomplete on their own, I recommend any digital marketer who is measuring the effect of AMP URLs to use the two reports in conjunction for their own reporting. Doing so will provide the value of:

1. Informing us which AMP URLs refer the most traffic to our non-AMP pages, providing us a jumping-off point for analysis of what type of content and CTAs are most effective for moving visitors from AMP deeper into the site
2. Informing us how many conversions happen with different attribution models

It’s possible that a quick glance at your reports will show very low conversion numbers, especially when compared with other channels. That does not necessarily mean AMP should be abandoned; rather, those pages should receive further investment and optimization to drive deeper engagement in the same session and retargeting for future engagement. Google actually does allow you to set up your AMP pages to retarget with Google products so users can see products related to the content they visited.

You can also add in email capture forms to your AMP URLs to re-engage with people at a later time, which is useful because AMP does not currently allow for interstitials or popups to capture a user’s information.

What do you do next with the information collected?

1. Identify why certain pages refer more traffic than others to non-AMP URLs. Is there a common factor amongst pages that refer more traffic and others that don’t?
2. Identify why certain pages are responsible for more revenue than other pages. Do all of your AMP pages contain buttons or designated CTAs?
3. Can you possibly capture more emails? What would need to be done?

Ultimately, this reporting is just the first step in benchmarking your data. From here you can pull insights, make recommendations, and monitor how your KPIs progress. Many people have been concerned or confused as to whether AMP is valuable or the right thing for them. It may or may not be, but if you’re not measuring it effectively, there’s no way to really know. There’s a strong likelihood that AMP will only increase in prominence over the coming months, so if you’re not sure how to attribute that traffic and revenue, perhaps this can help get you set up for continued success.

Did I miss anything? How do you measure the success (or failure) of your AMP URLs? Did I miss any KPIs that could be potentially more useful for your organization? Please let me know in the comments below.

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Building a Community of Advocates Through Smart Content

Posted by Michelle_LeBlanc

From gentle criticism to full-on trolls, every brand social media page or community sometimes faces pushback. Maybe you’ve seen it happen. Perhaps you’ve even laughed along as a corporation makes a condescending misstep or a local business publishes a glaring typo. It’s the type of thing that keeps social media and community managers up at night. Will I be by my phone to respond if someone needs customer service help? Will I know what to write if our brand comes under fire? Do we have a plan for dealing with this?

Advocates are a brand’s best friend

In my years of experience developing communities and creating social media content, I’ve certainly been there. I won’t try to sell you a magic elixir that makes that anxiety go away, but I’ve witnessed a phenomenon that can take the pressure off. Before you can even begin to frame a response as the brand, someone comes out of the woodwork and does it for you. Defending, opening up a conversation, or perhaps deflecting with humor, these individuals bring an authenticity to the response that no brand could hope to capture. They are true advocates, and they are perhaps the most valuable assets a company could have.

But how do you get them?

Having strong brand advocates can help insulate your brand from crisis, lead to referring links and positive media coverage, AND help you create sustainable, authentic content for your brand. In this blog post, I’ll explore a few case studies and strategies for developing these advocates, building user-generated content programs around them, and turning negative community perceptions into open dialogue.

Case study 1: Employee advocates can counter negative perceptions

To start, let’s talk about negative community perceptions. Almost every company deals with this to one degree or another.

In the trucking industry, companies deal with negative perceptions not just of their individual company, but also of the industry as a whole. You may not be aware of this, but our country needs approximately 3.5 million truck drivers to continue shipping daily supplies like food, medicine, deals from Amazon, and everything else you’ve come to expect in your local stores and on your doorstep. The industry regularly struggles to find enough drivers. Older drivers are retiring from the field, while younger individuals may be put off by a job that requires weeks away from home. Drivers that are committed to the industry may change jobs frequently, chasing the next hiring bonus or better pay rate.

How does a company counter these industry-wide challenges and also stand out as an employer from every other firm in the field?

Using video content, Facebook groups, and podcasts to create employee advocates

For one such company, we looked to current employees to become brand advocates in marketing materials and on social media. The HR and internal communications team had identified areas of potential for recruitment — e.g. separating military, women — and we worked with them to identify individuals that represented these niche characteristics, as well as the values that the company wanted to align themselves with: safety, long-term tenure with the company, affinity for the profession, etc. We then looked for opportunities to tell these individuals’ stories in a way that was authentic, reflected current organic social media trends, and provided opportunities for dialogue.

In one instance, we developed a GoPro-shot, vlog-style video program around two female drivers that featured real-life stories and advice from the road. By working behind the scenes with these drivers, we were able to coach them into being role models for our brand advocate program, modeling company values in media/PR coverage and at live company events.

One driver participated in an industry-media live video chat where she took questions from the audience, and later she participated in a Facebook Q&A on behalf of the brand as well. It was our most well-attended and most engaged Q&A to date. Other existing and potential drivers saw these individuals becoming the heroes of the brand’s stories and, feeling welcomed to the dialogue by one of their own, became more engaged with other marketing activities as a result. These activities included:

• A monthly call-in/podcast show where drivers could ask questions directly of senior management. We found that once a driver had participated in this forum, they were much more likely to stay with the company — with a 90% retention rate!
• A private Facebook group where very vocal and very socially active employees could have a direct line to the company’s driver advocate to express opinions and ask questions. In addition to giving these individuals a dedicated space to communicate, this often helped us identify trends and issues before they became larger problems.
• A contest to nominate military veterans within the company to become a brand spokesperson in charge of driving a military-themed honorary truck. By allowing anyone to submit a nomination for a driver, this contest helped us discover and engage members of the audience that were perhaps less likely to put themselves forward out of modesty or lack of esteem for their own accomplishments. We also grew our email list, gained valuable insights about the individuals involved, and were able to better communicate with more of this “lurker” group.

By combining these social media activities with traditional PR pitching around the same themes, we continued to grow brand awareness as a whole and build an array of positive links back to the company.

When it comes to brand advocates, sometimes existing employees simply need to be invited in and engaged in a way that appeals to their own intrinsic motivations — perhaps a sense of belonging or achievement. For many employee-based audiences, social media engagement with company news or industry trends is already happening and simply needs to be harnessed and directed by the brand for better effect.

But what about when it comes to individuals that have no financial motivation to promote a brand? At the other end of the brand advocate spectrum from employees are those who affiliate themselves with a cause. They may donate money or volunteer for a specific organization, but when it comes down to it, they don’t have inherent loyalty to one group and can easily go from engaged to enraged.

Case study 2: UGC can turn volunteers into advocates

One nonprofit client that we have the privilege of working with dealt with this issue on a regular basis. Beyond misunderstandings about their funding sources or operations, they occasionally faced backlash about their core mission on social media. After all, for any nonprofit or cause out there, it’s easy to point to two or ten others that may be seen as “more worthy,” depending on your views. In addition, the nature of their cause tended to attract a lot of attention in the holiday giving period, with times of low engagement through the rest of the year.

Crowdsourcing user-generated content for better engagement

To counter this and better engage the audience year-round, we again looked for opportunities to put individual faces and stories at the forefront of marketing materials.

In this case, we began crowdsourcing user-generated content through monthly contesting programs during the organization’s “off” months. Photos submitted during the contests could be used as individual posts on social media or remixed across videos, blog posts, or as a starting point for further conversation and promotion development with the individuals. As Facebook was the primary promotion point for these contests, they attracted those who were already highly engaged with the organization and its page. During the initial two-month program, the Facebook page gained 16,660 new fans with no associated paid promotion, accounting for 55% of total page Likes in the first half of 2016.

Perhaps even more importantly, the organization was able to save on internal labor in responding to complaints or negative commentary on posts as even more individuals began adding their own positive comments. The organization’s community manager was able to institute a policy of waiting to respond after any negative post, allowing the brand advocates time to chime in with a more authentic, volunteer-driven voice.

By inviting their most passionate supporters more deeply into the fold and giving them the space and trust to communicate, the organization may have lost some measure of control over the details of the message, but they gained support and understanding on a deeper level. These individuals not only influenced others within the social media pages of the organization, but also frequently shared content and tagged friends, acting as influencers and bringing others into the fold.

How you can make it work for your audience

As you can see, regardless of industry, building a brand advocate program often starts with identifying your most passionate supporters and finding a way to appeal to their existing habits, interests, and motivations — then building content programs that put those goals at the forefront. Marketing campaigns featuring paid influencers can be fun and can certainly achieve rapid awareness and reach, but they will never be able to counter the lasting value of an authentic advocate, particularly when it comes to countering criticism or improving the perceived status of your brand or industry.

To get started, you can follow a few quick tips:

• Understand your existing community.
  • Take a long look at your active social audience and try to understand who those people are: Employees? Customers?
  • Ask yourself what motivates them to participate in dialogue and how can you provide more of that.
• Work behind the scenes.
  • Send private messages and emails, or pick up the phone and speak with a few audience members.
  • Getting a few one-on-one insights can be incredibly helpful in content planning and inspiring your strategy.
  • By reaching out individually, you really make people feel special. That’s a great step towards earning their advocacy.
• Think: Where else can I use this?
  • Your advocates and their contributions are valuable. Make sure you take advantage of that value!
  • Reuse content in multiple formats or invite them to participate in new ways.
  • Someone who provides a testimonial might be able to act as a source for your PR team, as well.

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The Last Guide to Facebook Ad Account Structure You’ll Ever Need

Facebook advertising gives marketers almost limitless options when it comes to how you can target and promote your business across the platform, which is great for you creative types out there. That being said, taking a measured and methodical approach to how your account is structured is integral to getting the most value from Facebook ads.

To scale in Facebook, you need to have a foundation for success. You wouldn’t build your dream house without taking a few measurements, and your Facebook ad account shouldn’t be any different.

This is fine

If you’ve read our AdWords account structure guide in the past, prepare yourself for a completely different animal; by nature, Facebook and Google AdWords are very different platforms.

One key difference that completely changes your approach from a structural standpoint is the fact that Facebook budgets are controlled at the ad set or targeting level as opposed to the campaign level. This detail allows for greater control over how much you spend on specific audiences and which ads those audiences see.

If you want to master Facebook advertising and compete with the best, you need to start off on the right foot. In this guide, I’ll outline how to build a successful and organized Facebook ad account structure that allows you to maximize the amount of control you have over your budget and performance.

Facebook Ad Account Structure: Campaign Level

Having a clear understanding of your marketing goals at the campaign level is the first step to building the foundation for your account.

How Facebook optimizes a campaign based on the chosen objective ultimately affects every decision going forward.

For example, if you want to drive traffic to your website but also drive leads for your business, you’ll want to make two separate campaigns.

The campaign with the objective to drive traffic will ideally have different ads than the one that is optimized for conversions. The reason for this lies behind how Facebook’s algorithm serves the ads.

Let’s say for example you want to send traffic to your blog but also drive traffic to a landing page with a call to action. Your approach should look something like this:

Campaign 1 – Blog: Objective – Link clicks

Campaign 2 – Conversions: Objective – Optimize for Conversions

Now what’s important to understand when creating each campaign is whether or not there will be multiple promotions within it.

Example 1:

If the nature of the promotion is short term, cyclical, or frequently changed (like a variety of different blog posts) then make the campaign name relevant to the overall goal (Blog Traffic). Doing so will make organizing and reporting on the individual ad performance easier.

In this scenario, you can have multiple competing ad sets displaying the same mix of promotions within each. Facebook will optimize for the promotion that is performing the best and in each ad set you can have variability in exposure (what performs best in one ad set may not perform well in another). This makes the success (or failure) of each and the type of traffic you are driving much easier to ascertain.

If your promotion is more long-term or evergreen (as in a conversion campaign) I suggest creating separate campaigns for each individual promotion:

Example 2:

This will make strategy and optimization much easier!

You can cycle ad sets and gauge long-term CPA’s and conversion rates. You can show the same audience different variations of the same ad and assess which provides the best conversion rates and lowest costs.

The fact that everything related to each individual promotion is under the same umbrella means that you possess complete strategic control over budget allocation and can optimize according to where you are experiencing the highest return on investment.

Facebook Ad Account Structure: Ad Set Level

In order to have a full understanding of which target audiences work and which ones don’t, it’s extremely important to be organized on the ad set level. As mentioned before, this is where you will be pulling the strings in regard to spend. So, if one target audience outperforms another you can allocate more budget to the winning ad set. Taking this into consideration you’ll want to make sure there is no overlap in target audiences.

The best way to yield optimum results from a structure like this is to cycle these ad sets through your different campaigns (promotions) and assess the respective costs associated. Breaking ad sets out by targeting method is my preferred way to do this:

Targeting Method:

• Remarketing – website users

• Lookalikes of website users

• Custom List uploads

• Lookalikes of custom list uploads
• People who liked your page
• Lookalikes of people who liked your page
• Manually targeted audiences (interest/behaviors)

• Variation 1 – Broad
• Variation 2 – Narrow

(Further down the line)

• Conversions
• Lookalikes of conversions

Other variants that some advertisers may want to consider breaking their ad sets down by are:

• Geographic location
• Language
• Placement (i.e. Instagram, desktop, mobile)

For example: You should have one ad set targeting remarketing to website users only, one ad set for lookalikes of those users, and so on. This ensures that you can ascertain which specific segments perform best for you. If you blended many of these audiences and experienced success, then you wouldn’t necessarily know where to pinpoint that success.

Conversely, if you blended many of these audiences, some may perform well and others terribly. This would leave you with muddied, mediocre results to report on and your CPA would be inflated by the poorly performing segments.

The more refined you are at the ad set level, the more visibility you will be able to have when it comes to knowing what is ultimately working. From there you can make adjustments and improve your overall account health. The process of saving audiences is very simple:

After constructing the audience select the “Save This Audience” button:

After that, give your audience a unique name that will differentiate it from other saved audiences in your arsenal.

Facebook Ad Account Structure & Your Sales Funnel

As I mentioned above, over time you’ll want to create audiences of individuals who have already converted either in Facebook or across your site (using custom conversions, or database list uploads). This is important for two reasons:

1. It allows you to exclude these users after they convert from a specific promotion (so they don’t see the same ad again)
2. You can remarket to these individuals with lower funnel or upsell offers.

As you scale your Facebook ad account, this method will prove to be very useful, as you can then build campaigns for lower-funnel lead nurturing and customer marketing purposes.

The fact that you can hyper-target these individuals with relevant promotions means that you can ideally spend less and experience higher conversion rates, while producing an experience that coincides with your email marketing campaigns.

For example: When users convert on a free eBook promotion you have, you can then take those users, create an audience out of them, and subsequently serve them a follow-up promotion where the messaging is relevant to the first action they took.

Say, something like this:

“Thanks for downloading our free eBook: How to Come Back from Being Down 25 Points in the Third Quarter to Win the Superbowl. Order your New England Patriot season tickets today!”

Just as before, you have two options when doing this. You can create multiple campaigns consisting of a single promotion each, or you can create an umbrella campaign e.g. “Nurture Campaign” and show a variety of promotions to each audience.

The second approach is ideal if you have limited data or understanding of which offer performs best at each stage in the funnel. If that is the case I suggest creating what I call a “Practice Field” campaign.

The Practice Field Strategy

What I mean by “Practice Field” is that you have a single campaign and subsequent ad sets. Within those ad sets you have can have 2-4 promotions (ideally no more than 4).

From there you let the campaign run live for a period of time, giving Facebook time to optimize for the top performing ad or promotion. Like football players from the practice squad, only the best make the team. Once you have your winner, break out the promotion and ad set into its own campaign and allocate budget accordingly. Just don’t forget to pause the old practice field ad set.

You can use this method to learn how your different promotions compete with one another and which resonate with specific audiences the most. Transferring them from a practice campaign into their own campaign allows you the flexibility of both account structure strategies and gives you the insights to properly optimize.

The Value of Solid Facebook Ad Account Structure

The examples that I used in this post directly correlate to result rates. Whether you’re driving traffic to your site or you’re trying to get conversions, these methods of structuring your account are essential to your investment’s overall health.

If you consistently stuffed your face with whatever the hell Taco Bell is putting into Doritos and smoked a pack of Parliaments a day, you wouldn’t be in too great of shape. Consider this post a guide to getting those desirable Facebook abs so your business can go the distance.

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Going Beyond Google: Are Search Engines Ready for JavaScript Crawling & Indexation?

Posted by goralewicz

I recently published the results of my JavaScript SEO experiment where I checked which JavaScript frameworks are properly crawled and indexed by Google. The results were shocking; it turns out Google has a number of problems when crawling and indexing JavaScript-rich websites.

Google managed to index only a few out of multiple JavaScript frameworks tested. And as I proved, indexing content doesn’t always mean crawling JavaScript-generated links.

This got me thinking. If Google is having problems with JavaScript crawling and indexation, how are Google’s smaller competitors dealing with this problem? Is JavaScript going to lead you to full de-indexation in most search engines?

If you decide to deploy a client-rendered website (meaning a browser or Googlebot needs to process the JavaScript before seeing the HTML), you’re not only risking problems with your Google rankings — you may completely kill your chances at ranking in all the other search engines out there.

Google + JavaScript SEO experiment

To see how search engines other than Google deal with JavaScript crawling and indexing, we used our experiment website, http:/jsseo.expert, to check how Googlebot crawls and indexes JavaScript (and JavaScript frameworks’) generated content.

The experiment was quite simple: http://jsseo.expert has subpages with content parsed by different JavaScript frameworks. If you disable JavaScript, the content isn’t visible — i.e. if you go to http://ift.tt/2gm0jah, all the content within the red box is generated by Angular 2. If the content isn’t indexed in Yahoo, for example, we know that Yahoo’s indexer didn’t process the JavaScript.

Here are the results:

As you can see, Google and Ask are the only search engines to properly index JavaScript-generated content. Bing, Yahoo, AOL, DuckDuckGo, and Yandex are completely JavaScript-blind and won’t see your content if it isn’t HTML.

The next step: Can other search engines index JavaScript?

Most SEOs only cover JavaScript crawling and indexing issues when talking about Google. As you can see, the problem is much more complex. When you launch a client-rendered JavaScript-rich website (JavaScript is processed by the browser/crawler to “build” HTML), you can be 100% sure that it’s only going to be indexed and ranked in Google and Ask. Unfortunately, Google and Ask cover only ~64% of the whole search engine market, according to statista.com.

This means that your new, shiny, JavaScript-rich website can cost you ~36% of your website’s visibility on all search engines.

Let’s start with Yahoo, Bing, and AOL, which are responsible for 35% of search queries in the US.

Yahoo, Bing, and AOL

Even though Yahoo and AOL were here long before Google, they’ve obviously fallen behind its powerful algorithm and don’t invest in crawling and indexing as much as Google. One reason is likely the relatively high cost of crawling and indexing the web compared to the popularity of the website.

Google can freely invest millions of dollars in growing their computing power without worrying as much about return on investment, whereas Bing, AOL, and Ask only have a small percentage of the search market.

However, Microsoft-owned Bing isn’t out of the running. Their growth has been quite aggressive over last 8 years:

Unfortunately, we can’t say the same about one of the market pioneers: AOL. Do you remember the days before Google? This video will surely bring back some memories from a simpler time.

If you want to learn more about search engine history, I highly recommend watching Marcus Tandler’s spectacular TEDx talk.

Ask.com

What about Ask.com? How is it possible that Ask, with less than 1% of the market, can invest in crawling and indexing JavaScript? It makes me question if the Ask network is powered by Google’s algorithm and crawlers. It’s even more interesting looking at Ask’s aversion towards Google. There were already some speculations about Ask’s relationship with Google after Google Penguin in 2012, but we can now confirm that Ask’s crawling is using Google’s technology.

DuckDuckGo and Yandex

Both DuckDuckGo and Yandex had no problem indexing all the URLs within http://jsseo.expert, but unfortunately, the only content that was indexed properly was the 100% HTML page (http://ift.tt/2gkDEuM).

Baidu

Despite my best efforts, I didn’t manage to index http://jsseo.expert in Baidu.com. It turns out you need a mainland China phone number to do that. I don’t have any previous experience with Baidu, so any and all help with indexing our experimental website would be appreciated. As soon as I succeed, I will update this article with Baidu.com results.

Going beyond the search engines

What if you don’t really care about search engines other than Google? Even if your target market is heavily dominated by Google, JavaScript crawling and indexing is still in an early stage, as my JavaScript SEO experiment documented.

Additionally, even if crawled and indexed properly, there is proof that JavaScript reliance can affect your rankings. Will Critchlow saw a significant traffic improvement after shifting from JavaScript-driven pages to non-JavaScript reliant.

Is there a JavaScript SEO silver bullet?

There is no search engine that can understand and process JavaScript at the level our modern browsers can. Even so, JavaScript isn’t inherently bad for SEO. JavaScript is awesome, but just like SEO, it requires experience and close attention to best practices.

If you want to enjoy all the perks of JavaScript without worrying about problems like Hulu.com’s JavaScript SEO issues, look into isomorphic JavaScript. It allows you to enjoy dynamic and beautiful websites without worrying about SEO.

If you’ve already developed a client-rendered website and can’t go back to the drawing board, you can always use pre-rendering services or enable server-side rendering. They often aren’t ideal solutions, but can definitely help you solve the JavaScript crawling and indexing problem until you come up with a better solution.

Regardless of the search engine, yet again we come back to testing and experimenting as a core component of technical SEO.

The future of JavaScript SEO

I highly recommend you follow along with how http://jsseo.expert/ is indexed in Google and other search engines. Even if some of the other search engines are a little behind Google, they’ll need to improve how they deal with JavaScript-rich websites to meet the exponentially growing demand for what JavaScript frameworks offer, both to developers and end users.

For now, stick to HTML & CSS on your front-end.

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Google Announces Major Changes to Ad Rotation Settings

If there’s one thing all paid search advertisers can agree on, it’s that ad testing is important. It’s long been a best practice to include multiple ads in each ad group so that you can see which ads perform better and create better ads within your account.

That may be where the agreement ends, though, as advertisers have lots of opinions on how you should test your different ads in each ad group – should you rotate them blindly, wait 90 days to make any changes, or optimize them to drive more clicks or more conversions?

Well, Google is looking to finally end the argument over ad rotation by simplifying the options advertisers have when testing multiple ads within an ad group. Today on the AdWords blog, Google announced three important changes to ad rotation, all of which will go into effect automatically on September 25.

Here are the three changes you need to know about:

1. Going forward AdWords will only support two ad rotation settings – “Optimize” and “Rotate Indefinitely.”

• “Optimize: Prefer best performing ads” will use Google’s machine learning technology to deliver ads that are expected to perform better than other ads in your ad group.
• “Do not optimize: Rotate ads indefinitely” will rotate your ads without favoring better performing ads to a user’s search.

The current settings “Optimize for conversions” and “Rotate evenly” will be retired. Campaigns currently using “Optimize for clicks,” “Optimize for conversions,” and “rotate evenly” will automatically be switched to the “Optimize” setting.

2. Campaigns using smart bidding strategies, such as Enhanced CPC, target CPA, or target ROAS bidding strategies, will always be set to “Optimize” their ad rotation, regardless of how they set their ad rotation settings.

3. Advertisers can also manage their new ad rotation settings at both the campaign and ad group level.

Who’s Affected By This Change?

You’ll notice this change in your account on September 25 if your campaigns:

• Use either the “Rotate evenly” or “Optimize for conversions” ad rotation setting.
• OR use smart bidding strategies, such as Enhanced CPC, target CPA, or target ROAS bidding strategies.

These are common ad rotation and bidding strategies, so many advertisers will be affected! To review your campaigns’ ad rotation & bidding strategies, look under the settings tab:

 

What Should You Expect to See Change?

Although some advertisers have been skeptical about trusting Google to optimize their ad rotation, advertisers generally see positive performance from making the change. As recently as last quarter, we transitioned 419 accounts from the “rotate evenly” to an “optimize” rotation setting and saw, on average, an 8% increase in CTR and 11% increase in CVR!

 

What Should I Do?

This transition will occur on September 25 automatically; you won’t need to do anything in advance. As noted above, most affected advertisers will notice improved performance in their accounts, but it’s always best to keep a close eye on your accounts following a change like this!

Advertisers currently using the “Rotate Evenly” setting may want to conclude any current ad tests and consider migrating to an optimize setting in advance to get the most out of their future ad tests.

Advertisers currently using the “Optimize for conversions” setting may want to consider adopting a Smart Bidding strategy to help optimize their bids in real-time auctions. Google recently made changes to enhanced CPC to better accommodate these auction dynamics and help advertisers improve their ads’ conversion rates.

If you still prefer having complete control over your ad tests within each ad group, consider taking advantage of the new ad group level settings to manage your ad rotation in ad groups where you’re closely monitoring your ad tests.

If you’re not happy with the changes Google is looking to make in your account, you can always switch to the “Do Not Optimize” ad rotation. This will allow you to rotate your ads evenly into every search auction. However, with great power comes great responsibility – multi-variate ad testing can be particularly laborious for many advertisers, and if you don’t regularly review and refresh your ads, don’t expect performance to get better on its own!

About the author:

Mark is a Senior Data Scientist at WordStream, focused on research and training for the everchanging world of PPC. He was named the 5th Most Influential PPC Expert of 2017 by PPC Hero. You can follow him on Twitter, LinkedIn, and Google +.

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