How to use In-Page Analytics and how it can help boost conversions

Google Analytics is most certainly complex, so naturally there are a few options and features that go unnoticed.

So where do you begin if you’re trying to get more advanced and need a place to start? In-Page Analytics is probably one of the most under-used features that can also be the most impactful to a small business.

By looking at these specific analytics you can figure out which areas of your site are most important and which links visitors are clicking when they are actually on your site.

Once you can understand some of the details associated with user patterns, you can reformat your site and optimize in ways that ultimately will boost your conversions.

How to access your In-Page Analytics

The purpose of In-Page Analytics is to be able to tell what is working visually and what is not. In order to see your In-Page Analytics data you will need to sign into your Google Analytics account. Before you can do anything specific with the report, you will have to enter the URL for the page on which you want the report to launch. You enter that URL when you edit the settings for a Reporting view.

You can access this report two ways:

• Access—Way #1
• Sign in to your Analytics account.
• Navigate to your view.
• Select the Reporting tab.
• Select Behavior > In-Page Analytics.
• Access—Way #2
• Select Behavior > Site Content > All Pages.
• Drill into a page and select the In-Page tab.
• This opens the report for that page.

In both cases you access the report through the ‘behavior’ section. Once, you click on In-Page Analytics, your website’s home page will display the exact percentage of where users are clicking on your site. Below shows where you can find the In-Page Analytics report and what it looks like:

Once again, the job of the In-Page Analytics report is ultimately to infer the number of clicks on a page element (CTA, links, etc.) from the number of times that page appears as the referrer to subsequent pages.

In this way you can see which elements are leading to the more popular subsequent pages on your website. In many cases this is not just a preference of content, but something that stood out more than other elements on your website.

Customizing In-Page Analytics

According to Site Pro News, you can also customize in-page analytics for the needs of your site, which Site Pro News also touched on here. This can directly help to optimize your site, which in turn will help boost conversions.

Here are two ideas for how you can customize the report:

Importance of setting the date range

Just as with any report, you may customize your date range by clicking on the date panel located on the top right-hand side of your analytics dashboard and choosing your own date range.

This will allow you to understand exactly what was up on your site or any changes you have made, and when. Periods of time are incredibly important to consider with this analysis, so I recommend clicking the ‘Compare To’ button to see if you’re making improvements:

Keep in mind that the only way to say whether or not your numbers are ‘good’ or ‘bad’ is to compare them to what they were in previous months, and this is especially true with this report.

Every website is different, so you’re in a competition with yourself first and foremost before worrying about competition.

Using Segmentation

There are a lot ways to segment your data on the in-page analytics platform. This will allow you to look at how users arrive on your site (for example) and then the ways that they navigate it once they are there.

You can separate, as the screen shot indicates, by categories such as ‘made a purchase’, ‘referral traffic’, ‘direct traffic’, or ‘new users’. All of this can be used to optimize your site and figure out what focus you need to have to boost conversion rates.

To create a segment, click on All Users. This will take you to a screen where you can ‘Add a Segment’ (as shown below). You can then click to create a recommended segment or create a custom one. The screenshot below, for example, has segments for Bounced Sessions, Direct Traffic, and Converters. Just hit ‘Apply’ at the bottom when you’re finished.

Note: If you’re new to segmentation, segmenting your email lists is probably one of the easiest and most important places to start. Check out this article to learn more.

Making the Most of In-Page Analytics for Conversion Rates

Just as we discussed above in the section on data customization, there are a lot of different ways to make the most of your data to enhance your conversion rates. Segmenting data is one of the more successful ways to focus on who is finding your site and how these differences might effect interaction.

If you are interested, check this out this video on the visual context for your In-Page Analytics data from Google…

So now that you know how to read the data and what to look for, it’s important to understand how exactly to customize it. Below are some tips on customization that will help you make the most of your data for conversion rates:

• Make sure you segment or have a category for each of the streams/referral sites that people may be coming from—whether it be social media or other sites.
• For each channel, you want to construct a separate report (this includes direct traffic as well). This will give a clearer picture of the differences in where your audiences are coming from.
• Make adjustments as you see fit. For example, if you have a CTA that is either not being clicked, or people are leaving your site once they do, then you probably need to readjust and reconfigure the way this particular element is presented. There may also be differences for certain audiences that you want to account for, but remember to prioritize places where you are getting the most traffic from.
• Find out where maximum click happens. For example, if it happens on the top left side of the page, then put your conversion links there. Always check this when you run your analysis and make sure you adjust accordingly, as this can change over time.
• Make efforts to reduce whenever exit rate is high, especially when it is on most-linked or top pages on your site.
• Make it a goal to check back on a regular basis, as you do with your other analytics, so you are conscious of what needs to be adjusted over time

The Takeaway

It is difficult to understand why In-Page Analytics are as underused as they are when they provide such valuable insight. Definitely do not miss out on the opportunity to look at this as a tool of change and boosting conversion rates. The ability to segment your visitors and see how they interact with your site is very valuable; so start now!

Do you have experience with Google’s In-Page Analytics? Let us know in the comments section below, we would love to hear from you.

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Okay, now Google’s Artificial Intelligence Division is just showing off

In Seoul, South Korea, a Google-created artificial intelligence has been squaring off against a mortal man in the 2,500-year-old strategy game, called Go, that’s several orders of magnitude more complicated than chess.

When it was finally over, Google’s AlphaGo won four out of five matchups, making AlphaGo a role model for young artificial intelligences everywhere.

How did the robot pull off such a decisive win?

Wired reported that “AlphaGo relies on deep neural networks—networks of hardware and software that mimic the web of neurons in the human brain. With these neural nets, it can learn tasks by analyzing massive amounts of digital data.”

That’s bad news for SEOs the world over, because Google isn’t just using neural nets to beat Koreans at board games, it’s also using these advanced networks to make their search results more efficient. And in the process Google might just create the artificial intelligence science-fiction authors have been dreaming about for decades.

When will Google become sentient?

For eons, our foremost philosophers and scientists believed that man’s ability to make tools set him apart from the animals. It was actually Jane Goodall who smashed this macho theory to bits after she witnessed chimpanzees making rudimentary tools.

Now, many scientists instead believe that it’s our unique capacity for language that truly sets us apart from the beasts of the world. In the quest to give birth to artificial intelligence, computers’ inability to comprehend human speech is one of the main stumbling blocks – as anyone who’s ever tried to talk to Siri can attest.

Yet we’re getting closer to that Brave New World every day, and in many ways Google is leading the charge. Not only does the company control one of the most complex computer networks on the face of the planet, but by necessity Google is making major strides in Natural Language Processing.

Because search engines can’t (yet) understand a piece of content or search query the way a human does, the company uses advanced algorithms to analyze the semantic content of content. Recently, Google started using neural net technology to push its NLP efforts forward.

And while Google is using machine learning to bring you more relevant search results, and Apple is doing the same to make Siri more useful, both tech companies are striking at the very core of human consciousness.

How long until Siri can pass the Turing Test?

This March it seemed like every website on the internet covered the story about Siri and Cortana responding to questions about violence and suicide. As Gizmodo summed it up, “Siri Is Woefully Ill-Equipped to Help With Your Mental Health Problems.”

Clearly we haven’t quite cracked the secret to artificial intelligence, even despite recent breakthroughs in machine learning (see my earlier post on Google’s RankBrain).

So why does it matter that Siri, Cortana, and Google Now still struggle to understand even basic questions?

Alan Turing, the father of the computer, is known for many things, but AI geeks remember him best for the so-called Turing Test. The test has evolved through a number of different versions over the years, but simply put, the Turing Test is a method for determining whether a computer can think like a human being.

Per the Webopedia version of the experiment…

“The test is simple: a human interrogator is isolated and given the task of distinguishing between a human and a computer based on their replies to questions that the interrogator poses. After a series of tests are performed, the interrogator attempts to determine which subject is human and which is an artificial intelligence.”

If a computer can genuinely pass the Turing Test and convince a human that it’s a fellow living, breathing, talking person, then that machine can fairly be called Artificial Intelligence, with a capital AI.

One day, when you pull out your smartphone to ask Google or Siri a question, instead of returning a list of search results, they just might answer back.

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Remembering Klout: how ‘influence’ has changed over the years

I came across a tweet the other day from a follower giving a +K to another user, which serves as a reward for someone’s expertise, and it reminded me that Klout is still out there, although I haven’t visited it for years.

What is Klout?

It was back in 2008 when Klout was introduced to everyone as an online platform measuring social media influence. Klout aggregates a user’s performance (ranging from followers to engagement) among several social networks in order to calculate the Klout score, counting from 0 to 100, depending on the online influence someone has.

Although it wasn’t the only site that attempted to measure online influence, Klout quickly became popular for its measuring algorithm, which was a mystery for many years.

Image source: Garry McLeod

How we became obsessed with our score

It was in 2012 when Klout reached its peak popularity, as passionate social media users became obsessed with their Klout scores, looking for ways to improve their numbers and then use them accordingly as a way to prove their online credibility.

In fact, it was believed back then that a high Klout score could lead to great rewards, both in the online and offline world, and a new form of rising influence with endless opportunities.

Many companies were fascinated by this measurement platform that allowed them to separate the influencers from the average Internet users and they even turned a high Klout score into a job requirement for their hiring process.

Klout realised its rising power and launched ‘Perks’, a service that rewards influencers with perks coming directly from companies that joined the program.

It was the first time that users could officially monetise their online influence with actual rewards, and they were happy to do so.

However, Klout Perks disappeared at the end of 2015, as Lithium Technologies, the company that bought Klout in 2014, decided to focus mostly on the algorithm and its powerful social data.

Why we moved beyond the Klout score

Klout recently released a paper analysing how its score is calculated and all the factors that determine the measurement of a user’s influence.

According to Klout, its scoring system processes 45 billion interactions daily and analyses 3,600 different actions that define the score that is assigned to its 750 million users from nine networks (Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Google+, Youtube, Lithium Communities and Wikipedia).

Image source: Klout

Although the algorithm takes into consideration many factors to determine a user’s influence, it still doesn’t include rising social networks, such as Snapchat and Vine, or it doesn’t consider Pinterest and blogging platforms, despite the fact that a user may connect these to a Klout profile.

Thus, Klout struggles to keep up with all the changes on social media and this inability to include the rising social networks on its measuring algorithm makes its score incorrect, or at least, not as relevant as it hoped to be.

the worst class i took in college was a social media class. we got graded based on our klout scores. i can’t believe someone approved that.

— Maya Kosoff (@mekosoff) March 28, 2016

It’s not that we got past our vanity to measure our social presence, as it may still serve as an indication of someone’s influence, but we now seem to realise that we can’t take it as seriously as we did, if we ever did.

How do we define social influence today?

Klout might not be the primary measurement of influence anymore, but social influencers  gained significant power lately, turning their social recognition into a profession.

Many brands seek online ambassadors to promote their products and Instagram appears to be their most popular choice, as it blends the visual appeal and the increasing engagement with the business leads.

Although the number of followers is still important in many cases, it’s certainly not an indication of a user’s influence, as a number may be misleading (and that’s also the case with Klout and how we stopped relying on just a number).

Tyler Oakley started creating videos while he was in college and he counts today more than 8 million subscribers, turning his hobby into a profitable job.

It’s the engagement an influencer creates and the ability to affect users that matters most to brands, and this can be analysed today through numerous platforms, or simply by taking a closer look at a user’s online presence.

What’s more, what Klout failed to depict was the fact that every platform is different, which means that it also leads to a different type of influence. Social influencers nowadays may focus on a specific platform, or they may create a unified social presence, which requires the necessary attention on each social network separately.

For example, Barack Obama, Donald Trump, Kim Kardashian and Justin Bieber, who all have a Klout score higher than 90 out of 100, belong to the social influencers that are all over the web and may use their social power every way they want.

However, the freedom of social media and the call for authenticity created a new type of influencer, the self-made ones that usually focus on a single platform and create an engaged community who is ready to listen to their suggestions and their reviews. Though they cannot be compared (yet) with the influencers mentioned above, as they don’t have the same exposure to media, they still manage to build a solid presence, which makes brands chase a collaboration with them.

Natasha Oakley is considered one of the biggest influencers in the swimwear fashion industry and 2015 and counts 1.7 million followers on Instagram, also promoting her own swimwear brand.

Yes, social influence gets more complicated day by day, but it’s another sign how social media is maturing and so does the users’ influence.

It may not be easy to consider yourself a social influencer, but this makes it more challenging, and usually more rewarding.

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6 Ways to Use Video to Increase Conversion Rates

Are you still watching?

Have you ever been victim to that shaming message that pops up after you’ve binged watched nearly an entire season of House of Cards?

Many of us have, and luckily we’re not alone. Humans love binge watching because our brains process video 60,000 times faster then text.

Video is entertaining, visual, and drastically underused to convert leads. Yet, having a video on your landing page can increase your conversion rate by 80%, according to EyeWideDigital.

Unsure of how to best use video to up conversion rates? Below are 6 full-proof ways to use video to convert leads.

#1: Insert a Lead Capture Form in the First 10-20% of Your Video

You might be shaking your head in doubt, thinking capturing leads directly in a video is impossible. Well, it isn’t!

Wistia offers a feature called Turnstile that allows you to insert a lead capture form anywhere in your video to either completely gate your video content or just make it optional for viewers to submit their emails to receive future content from your company.

Wistia did an analysis of over 15,000 videos with turnstiles, and found that turnstiles placed in the first 10-20% of the video have the highest conversion rates, ranging roughly from 38 – 43%!

So give your viewers a powerfully compelling introduction to leave them wanting more before asking for their emails, and you’ll see your lists growing faster and faster!

#2: Use a Custom Thumbnail with a Smiling Human Face

If you had the choice to view an image of clunky text or a human face, which would you chose? Naturally we all gravitate towards that goofy looking human smiling back at us. Well, most of us do anyhow…

“Smiles are almost internationally a symbol of friendliness and openness,” according to Wishpond. “They are also universally understood to improve the attractiveness of the subject – which we all know has a huge influence on sales.”

According to a 5-week A/B split test Wishpond ran of two individuals – one smiling and one not – the smiling image increased a software company’s profits by 10.7%.

Moral of the story, use a thumbnail image of a smiling human to increase the play and conversion rates of your videos!

#3: Make Your Video Short and Immediately Entertaining

Ever since I emerged myself into the online video industry, I’ve notice a recurring theme when analyzing my clients’ media files. Viewers lose interest over time. This wasn’t a mind-blowing finding to me, but it was also clear that many marketers are making their videos WAY too long.

Just take a look at the 1-minute video below. People start off pretty engaged, even re-watching sections of the video (in red), but as time goes-on viewers begin to drop-off midway, ending with far fewer viewers than in the first half of the video.

Even more interesting, take a look at the graph below, which summarized millions of data points from 2009-2012:

This proves that yes, video length matters. The shorter, the better!

“You should strive to make your content as concise as possible to achieve the highest engagement,” says Wistia’s Ben Ruedlinger. “Consider front-loading your video with the most important information at the beginning.”

#4: Quickly Instill a Sense of Trust

Imagine you’ve been hit by a drunk driver who doesn’t want to take any fault for the incident. Yet you’ve suffered a laundry list of injuries, not to mention your car is totaled. You want justice, but you don’t have a lawyer or any affordable referrals to fall back on so you’ve found yourself on Google.

Browsing text on website after website isn’t giving you any idea of which direction to take until you find that video of the friendly lawyer with 20 years of experience, and a trusting and welcoming air about him. This sense of trust couldn’t be achieved just by persuasive copy on a landing page.

This technique isn’t just useful for the law industry. Remember, videos have been proven to increase conversion rates by 80%. Use video on your landing page to put a face to your business, help your leads trust you, and convert faster.

#5: Send Personalized Videos to Prospects

Another way to speed up the sales process and raise conversion rates is to send personalized videos to prospects over email. More often than not, salespeople spend half their day struggling to get leads on the phone. They answer one email, perhaps agree to a call, but then: radio silence.

How do you re-engage these leads that are mimicking the behavior of your flakiest friends?

Video, duh. There are tons of companies out there that have successfully adapted video email messages, like this one from a Bamboo HR sales representative below (click here to watch the video):

Not only does this create a more personalized and human sales experience, but it makes the lead feel like you actually care, in turn making it much more likely for them to be open to discussing your products or offerings with them.

And Bamboo HR is not the only company that’s had success with this strategy. Check out this post below from the Wistia community:

Using video voicemails led to 16% open rates and 17% CTR. Video is good for more then just binge-watching on the weekends. With these strategies, you can use video to actually grow your business.

#6: Leverage Video Viewership Knowledge with Marketing Automation

With the right tools it’s possible to build lists and score leads based off of video viewership data. Pretty cool, huh? A lot of marketers out there are spending their days emerged in Marketo, HubSpot, and other marketing automation platforms, and as they’re segmenting their audiences to send out targeted content and push leads down the marketing funnel, they’re also often ignoring a HUGE impact of the buying cycle: video.

Wouldn’t it be helpful to segment viewers based on those who have watched 75% – 100% of your video? Or to nudge viewers who have only watched 25% of your video to watch more? Or to up the score of a lead based on their viewership data? This is all possible if you’re hosting your videos with a platform that integrates with your marketing automation system.

Knowledge is power, especially in these situations. Don’t let your leads slip away by not knowing enough about them.

About the Author:

Margot is a Customer Success Coach at Wistia. She loves all things digital, and spends her free time running, traveling, and cooking. Follow her on:

Twitter: @ChappyMargot

Google+: +Margot da Cunha

LinkedIn: http://ift.tt/1B7RySO

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Is a brutal approach to content migration best for SEO?

I read a great article over at Boagworld about the pain of content migration, a term that will send shivers down the spine of anybody unfortunate enough to have been through such a process.

Written by Paul Boag, it explains some of the common problems with migrating vast amounts of content. Notably, the reorganising of content in a way where lots of mismatches occur, breaking navigation and links, ending up with wonky URL structures and – as a result – lots of frustrated users and too many 404 pages being shown.

Paul suggests that you need to tackle the issue head on, by pruning your website.

“Failing to address content in a redesign means that your shiny new website inherits the problems from your old one. You will have a bloated website full of redundant, out of date or trivial content. Content that you should be removing.”

He says that a redesign is the best opportunity you’ll have to remove content, and he’s right. Content owners and other stakeholders can be very precious about old content. They’re emotionally attached to their work and don’t want to see your grubby fingers hovering over the Delete key.

So what to do? The solution is brutal.

Cut everything

Instead of removing content, maybe the mindset should be about adding content…

“What if you started from scratch? What if instead of deciding what to remove you removed everything? You then don’t have to audit what you already have. Your political fights are less too. After all everybody is receiving equal treatment. Everybody is having their content removed.”

An intriguing thought, and one that is probably backed up by the data.

“Take a moment to look at your analytics. I bet the vast majority of traffic only hits a fraction of your pages. I also bet that if your site is big there is an enormous proportion of pages that are rarely if ever viewed. In truth 80% of your audience only needs 20% of your content. So cut the rest. At least to start with. You can always add content back in later if there is a proven case.”

This is certainly a hardcore approach to a site redesign, but it makes sense. Everybody involved will understand that it’s not just the design that is being overhauled, but the content too. From there it’s about what is added back to the site.

Caution: SEO

While I like this bold approach, and I agree that it’s wise to get everybody on the same page when undertaking these large projects, there are some alarm bells ringing in my head.

Firstly, let’s consider SEO, given that any content-rich site will probably attract the lion’s share of its traffic from organic search, if the team and technology are doing the right things.

Removing so many pages might seem like a good idea if they all have low amounts of traffic, but content clustering is important from a Google perspective.

It’s generally a good idea to have a sense of how similarly themed pages contribute to your overall rankings, even if they don’t appear to do much for your business on the face of it.

For example, it might be risky to remove them if they have lots of internal links to related pages, hero pages and hub pages.

Also, some of these pages may rank for the niche terms that contribute greatly to your business, even if the volume isn’t there…

Alert: high value visitors

The data doesn’t lie, does it? No, but it depends on what you’re looking for.

If you axe 80% of pages based on visits or – worse – impressions, then I fear that the axe may swing around in your direction.

Low-traffic pages can attract some of the most interesting visitors, either by accident or design.

Sometimes a page will rank for something so specific, either by way of a highly descriptive anchor text link or on-page content (or more often some combination of the two), that it will attract a very specific type of visitor.

Some of the best conversion rates live in the long tail. If only we could scale it!

Niche content has its place, and the user flows from these landing pages to key conversion areas of your website can be really valuable. Pages that are positioned prominently for high intent, multi-phrase terms should be your bread and butter.

Plan ahead

Finally, it’s crucial to spend some time figuring out taxonomy, metadata and vocabulary upfront when starting afresh with content (or undertaking a migration). It will save you so many headaches down the line, and it will help your techies to make sense of your content, when undertaking a migration.

If a redesign and content migration is looming then you have my sympathies. It’s a stressful time for all involved.

The key to getting it right is all in the planning, before and after you launch. That means a proper audit of your content, your search analytics, and your tech. Good luck!

Do share your content migration horror stories (and tips!) below.

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What You Should Know About Accessibility + SEO, Part I: An Intro

Posted by Laura.Lippay

[Estimated read time: 4 minutes]

Do you know anyone who is visually impaired? Maybe they have low vision or color blindness, or are fully blind. Think about how they use the Internet. Close your eyes, or at least squint really hard, and try to find today’s news or interact with your friends on Facebook. It’s a challenge many of us don’t think about every day, but some of what we do in SEO can affect the experience that people with visual impairments have when visiting a page.

Accessibility and the Internet

Visually impaired Internet users are able to navigate and use the web using screen readers like VoiceOver or Jaws. Screen readers, much like search engine crawlers, rely on signals in the code to determine the structure and the context of what they’re crawling. The overlap in what search crawlers look for and interpret versus what screen readers look for and interpret is small, but the idea is the same: Where are the elements of this page and how do I understand them?

The SEO overlap

While it’s important to understand where SEO and accessibility (a11y) overlap in order to optimize correctly for both, it’s also important to note that optimizing for one is not necessarily akin to optimizing for the other. In other words, if you’ve optimized a page for search engines, it doesn’t mean you’ve necessarily made it accessible — and vice versa.

Recently, web accessibility expert Karl Groves wrote a post called The Accessibility & SEO Myth. Mr. Groves knows the world of accessibility inside and out, and knows that optimizing for accessibility, which goes far beyond optimizing for the visually-impaired, is very different overall, and much more complex (strictly from a technical standpoint) than optimizing for search engines. He’s right — that despite the ways SEO and a11y overlap, a11y is a whole different ballgame. But if you understand the overlap, you can successfully optimize for both.

Here are just some examples of where SEO and accessibility can overlap:

• Video transcription
• Image captioning
• Image alt attributes
• Title tags
• Header tags (H1, H2, etc)
• Link anchor text
• On-site sitemaps, table of contents, and/or breadcrumbs
• Content ordering
• Size and color contrast of text
• Semantic HTML

If you’re developing the page yourself, I would challenge you to learn more about the many things you can do for accessibility beyond where it overlaps with SEO, like getting to know ARIA attributes. Take a look at the W3C Web Content Accessibility Guidelines and you’ll see there are far more complex considerations for accessibility than what we typically consider for technical SEO. If you think technical SEO is fun, just wait until you get a load of this.

Optimizing for accessibility or SEO?

Chances are, if you’re optimizing for accessibility, you’re probably covering your bases for those technical optimizations where accessibility and SEO overlap. BUT, this doesn’t always work the other way around, depending on the SEO tactics you take.

Thankfully, the Converse site has a pretty descriptive alt attribute in place!

Consider a screen reader reaching an image of a pair of women’s black Chuck Taylor All-Star shoes and reading its alt attribute as “Women’s black Chuck Taylor All-Stars buy Chucks online women’s chuck taylors all-stars for sale.” Annoying, isn’t it? Or compare these page titles with SEO and accessibility in mind: “Calculate Your Tax Return” versus “Online Tax Calculator | Tax Return Estimator | Tax Refund/Rebate.” Imagine you just encountered this page without being able to see the content. Which one more crisply and clearly describes what you can expect of this page?

While it’s nice to know that proper technical search engine optimization will affect how someone using a screen reader can contextualize your site, it’s also important to understand (1) that these two optimization industries are, on a bigger level, quite different, and (2) that what you do for SEO where SEO and a11y overlap will affect how some visitors can (or can’t) understand your site.

Marking the 5th Global Accessibility Awareness Day https://t.co/QiJyAM8xGW 05/19? Let us know how Globala11yawarenessdayAtGmailDotCom #gaad
— GblA11yAwarenessDay (@gbla11yday) March 14, 2016

http://platform.twitter.com/widgets.js

For Global Accessibility Awareness Day on May 19, I’ll be collaborating with some experts in a11y on a post that will go into more details on what aspects of SEO + a11y to be keenly aware of and how to optimize for both. I’ll be sure to find as many examples as I can — if you’ve got any good ones, please feel free to share in the comments (and thanks in advance).

Educational resources & tools

In the meantime, to learn more about accessibility, check out a couple of great resources:

• W3C Techniques for WCAG 2.0
• ARIA attributes
• Web Accessibility Evaluation Tools List
• Web Accessibility Tools & events from the Paciello Group, a well-known accessibility agency
• Also check out The Paciello Group’s blog. It’s digestible bits of good info
• Ted Drake’s “css toys for professional web developers“ blog, heavy on accessible dev & accessible infographics!

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Three early results of Google removing right-hand side ads

About a month ago, Google introduced what now seems like a very obvious change to its results pages: it removed paid search ads from the right-hand side.

Apparently Google made this change based on years of testing. These tests showed that no one was really clicking on these ads and it would better align with the mobile experience if they simply weren’t there.

The impact of this means there will be less inventory, and ranking at the top of the page is potentially even more important than ever before.

So now that we are a few weeks into this change what is the impact? Did everything the industry predicted come true?

To understand the impact I ran a keyword level report that included the Top vs. Other segment, looking at three weeks post and prior to the change.

There are three things to note:

1) Inventory is down

As expected, with no more ads on the right-hand rail there are less ad spots available. As a result we are seeing a 19% decrease in total inventory. The majority of that reduction is within the Other bucket.

2) Traffic shifts

You can see from the data below that traffic for positions below the organic listings has shifted up significantly and dropped in lower positions due to inventory restrictions. You also see an increase in traffic to positions 3 & 4 in the Top ads. While the increase is still noticeable, it is still <5% of total traffic in the post-right-hand-side-ad world. This implies that either we don’t manage a lot of brands that have ‘highly commercial’ queries or that the impact of adding a 4^th position is still pretty small.

3) Despite these changes CTRs and CPCs are down

The fact that click-through rates are up isn’t that big of a surprise given the fact that more ads are seen by searchers, so you would expect more click-throughs to occur. What is really good news for advertisers is the fact that consumers are responding well to the new layout of the page: CTR is up {12%) and CPCs are down (-11%). Hopefully this will help overcome the reduction in overall inventory.

So what does it all mean?

This is a big change that seems to be having the expected impact of reducing total inventory, but increasing the amount of traffic as a percent of total impressions.

Advertisers need to be taking a look at their own data. Are they seeing different data? Are CPCs going up in certain areas given competition? Is the incremental CPC worth it to your business, or does the reduction in CPC allow you to spend more in other areas?

Staying close to your Top vs Other data segments and detailed data points will allow you to respond to this change in a smart and sophisticated way.

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