Google Launching The Lighthouse Chrome Extension To SEO Audits

Google announced  the Lighthouse Chrome Extension to add SEO Audit features.

Here is how to use it in the Lighthouse Chrome Extension:

(1) Install the Lighthouse Chrome Extension
(2) Click on the Lighthouse icon in the extension bar
(3) Select the Options menu, tick “SEO” and click OK, then Generate report


Google said "you can now do a basic SEO Health-check in Chrome (Canary) DevTools or with the Lighthouse extension."

Here is how to use it in the Chrome Developer tools on Chrome Canary:

(1) Open Chrome Developer Tools
(2) Go to Audits
(3) Click Perform an audit
(4) Tick the "SEO" checkbox and click Run Audit.

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Does Your Content Create the Right Kind of Halo?

If you've ever sold a house, you've probably heard about curb appeal. Curb appeal is the visual attractiveness of a house as seen from the street, and it is what creates the first impression of a house in the minds of potential buyers. Real estate professionals know that curb appeal plays a huge role in determining how quickly a house will sell and what its selling price will be.

Good first impressions are also critical for successful B2B marketing. And today, most of your potential buyers will base their first impression of your company on the content you produce. If your content fails to create a good first impression, a potential buyer will quickly look elsewhere, and you may not get another chance to create engagement with that buyer.

On the other hand, when your content creates a good first impression, a potential buyer is more likely to "come back for more" and to be more willing to engage further with your company. Equally important, when one of your content resources creates a good first impression, a potential buyer will be more inclined to view the rest of your content - and your company - favorably.

That's because of a powerful cognitive bias known as the halo effect. The halo effect can be defined as the transfer of positive (or negative) feelings about one thing to another, without having a rational basis for the transfer. The critical thing to remember about the halo effect is that it magnifies the impact of a first impression beyond what would be justified on a purely rational basis.

The halo effect can be found in a wide range of human judgments. For example:

• If I meet a person who is likable and well-spoken, I will be inclined to believe that the person is also generous and ethical even though I actually know nothing about the person's generosity or ethics.
• If I have a good experience with a Honda automobile, I'll be inclined to believe that I would also be happy with a Honda lawnmower even though I actually know nothing about the quality of Honda lawnmowers.
• If I read an e-book or a white paper produced by your company and find it to be useful and valuable, I'll be inclined to believe that the other content produced by your company will also be useful and valuable, and I'll be inclined to believe that your company is good at what it does even though I know little or nothing about your company.

Daniel Kahneman, a winner of the Nobel Prize for economics, shared a first-hand experience with the halo effect in his best-selling book Thinking, Fast and Slow. Kahneman wrote that when he was a young professor, he graded essay exams by reading all of the essays written by each student in immediate succession, grading them as he went. When finished, he would compute the overall final grade and move on to the next student.

Kahneman eventually noticed that his evaluations of each student's essays were usually similar. He began to suspect that his grading exhibited a halo effect and that the first essay he read had a disproportionate effect on each student's overall grade. In essence, if he gave a high score to the first essay, he was likely to be more lenient in scoring the rest of the essays.

So, if a student had written two essays - one strong and one weak - Kahneman would award different final grades, depending on which essay he read first. As Kahneman wrote, "I had told the students that the two essays had equal weight, but that was not true:  the first one had a much greater impact on the final grade than the second."

As a B2B marketer, it's important to recognize that every content resource you publish will produce a halo effect - either good or bad - if it constitutes the first interaction that a potential buyer has with your company. So you can benefit from the halo effect if you consistently produce valuable and credible content that creates a great first impression with potential buyers.

Image courtesy of Michael Dougherty via Flickr CC.

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How to enable auto-tagging of the Microsoft Click ID

You can enable the auto-tagging of the Microsoft Click ID on the URL options page of the Shared Library by checking the box, “Add Microsoft Click ID (MSCLIKID) to URLs to allow conversion tracking.”

Note that this setting is managed at the account level. If you have more than one account, make sure to check the box within each account.

When you enable auto-tagging of the Microsoft Click ID, it allows Bing Ads to automatically add a unique click ID to the landing page URL after a customer clicks your ad.

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Why Social Sharing is a Poor Measure of B2B Content Performance

About a year ago, I published a post arguing that B2B marketers need to set realistic expectations for their content marketing efforts. This turned out to be our most widely-read post in 2017. The main theme of my post was that content marketing performance depends on several factors and that some of those factors are beyond marketers' control.

The annual content marketing surveys by the Content Marketing Institute and MarketingProfs have consistently shown that doing the right things in the right ways will have a major impact on content marketing success. But it's equally true that content marketing performance is affected by competitive forces that are beyond any company's control. For example, the amount of content available to potential buyers has increased dramatically, and this makes it harder for any company to consistently produce content that will capture buyer attention and win mindshare.

For the past couple of years, some marketing pundits have been using content sharing data to argue that content marketing has lost some of its punch and may not continue to be a viable strategy for some companies. For example, a 2016 study by Beckon found that the amount of content published by brands had tripled in the previous year, but that customer engagement had remained flat. Beckon also found that just 5% of the total content garnered 90% of the total customer engagements, meaning that 19 out of 20 content pieces generated little engagement.

Last November, Steve Rayson, the director of content research company BuzzSumo, wrote a guest post for Mark Schaefer's blog that analyzed recent trends in content publication and content sharing on social networks. His analysis found that as the volume of content published about a topic increases, there is a decline in the average engagement in terms of social shares. Rayson wrote, "Declining content engagement as publication volumes increase over time appears to be a common pattern."

While it's worthwhile for marketers to understand current trends in social content sharing, this type of data provides only limited insight regarding the effectiveness of content marketing, particularly in a B2B context. Here's why.

Most content sharing metrics only capture the number of times a piece of content is shared on public social networks such as Facebook, LinkedIn, and Twitter. Therefore, these metrics will often understate the level of actual content sharing. In 2014, research by RadiumOne found that 69% of all content sharing globally takes place via private digital communication tools such as e-mail and instant messaging - what is typically called "dark social" sharing.

The RadiumOne research focused on consumers, but other research has found that private content sharing is even more prevalent among business buyers. As the following table shows, respondents in Demand Gen Report's annual content preferences surveys have consistently identified e-mail as the top channel for sharing business-related content with colleagues and business connections.

Not only do social sharing metrics often understate the actual amount of content sharing, they also don't provide a reliable indication of content engagement. Recent research by Chartbeat found that the correlation between social shares and content engagement is very weak. Also consider this. When a businessperson privately shares business-related content with his or her work colleagues, the engagement with that content is likely to be quite high. So typical social sharing metrics are even less effective at capturing content engagement in a B2B setting.

The bottom line is that social sharing metrics provide an incomplete picture of content marketing effectiveness. As a B2B marketer, one of your primary objectives is to entice your target audience to consume your content. If your content is widely shared across social networks, that may (or may not) boost the consumption of your content. However, the absence of social sharing doesn't necessarily mean that your content isn't being consumed by - and having an impact on - your target audience.

Top image courtesy of Nan Palmero via Flickr CC.

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Google dropping Merchant Center feed integrations with BigCommerce, Magento, PrestaShop

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How to Add, edit or remove keywords on the go using the AdWords app

Keywords are words or phrases you choose to describe your product or service. They’re used to help you reach only the most interested people, who are more likely to become your customers. Using keywords can increase your sales and lower your costs.

With the AdWords app, you can select high-quality, relevant keywords for your ad campaigns even when you’re away from your computer. Advertisers can now add, edit and remove keywords from their campaigns using the AdWords app.

• To add a keyword, click the new round blue “plus” button that appears in the bottom right corner of the various Keyword views in the app.
• To delete existing keywords, click on the keyword you want to delete and then on the trash can icon in the upper right corner of the screen.
• From that same specific keyword screen, advertisers can edit the word itself or change the match type. That’s also where advertisers can pause or enable a keyword and change manually set bids.

The AdWords app can be downloaded from the iOs and Google Play app stores.

Manage your keywords (AdWords app), to get full instructions see this page

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New Research Tracks Progress on B2B Customer Experience

In 2013, Walker Information published the results of a study regarding the emerging importance of customer experience for B2B companies. Customers 2020:  The Future of B-to-B Customer Experience focused on how B2B companies should be preparing to meet changing customer expectations. In this research, study participants said they expected customer experience to surpass product and pricing as the key business differentiator by 2020.

Last fall, Walker published the results of a new study that was designed to take a fresh look at some of the issues addressed in the 2013 research and examine how much progress B2B companies have made on the customer experience journey. Customers 2020:  A Progress Report was based on a survey of more than 400 customer experience leaders and influencers, and on in-depth interviews with 22 senior business executives. Survey respondents represented a range of industries, company sizes, and job titles.

The 2017 research identified three core dimensions of B2B customer experience:

• Personalization - "Customers want to do business with companies that know their individual and company needs and are willing to tailor the experience to meet those needs."
• Ease - "Customers don't have time on their side and place a real premium on simplicity."
• Speed - "Customers can't afford to wait around while their business issues are being considered. They value companies that provide real-time response and proactively anticipate their future needs."

Walker's research found that B2B customer experience professionals believe that customer expectations have risen across all three of these dimensions and will continue to rise for the foreseeable future. In the 2017 study, Walker asked survey participants to rate the level of customer expectations for personalization, ease, and speed at three points in time - in 2013, today (2017), and in 2020. The following table shows the percentage of survey respondents who said customer expectations were/are/will be high.

Walker's research also revealed that most B2B customer experience professionals don't believe their company is fully prepared to meet customer expectations for personalization, ease, and speed. As the following table shows, less than 10% of survey respondents said their company is very effective at delivering on the three critical components of B2B customer experience.

The findings of the Walker study aren't particularly surprising. Walker's research suggests that while the expectations of B2B customers are high and rising, those expectations are also primarily utilitarian. What B2B customers really want is to do business with companies that are fast, responsive, and easy to work with. 

Even personalization has a practical dimension. When a company understands my interests and needs, and has a complete picture of our existing relationship and previous interactions, I don't need to "reintroduce" myself at every new encounter.

Top image courtesy of Zach via Flickr CC.

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