Getting Real with Retail: An Agency’s Guide to Inspiring In-Store Excellence

Posted by MiriamEllis

No marketing agency staffer feels good when they see a retail client getting reviews like this on the web.

But we can find out why they’re happening, and if we’re going above-and-beyond in our work, we just might be able to catalyze turning things around if we’re committed to being honest with clients and have an actionable strategy for their in-store improvements.

In this post, I’ll highlight some advice from an internal letter at Tesla that I feel is highly applicable to the retail sector. I’d also like to help your agency combat the retail blues headlining the news these days with big brands downsizing, liquidating and closing up shop — I’m going to share a printable infographic with some statistics with you that are almost guaranteed to generate the client positivity so essential to making real change. And, for some further inspiration, I’d like to offer a couple of anecdotes involving an Igloo cooler, a monk, reindeer moss, and reviews.

The genuine pain of retail gone wrong: The elusive cooler, "Corporate," and the man who could hardly stand

“Hi there,” I greeted the staffer at the customer service counter of the big department store. “Where would I find a small cooler?”

“We don’t have any,” he mumbled.

“You don’t have any coolers? Like, an Igloo cooler to take on a picnic to keep things cold?”

“Maybe over there,” he waved his hand in unconcern.

And I stood there for a minute, expecting him to actually figure this out for me, maybe even guide me to the appropriate aisle, or ask a manager to assist my transaction, if necessary. But in his silence, I walked away.

“Hi there,” I tried with more specificity at the locally owned general store the next day. “Where would I find something like a small Igloo cooler to keep things cold on a picnic?”

“I don’t know,” the staffer replied.

“Oh…” I said, uncomfortably.

“It could be upstairs somewhere,” he hazarded, and left me to quest for the second floor, which appeared to be a possibly-non-code-compliant catch-all attic for random merchandise, where I applied to a second dimly illuminated employee who told me I should probably go downstairs and escalate my question to someone else.

And apparently escalation was necessary, for on the third try, a very tall man was able to lift his gaze to some coolers on a top shelf… within clear view of the checkout counter where the whole thing began.

Why do we all have experiences like this?

“Corporate tells us what to carry” is the almost defensive-sounding refrain I have now received from three employees at two different Whole Foods Markets when asking if they could special order items for me since the Amazon buyout.

Because, you know, before they were Amazon-Whole Foods, staffers would gladly offer to procure anything they didn’t have in stock. Now, if they stop carrying that Scandinavian vitamin D-3 made from the moss eaten by reindeer and I’ve got to have it because I don’t want the kind made by irradiating sheep wool, I’d have to special order an entire case of it to get my hands on a bottle. Because, you know, “Corporate.”

Why does the distance between corporate and customer make me feel like the store I’m standing in, and all of its employees, are powerless? Why am I, the customer, left feeling powerless?

So maybe my search for a cooler, my worries about access to reindeer moss, and the laughable customer service I’ve experienced don’t signal “genuine pain.” But this does:

This is genuine pain. When customer service is failing to the point that badly treated patrons are being further distressed by the sight of fellow shoppers meeting the same fate, the cause is likely built into company structure. And your marketing agency is looking at a bonafide reputation crisis that could presage things like lawsuits, impactful reputation damage, and even closure for your valuable clients.

When you encounter customer service disasters, it begs questions like:

1. Could no one in my situation access a list of current store inventory, or, barring that, seek out merchandise with me instead of risking the loss of a sale?
2. Could no one offer to let “corporate” know that I’m dissatisfied with a “customer service policy” that would require me to spend $225 to buy a whole case of vitamins? Why am I being treated like a warehouse instead of a person?
3. Could no one at the pharmacy see a man with a leg wound about to fall over, grab a folding chair for him, and keep him safe, instead of risking a lawsuit?

I think a “no” answer to all three questions proceeds from definite causes. And I think Tesla CEO, Elon Musk, had such causes in mind when he recently penned a letter to his own employees.

“It must be okay for people to talk directly and just make the right thing happen.”

“Communication should travel via the shortest path necessary to get the job done, not through the 'chain of command.' Any manager who attempts to enforce chain of command communication will soon find themselves working elsewhere.

A major source of issues is poor communication between depts. The way to solve this is allow free flow of information between all levels. If, in order to get something done between depts, an individual contributor has to talk to their manager, who talks to a director, who talks to a VP, who talks to another VP, who talks to a director, who talks to a manager, who talks to someone doing the actual work, then super dumb things will happen. It must be ok for people to talk directly and just make the right thing happen.

In general, always pick common sense as your guide. If following a 'company rule' is obviously ridiculous in a particular situation, such that it would make for a great Dilbert cartoon, then the rule should change.”
- Elon Musk, CEO, Tesla

Let’s parlay this uncommon advice into retail. If it’s everyone’s job to access a free flow of information, use common sense, make the right thing happen, and change rules that don’t make sense, then:

1. Inventory is known by all store staff, and my cooler can be promptly located by any employee, rather than workers appearing helpless.
2. Employees have the power to push back and insist that, because customers still expect to be able to special order merchandise, a specific store location will maintain this service rather than disappoint consumers.
3. Pharmacists can recognize that patrons are often quite ill and can immediately place some chairs near the pharmacy counter, rather than close their eyes to suffering.

“But wait,” retailers may say. “How can I trust that an employee’s idea of ‘common sense’ is reliable?”

Let’s ask a monk for the answer.

“He took the time...”

I recently had the pleasure of listening to a talk given by a monk who was defining what it meant to be a good leader. He hearkened back to his young days, and to the man who was then the leader of his community.

“He was a busy man, but he took the time to get to know each of us one-on-one, and to be sure that we knew him. He set an example for me, and I watched him,” the monk explained.

Most monasteries function within a set of established rules, many of which are centuries old. You can think of these guidelines as a sort of policy. In certain communities, it’s perfectly acceptable that some of the members live apart as hermits most of the year, only breaking their meditative existence by checking in with the larger group on important holidays to share what they’ve been working on solo. In others, every hour has its appointed task, from prayer, to farming, to feeding people, to engaging in social activism.

The point is that everyone within a given community knows the basic guidelines, because at some point, they’ve been well-communicated. Beyond that, it is up to the individual to see whether they can happily live out their personal expression within the policy.

It’s a lot like retail can be, when done right. And it hinges on the question:

“Has culture been well-enough communicated to every employee so that he or she can act like the CEO of the company would in wide variety of circumstances?”

Or to put it another way, would Amazon owner Jeff Bezos be powerless to get me my vitamins?

The most accessible modern benchmark of good customer service — the online review — is what tells the public whether the CEO has “set the example.” Reviews tell whether time has been taken to acquaint every staffer with the business that employs them, preparing them to fit their own personal expression within the company’s vision of serving the public.

An employee who is able to recognize that an injured patron needs a seat while awaiting his prescription should be empowered to act immediately, knowing that the larger company supports treating people well. If poor training, burdensome chains of command, or failure to share brand culture are obstacles to common-sense personal initiative, the problem must be traced back to the CEO and corrected, starting from there.

And, of course, should a random staffer’s personal expression genuinely include an insurmountable disregard for other people, they can always be told it’s time to leave the monastery...

For marketing agencies, opportunity knocks

So your agency is auditing a valuable incoming client, and their negative reviews citing dirty premises, broken fixtures, food poisoning, slowness, rudeness, cluelessness, and lack of apparent concern make you say to yourself,

“Well, I was hoping we could clean up the bad data on the local business listings for this enterprise, but unless they clean up their customer service at 150 of their worst-rated locations, how much ROI are we really going to be able to deliver? What’s going on at these places?”

Let’s make no bones about this: Your honesty at this critical juncture could mean the difference between survival and closure for the brand.

You need to bring it home to the most senior level person you can reach in the organization that no amount of honest marketing can cover up poor customer service in the era of online reviews. If the brand has fallen to the level of the pharmacy I’ve cited, structural change is an absolute necessity. You can ask the tough questions, ask for an explanation of the bad reviews.

“But I’m just a digital marketer,” you may think. “I’m not in charge of whatever happens offline.”

Think again.

Headlines in retail land are horrid right now:

• The mall crisis is secretly morphing into a full-on Armageddon - Business Insider
• America’s ‘Retail Apocalypse’ Is Really Just Beginning - Bloomberg
• Retail Wreck? Over 1,000 Stores Close in a Single Week - NBC
• 8 Companies Amazon is Killing - Investopedia
• These major retailers have closed more than 5,000 stores in 2017 - Clark.com

If you were a retail brand C-suite and were swallowing these predictions of doom with your daily breakfast, wouldn’t you be looking for inspiration from anyone with genuine insight? And if a marketing agency should make it their business to confront the truth while also being the bearer of some better news, wouldn’t you be ready to listen?

What is the truth? That poor reviews are symptoms smart doctors can use for diagnosis of structural problems.
What is the better news? The retail scenario is not nearly as dire as it may seem.

Why let hierarchy and traditional roles hold your agency back? Tesla wouldn’t. Why not roll up your sleeves and step into in-store? Organize and then translate the narrative negative reviews are telling about structural problems for the brand which have resulted in dangerously bad customer service. And then, be prepared to counter corporate inertia born of fear with some eye-opening statistics.

Print and share some good retail tidings

Print your own copy of this infographic to share with clients.

At Moz, we’re working with enterprises to get their basic location data into shape so that they are ready to win their share of the predicted $1.4 trillion in mobile-influenced local sales by 2021, and your agency can use these same numbers to combat indecision and apathy for your retail clients. Look at that second statistic again: 90% of purchases are still happening in physical stores. At Moz, we ask our customers if their data is ready for this. Your agency can ask its clients if their reputations are ready for this, if their employees have what they need to earn the brand’s piece of that 90% action. Great online data + great in-store service = table stakes for retail success.

While I won’t play down the unease that major brand retail closures is understandably causing, I hope I’ve given you the tools to fight the “retail disaster” narrative. 85% more mobile users are searching for things like “Where do I buy that reindeer moss vitamin D3?” than they were just 3 years ago. So long as retail staff is ready to deliver, I see no “apocalypse” here.

Investing time

So, your agency has put in the time to identify a reputation problem severe enough that it appears to be founded in structural deficiencies or policies. Perhaps you’ve used some ORM software to do review sentiment analysis to discover which of your client’s locations are hurting worst, or perhaps you’ve done an initial audit manually. You've communicated the bad news to the most senior-level person you can reach at the company, and you've also shared the statistics that make change seem very worthwhile, begging for a new commitment to in-store excellence. What happens next?

While there are going to be nuances specific to every brand, my bet is that the steps will look like this for most businesses:

1. C-suites need to invest time in creating a policy which a) abundantly communicates company culture, b) expresses trust in employee initiative, and c) dispenses with needless “chain of command” steps, while d) ensuring that every public facing staffer receives full and ongoing training. A recent study says 62% of new retail hires receive less than 10 hours of training. I’d call even these worrisome numbers optimistic. I worked at 5 retail jobs in my early youth. I’d estimate that I received no more than 1 hour of training at any of them.
2. Because a chain of command can’t realistically be completely dispensed with in a large organization, store managers must then be allowed the time to communicate the culture, encourage employees to use common sense, define what “common sense” does and doesn’t look like to the company, and, finally, offer essential training.
3. Employees at every level must be given the time to observe how happy or unhappy customers appear to be at their location, and they must be taught that their observations are of inestimable value to the brand. If an employee suggests a solution to a common consumer complaint, this should be recognized and rewarded.
4. Finally, customers must be given the time to air their grievances at the time of service, in-person, with accessible, responsive staff. The word “corporate” need never come into most of these conversations unless a major claim is involved. Given that it may cost as much as 7x more to replace an unhappy customer than to keep an existing one happy, employees should be empowered to do business graciously and resolve complaints, in most cases, without escalation.

Benjamin Franklin may or may not have said that “time is money.” While the adage rings true in business, reviews have taught me the flip side — that a lack of time equals less money. Every negative review that cites helpless employees and poor service sounds to my marketing ears like a pocketful of silver dollars rolling down a drain.

The monk says good leaders make the time to communicate culture one-on-one.

Tesla says rules should change if they’re ridiculous.

Chairs should be offered to sick people… where common sense is applied.

Reviews can read like this:

And digital marketers have never known a time quite like this to have the ear of retail, maybe stepping beyond traditional boundaries into the fray of the real world. Maybe making a fundamental difference.

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Tracking Your Link Prospecting Using Lists in Link Explorer

Posted by Dr-Pete

I'm a lazy marketer some days — I'll admit it. I don't do a lot of manual link prospecting, because it's a ton of work, outreach, and follow-up. There are plenty of times, though, where I've got a good piece of content (well, at least I hope it's good) and I want to know if it's getting attention from specific sites, whether they're in the search industry or the broader marketing or PR world. Luckily, we've made that question a lot easier to answer in Link Explorer, so today's post is for all of you curious but occasionally lazy marketers. Hop into the tool if you want to follow along:

Open Link Explorer

(1) Track your content the lazy way

When you first visit Link Explorer, you'll see that it defaults to "root domain":

Some days, you don't want to wade through your entire domain, but just want to target a single piece of content. Just enter or paste that URL, and select "exact page" (once you start typing a full path, we'll even auto-select that option for you):

Now I can see just the link data for that page (note: screenshots have been edited for size):

Good news — my Whiteboard Friday already has a decent link profile. That's already a fair amount to sort through, and as the link profile grows, it's only going to get tougher. So, how can I pinpoint just the sites I'm interested in and track those sites over time?

(2) Make a list of link prospects

This is the one part we can't automate for you. Make a list of prospects in whatever tool you please. Here's an imaginary list I created in Excel:

Obviously, this list is on the short side, but let's say I decide to pull a few of the usual suspects from the search marketing world, plus one from the broader marketing world, and a couple of aspirational sites (I'm probably not going to get that New York Times link, but let's dream big).

(3) Create a tracking list in Link Explorer

Obviously, I could individually search for these domains in my full list of inbound links, but even with six prospects, that's going to take some time. So, let's do this the lazy way. Back in Link Explorer, look at the very bottom of the left-hand navigation and you'll see "Link Targeting Lists":

Keep scrolling — I promise it's down there. Click on it, and you'll see something like this:

On the far-right, under the main header, click on "[+] Create new list." You'll get an overlay with a three-step form like the one below. Just give your list a name, provide a target URL (the page you want to track links to), and copy-and-paste in your list of prospects. Here's an example:

Click "Save," and you should immediately get back some data.

Alas, no link from the New York Times. The blue icons show me that the prospects are currently linking to Moz.com, but not to my target page. The green icon shows me that I've already got a head-start — Search Engine Land is apparently linking to this post (thanks, Barry!).

Click on any arrow in the "Notes" column, and you can add a note to that entry, like so:

Don't forget to hit "Save." Congratulations, you've created your first list! Well, I've created your first list for you. Geez, you really are lazy.

(4) Check in to track your progress

Of course, the real magic is that the list just keeps working for you. At any time, you can return to "Link Tracking Lists" on the Link Explorer menu, and now you'll see a master list of all your lists:

Just click on the list name you're interested in, and you can see your latest-and-greatest data. We can't build the links for you, but we can at least make keeping track of them a lot easier.

Bonus video: Now in electrifying Link-o-Vision!

Ok, it's just a regular video, although it does require electricity. If you're too lazy to read (in which case, let's be honest, you probably didn't get this far), I've put this whole workflow into an enchanting collection of words and sounds for you:

I hope you'll put your newfound powers to good. Let us know how you're using Tracking Lists (or how you plan to use them) in the comments, and where you'd like to see us take them next!

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How Much Data Is Missing from Analytics? And Other Analytics Black Holes

Posted by Tom.Capper

If you’ve ever compared two analytics implementations on the same site, or compared your analytics with what your business is reporting in sales, you’ve probably noticed that things don’t always match up. In this post, I’ll explain why data is missing from your web analytics platforms and how large the impact could be. Some of the issues I cover are actually quite easily addressed, and have a decent impact on traffic — there’s never been an easier way to hit your quarterly targets. ;)

I’m going to focus on GA (Google Analytics), as it's the most commonly used provider, but most on-page analytics platforms have the same issues. Platforms that rely on server logs do avoid some issues but are fairly rare, so I won’t cover them in any depth.

Side note: Our test setup (multiple trackers & customized GA)

On Distilled.net, we have a standard Google Analytics property running from an HTML tag in GTM (Google Tag Manager). In addition, for the last two years, I’ve been running three extra concurrent Google Analytics implementations, designed to measure discrepancies between different configurations.

(If you’re just interested in my findings, you can skip this section, but if you want to hear more about the methodology, continue reading. Similarly, don’t worry if you don’t understand some of the detail here — the results are easier to follow.)

Two of these extra implementations — one in Google Tag Manager and one on page — run locally hosted, renamed copies of the Google Analytics JavaScript file (e.g. www.distilled.net/static/js/au3.js, instead of www.google-analytics.com/analytics.js) to make them harder to spot for ad blockers. I also used renamed JavaScript functions (“tcap” and “Buffoon,” rather than the standard “ga”) and renamed trackers (“FredTheUnblockable” and “AlbertTheImmutable”) to avoid having duplicate trackers (which can often cause issues).

This was originally inspired by 2016-era best practice on how to get your Google Analytics setup past ad blockers. I can’t find the original article now, but you can see a very similar one from 2017 here.

Lastly, we have (“DianaTheIndefatigable”), which just has a renamed tracker, but uses the standard code otherwise and is implemented on-page. This is to complete the set of all combinations of modified and unmodified GTM and on-page trackers.

Two of Distilled’s modified on-page trackers, as seen on https://www.distilled.net/

Overall, this table summarizes our setups:

Tracker	Renamed function?	GTM or on-page?	Locally hosted JavaScript file?
Default	No	GTM HTML tag	No
FredTheUnblockable	Yes - “tcap”	GTM HTML tag	Yes
AlbertTheImmutable	Yes - “buffoon”	On page	Yes
DianaTheIndefatigable	No	On page	No

I tested their functionality in various browser/ad-block environments by watching for the pageviews appearing in browser developer tools:

Reason 1: Ad Blockers

Ad blockers, primarily as browser extensions, have been growing in popularity for some time now. Primarily this has been to do with users looking for better performance and UX on ad-laden sites, but in recent years an increased emphasis on privacy has also crept in, hence the possibility of analytics blocking.

Effect of ad blockers

Some ad blockers block web analytics platforms by default, others can be configured to do so. I tested Distilled’s site with Adblock Plus and uBlock Origin, two of the most popular ad-blocking desktop browser addons, but it’s worth noting that ad blockers are increasingly prevalent on smartphones, too.

Here’s how Distilled’s setups fared:

(All numbers shown are from April 2018)

Setup	Vs. Adblock	Vs. Adblock with “EasyPrivacy” enabled	Vs. uBlock Origin
GTM	Pass	Fail	Fail
On page	Pass	Fail	Fail
GTM + renamed script & function	Pass	Fail	Fail
On page + renamed script & function	Pass	Fail	Fail

Seems like those tweaked setups didn’t do much!

Lost data due to ad blockers: ~10%

Ad blocker usage can be in the 15–25% range depending on region, but many of these installs will be default setups of AdBlock Plus, which as we’ve seen above, does not block tracking. Estimates of AdBlock Plus’s market share among ad blockers vary from 50–70%, with more recent reports tending more towards the former. So, if we assume that at most 50% of installed ad blockers block analytics, that leaves your exposure at around 10%.

Reason 2: Browser “do not track”

This is another privacy motivated feature, this time of browsers themselves. You can enable it in the settings of most current browsers. It’s not compulsory for sites or platforms to obey the “do not track” request, but Firefox offers a stronger feature under the same set of options, which I decided to test as well.

Effect of “do not track”

Most browsers now offer the option to send a “Do not track” message. I tested the latest releases of Firefox & Chrome for Windows 10.

Setup	Chrome “do not track”	Firefox “do not track”	Firefox “tracking protection”
GTM	Pass	Pass	Fail
On page	Pass	Pass	Fail
GTM + renamed script & function	Pass	Pass	Fail
On page + renamed script & function	Pass	Pass	Fail

Again, it doesn’t seem that the tweaked setups are doing much work for us here.

Lost data due to “do not track”: <1%

Only Firefox Quantum’s “Tracking Protection,” introduced in February, had any effect on our trackers. Firefox has a 5% market share, but Tracking Protection is not enabled by default. The launch of this feature had no effect on the trend for Firefox traffic on Distilled.net.

Reason 3: Filters

It’s a bit of an obvious one, but filters you’ve set up in your analytics might intentionally or unintentionally reduce your reported traffic levels.

For example, a filter excluding certain niche screen resolutions that you believe to be mostly bots, or internal traffic, will obviously cause your setup to underreport slightly.

Lost data due to filters: ???

Impact is hard to estimate, as setup will obviously vary on a site-by site-basis. I do recommend having a duplicate, unfiltered “master” view in case you realize too late you’ve lost something you didn’t intend to.

Reason 4: GTM vs. on-page vs. misplaced on-page

Google Tag Manager has become an increasingly popular way of implementing analytics in recent years, due to its increased flexibility and the ease of making changes. However, I’ve long noticed that it can tend to underreport vs. on-page setups.

I was also curious about what would happen if you didn’t follow Google’s guidelines in setting up on-page code.

By combining my numbers with numbers from my colleague Dom Woodman’s site (you’re welcome for the link, Dom), which happens to use a Drupal analytics add-on as well as GTM, I was able to see the difference between Google Tag Manager and misplaced on-page code (right at the bottom of the <body> tag) I then weighted this against my own Google Tag Manager data to get an overall picture of all 5 setups.

Effect of GTM and misplaced on-page code

Traffic as a percentage of baseline (standard Google Tag Manager implementation):

	Google Tag Manager	Modified & Google Tag Manager	On-Page Code In <head>	Modified & On-Page Code In <head>	On-Page Code Misplaced In <Body>
Chrome	100.00%	98.75%	100.77%	99.80%	94.75%
Safari	100.00%	99.42%	100.55%	102.08%	82.69%
Firefox	100.00%	99.71%	101.16%	101.45%	90.68%
Internet Explorer	100.00%	80.06%	112.31%	113.37%	77.18%

There are a few main takeaways here:

• On-page code generally reports more traffic than GTM
• Modified code is generally within a margin of error, apart from modified GTM code on Internet Explorer (see note below)
• Misplaced analytics code will cost you up to a third of your traffic vs. properly implemented on-page code, depending on browser (!)
• The customized setups, which are designed to get more traffic by evading ad blockers, are doing nothing of the sort.

It’s worth noting also that the customized implementations actually got less traffic than the standard ones. For the on-page code, this is within the margin of error, but for Google Tag Manager, there’s another reason — because I used unfiltered profiles for the comparison, there’s a lot of bot spam in the main profile, which primarily masquerades as Internet Explorer. Our main profile is by far the most spammed, and also acting as the baseline here, so the difference between on-page code and Google Tag Manager is probably somewhat larger than what I’m reporting.

I also split the data by mobile, out of curiosity:

Traffic as a percentage of baseline (standard Google Tag Manager implementation):

	Google Tag Manager	Modified & Google Tag Manager	On-Page Code In <head>	Modified & On-Page Code In <head>	On-Page Code Misplaced In <Body>
Desktop	100.00%	98.31%	100.97%	100.89%	93.47%
Mobile	100.00%	97.00%	103.78%	100.42%	89.87%
Tablet	100.00%	97.68%	104.20%	102.43%	88.13%

The further takeaway here seems to be that mobile browsers, like Internet Explorer, can struggle with Google Tag Manager.

Lost data due to GTM: 1–5%

Google Tag Manager seems to cost you a varying amount depending on what make-up of browsers and devices use your site. On Distilled.net, the difference is around 1.7%; however, we have an unusually desktop-heavy and tech-savvy audience (not much Internet Explorer!). Depending on vertical, this could easily swell to the 5% range.

Lost data due to misplaced on-page code: ~10%

On Teflsearch.com, the impact of misplaced on-page code was around 7.5%, vs Google Tag Manager. Keeping in mind that Google Tag Manager itself underreports, the total loss could easily be in the 10% range.

Bonus round: Missing data from channels

I’ve focused above on areas where you might be missing data altogether. However, there are also lots of ways in which data can be misrepresented, or detail can be missing. I’ll cover these more briefly, but the main issues are dark traffic and attribution.

Dark traffic

Dark traffic is direct traffic that didn’t really come via direct — which is generally becoming more and more common. Typical causes are:

• Untagged campaigns in email
• Untagged campaigns in apps (especially Facebook, Twitter, etc.)
• Misrepresented organic
• Data sent from botched tracking implementations (which can also appear as self-referrals)

It’s also worth noting the trend towards genuinely direct traffic that would historically have been organic. For example, due to increasingly sophisticated browser autocompletes, cross-device history, and so on, people end up “typing” a URL that they’d have searched for historically.

Attribution

I’ve written about this in more detail here, but in general, a session in Google Analytics (and any other platform) is a fairly arbitrary construct — you might think it’s obvious how a group of hits should be grouped into one or more sessions, but in fact, the process relies on a number of fairly questionable assumptions. In particular, it’s worth noting that Google Analytics generally attributes direct traffic (including dark traffic) to the previous non-direct source, if one exists.

Discussion

I was quite surprised by some of my own findings when researching this post, but I’m sure I didn’t get everything. Can you think of any other ways in which data can end up missing from analytics?

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Backlink Blindspots: The State of Robots.txt

Posted by rjonesx.

Here at Moz we have committed to making Link Explorer as similar to Google as possible, specifically in the way we crawl the web. I have discussed in previous articles some metrics we use to ascertain that performance, but today I wanted to spend a little bit of time talking about the impact of robots.txt and crawling the web.

Most of you are familiar with robots.txt as the method by which webmasters can direct Google and other bots to visit only certain pages on the site. Webmasters can be selective, allowing certain bots to visit some pages while denying other bots access to the same. This presents a problem for companies like Moz, Majestic, and Ahrefs: we try to crawl the web like Google, but certain websites deny access to our bots while allowing that access to Googlebot. So, why exactly does this matter?

Why does it matter?

As we crawl the web, if a bot encounters a robots.txt file, they're blocked from crawling specific content. We can see the links that point to the site, but we're blind regarding the content of the site itself. We can't see the outbound links from that site. This leads to an immediate deficiency in the link graph, at least in terms of being similar to Google (if Googlebot is not similarly blocked).

But that isn't the only issue. There is a cascading failure caused by bots being blocked by robots.txt in the form of crawl prioritization. As a bot crawls the web, it discovers links and has to prioritize which links to crawl next. Let's say Google finds 100 links and prioritizes the top 50 to crawl. However, a different bot finds those same 100 links, but is blocked by robots.txt from crawling 10 of the top 50 pages. Instead, they're forced to crawl around those, making them choose a different 50 pages to crawl. This different set of crawled pages will return, of course, a different set of links. In this next round of crawling, Google will not only have a different set they're allowed to crawl, the set itself will differ because they crawled different pages in the first place.

Long story short, much like the proverbial butterfly that flaps its wings eventually leading to a hurricane, small changes in robots.txt which prevent some bots and allow others ultimately leads to very different results compared to what Google actually sees.

So, how are we doing?

You know I wasn't going to leave you hanging. Let's do some research. Let's analyze the top 1,000,000 websites on the Internet according to Quantcast and determine which bots are blocked, how frequently, and what impact that might have.

Methodology

The methodology is fairly straightforward.

1. Download the Quantcast Top Million
2. Download the robots.txt if available from all top million sites
3. Parse the robots.txt to determine whether the home page and other pages are available
4. Collect link data related to blocked sites
5. Collect total pages on-site related to blocked sites.
6. Report the differences among crawlers.

Total sites blocked

The first and easiest metric to report is the number of sites which block individual crawlers (Moz, Majestic, Ahrefs) while allowing Google. Most site that block one of the major SEO crawlers block them all. They simply formulate robots.txt to allow major search engines while blocking other bot traffic. Lower is better.

Of the sites analyzed, 27,123 blocked MJ12Bot (Majestic), 32,982 blocked Ahrefs, and 25,427 blocked Moz. This means that among the major industry crawlers, Moz is the least likely to be turned away from a site that allows Googlebot. But what does this really mean?

Total RLDs blocked

As discussed previously, one big issue with disparate robots.txt entries is that it stops the flow of PageRank. If Google can see a site, they can pass link equity from referring domains through the site's outbound domains on to other sites. If a site is blocked by robots.txt, it's as though the outbound lanes of traffic on all the roads going into the site are blocked. By counting all the inbound lanes of traffic, we can get an idea of the total impact on the link graph. Lower is better.

According to our research, Majestic ran into dead ends on 17,787,118 referring domains, Ahrefs on 20,072,690 and Moz on 16,598,365. Once again, Moz's robots.txt profile was most similar to that of Google's. But referring domains isn't the only issue with which we should be concerned.

Total pages blocked

Most pages on the web only have internal links. Google isn't interested in creating a link graph — they're interested in creating a search engine. Thus, a bot designed to act like Google needs to be just as concerned about pages that only receive internal links as they are those that receive external links. Another metric we can measure is the total number of pages that are blocked by using Google's site: query to estimate the number of pages Google has access to that a different crawler does not. So, how do the competing industry crawlers perform? Lower is better.

Once again, Moz shines on this metric. It's not just that Moz is blocked by fewer sites— Moz is blocked by less important and smaller sites. Majestic misses the opportunity to crawl 675,381,982 pages, Ahrefs misses 732,871,714 and Moz misses 658,015,885. There's almost an 80 million-page difference between Ahrefs and Moz just in the top million sites on the web.

Unique sites blocked

Most of the robots.txt disallows facing Moz, Majestic, and Ahrefs are simply blanket blocks of all bots that don't represent major search engines. However, we can isolate the times when specific bots are named deliberately for exclusion while competitors remain. For example, how many times is Moz blocked while Ahrefs and Majestic are allowed? Which bot is singled out the most? Lower is better.

Ahrefs is singled out by 1201 sites, Majestic by 7152 and Moz by 904. It is understandable that Majestic has been singled out, given that they have been operating a very large link index for many years, a decade or more. It took Moz 10 years to accumulate 904 individual robots.txt blocks, and took Ahrefs 7 years to accumulate 1204. But let me give some examples of why this is important.

If you care about links from name.com, hypermart.net, or eclipse.org, you can't rely solely on Majestic.

If you care about links from popsugar.com, dict.cc, or bookcrossing.com, you can't rely solely on Moz.

If you care about links from dailymail.co.uk, patch.com, or getty.edu, you can't rely solely on Ahrefs.

And regardless of what you do or which provider you use, you can't links from yelp.com, who.int, or findarticles.com.

Conclusions

While Moz's crawler DotBot clearly enjoys the closest robots.txt profile to Google among the three major link indexes, there's still a lot of work to be done. We work very hard on crawler politeness to ensure that we're not a burden to webmasters, which allows us to crawl the web in a manner more like Google. We will continue to work more to improve our performance across the web and bring to you the best backlink index possible.

Thanks to Dejan SEO for the beautiful link graph used in the header image and Mapt for the initial image used in the diagrams.

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Instant Techniques of Non Verbal Hypnosis, Mesmerism and Strong Hypno In...

What Google's GDPR Compliance Efforts Mean for Your Data: Two Urgent Actions

Posted by willcritchlow

It should be quite obvious for anyone that knows me that I’m not a lawyer, and therefore that what follows is not legal advice. For anyone who doesn’t know me: I’m not a lawyer, I’m certainly not your lawyer, and what follows is definitely not legal advice.

With that out of the way, I wanted to give you some bits of information that might feed into your GDPR planning, as they come up more from the marketing side than the pure legal interpretation of your obligations and responsibilities under this new legislation. While most legal departments will be considering the direct impacts of the GDPR on their own operations, many might miss the impacts that other companies’ (namely, in this case, Google’s) compliance actions have on your data.

But I might be getting a bit ahead of myself: it’s quite possible that not all of you know what the GDPR is, and why or whether you should care. If you do know what it is, and you just want to get to my opinions, go ahead and skip down the page.

What is the GDPR?

The tweet-length version is that the GDPR (General Data Protection Regulation) is new EU legislation covering data protection and privacy for EU citizens, and it applies to all companies offering goods or services to people in the EU.

Even if you aren’t based in the EU, it applies to your company if you have customers who are, and it has teeth (fines of up to the greater of 4% of global revenue or EUR20m). It comes into force on May 25. You have probably heard about it through the myriad organizations who put you on their email list without asking and are now emailing you to “opt back in.”

In most companies, it will not fall to the marketing team to research everything that has to change and achieve compliance, though it is worth getting up to speed with at least the high-level outline and in particular its requirements around informed consent, which is:

"...any freely given, specific, informed, and unambiguous indication of the data subject's wishes by which he or she, by a statement or by a clear affirmative action, signifies agreement to the processing of personal data relating to him or her."

As always, when laws are made about new technology, there are many questions to be resolved, and indeed, jokes to be made:

Can you recommend a GDPR expert?
-yes
Can I have their email address?
-no
— Adam Cleevely (@ACleevely) May 2, 2018

But my post today isn’t about what you should do to get compliant — that’s specific to your circumstances — and a ton has been written about this already:

• I’ve found value in the content Ometria has produced on this front, e.g. 6 things e-commerce marketers should know about GDPR and their deeper GDPR guide (registration required)
• If you work in the area, this GDPR impact on social post from Buffer will get you up to speed there
• And for the paid marketers among us, this GDPR impact on AdWords article from WordStream is what you need

My intention is not to write a general guide, but rather to warn you about two specific things you should be doing with analytics (Google Analytics in particular) as a result of changes Google is making because of GDPR.

Unexpected consequences of GDPR

When you deal directly with a person in the EU, and they give you personally identifiable information (PII) about themselves, you are typically in what is called the "data controller" role. The GDPR also identifies another role, which it calls "data processor," which is any other company your company uses as a supplier and which handles that PII. When you use a product like Google Analytics on your website, Google is taking the role of data processor. While most of the restrictions of the GDPR apply to you as the controller, the processor must also comply, and it’s here that we see some potentially unintended (but possibly predictable) consequences of the legislation.

Google is unsurprisingly seeking to minimize their risk (I say it’s unsurprising because those GDPR fines could be as large as $4.4 billion based on last year’s revenue if they get it wrong). They are doing this firstly by pushing as much of the obligation onto you (the data controller) as possible, and secondly, by going further by default than the GDPR requires and being more aggressive than the regulation requires in shutting down accounts that infringe their terms (regardless of whether the infringement also infringes the GDPR).

This is entirely rational — with GA being in most cases a product offered for free, and the value coming to Google entirely in the aggregate, it makes perfect sense to limit their risks in ways that don’t degrade their value, and to just kick risky setups off the platform rather than taking on extreme financial risk for individual free accounts.

It’s not only Google, by the way. There are other suppliers doing similar things which will no doubt require similar actions, but I am focusing on Google here simply because GA is pervasive throughout the web marketing world. Some companies are even going as far as shutting down entirely for EU citizens (like unroll.me). See this Twitter thread of others.

Consequence 1: Default data retention settings for GA will delete your data

Starting on May 25, Google will be changing the default for data retention, meaning that if you don’t take action, certain data older than the cutoff will be automatically deleted.

You can read more about the details of the change on Krista Seiden’s personal blog (Krista works at Google, but this post is written in her personal capacity).

The reason I say that this isn’t strictly a GDPR thing is that it is related to changes Google is making on their end to ensure that they comply with their obligations as a data processor. It gives you tools you might need but isn’t strictly related to your GDPR compliance. There is no particular “right” answer to the question of how long you need to/should be/are allowed to keep this data stored in GA under the GDPR, but by my reading, given that it shouldn’t be PII anyway (see below) it isn’t really a GDPR question for most organizations. In particular, there is no particular reason to think that Google’s default is the correct/mandated/only setting you can choose under the GDPR.

Action: Review the promises being made by your legal team and your new privacy policy to understand the correct timeline setting for your org. In the absence of explicit promises to your users, my understanding is that you can retain any of this data you were allowed to capture in the first place unless you receive a deletion request against it. So while most orgs will have at least some changes to make to privacy policies at a minimum, most GA users can change back to retain this data indefinitely.

Consequence 2: Google is deleting GA accounts for capturing PII

It has long been against the Terms of Service to store any personally identifiable information (PII) in Google Analytics. Recently, though, it appears that Google has become far more diligent in checking for the presence of PII and robust in their handling of accounts found to contain any. Put more simply, Google will delete your account if they find PII.

It’s impossible to know for sure that this is GDPR-related, but being able if necessary to demonstrate to regulators that they are taking strict actions against anyone violating their PII-related terms is an obvious move for Google to reduce the risk they face as a Data Processor. It makes particular sense in an area where the vast majority of accounts are free accounts. Much like the previous point, and the reason I say that this is related to Google’s response to the GDPR coming into force, is that it would be perfectly possible to get your users’ permission to record their data in third-party services like GA, and fully comply with the regulations. Regardless of the permissions your users give you, Google’s GDPR-related crackdown (and heavier enforcement of the related terms that have been present for some time) means that it’s a new and greater risk than it was before.

Action: Audit your GA profile and implementation for PII risks:

• There are various ways you can search within GA itself to find data that could be personally identifying in places like page titles, URLs, custom data, etc. (see these two excellent guides)
• You can also audit your implementation by reviewing rules in tag manager and/or reviewing the code present on key pages. The most likely suspects are the places where people log in, take key actions on your site, give you additional personal information, or check out

Don’t take your EU law advice from big US tech companies

The internal effort and coordination required at Google to do their bit to comply even “just” as data processor is significant. Unfortunately, there are strong arguments that this kind of ostensibly user-friendly regulation which incurs outsize compliance burdens on smaller companies will cement the duopoly and dominance of Google and Facebook and enables them to pass the costs and burdens of compliance onto sectors that are already struggling.

Regardless of the intended or unintended consequences of the regulation, it seems clear to me that we shouldn’t be basing our own businesses’ (and our clients’) compliance on self-interested advice and actions from the tech giants. No matter how impressive their own compliance, I’ve been hugely underwhelmed by guidance content they’ve put out. See, for example, Google’s GDPR “checklist” — not exactly what I’d hope for:

So, while I’m not a lawyer, definitely not your lawyer, and this is not legal advice, if you haven’t already received any advice, I can say that you probably can’t just follow Google’s checklist to get compliant. But you should, as outlined above, take the specific actions you need to take to protect yourself and your business from their compliance activities.

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GDPR: What it Means for Google Analytics & Online Marketing

Posted by Angela_Petteys

If you’ve been on the Internet at all in the past few months, you’ve probably seen plenty of notices about privacy policy updates from one service or another. As a marketer, a few of those notices have most likely come from Google.

With the General Data Privacy Regulation (GDPR) set to go into effect on May 25th, 2018, many Internet services have been scrambling to get in compliance with the new standards — and Google is no exception. Given the nature of the services Google provides to marketers, GDPR absolutely made some significant changes in how they conduct business. And, in turn, some marketers may have to take steps to make sure their use of Google Analytics is allowable under the new rules. But a lot of marketers aren’t entirely sure what exactly GDPR is, what it means for their jobs, and what they need to do to follow the rules.

What is GDPR?

GDPR is a very broad reform that gives citizens who live in the European Economic Area (EEA) and Switzerland more control over how their personal data is collected and used online. GDPR introduces a lot of new rules and if you’re up for a little light reading, you can check out the full text of the regulation online. But here are a few of the most significant changes:

• Companies and other organizations have to be more transparent and clearly state what information they’re collecting, what it will be used for, how they’re collecting it, and if that information will be shared with anyone else. They can also only collect information that is directly relevant for its intended use. If the organization collecting that information later decides to use it for a different purpose, they must get permission again from each individual.
• GDPR also spells out how that information needs to be given to consumers. That information can no longer be hidden in long privacy policies filled with legal jargon. The information in disclosures needs to be written in plain language and “freely given, specific, informed, and unambiguous.” Individuals also have to take an action which clearly gives their consent to their information being collected. Pre-checked boxes and notices that rely on inaction as a way of giving consent will no longer be allowed. If a user does not agree to have their information collected, you cannot block them from accessing content based on that fact.
• Consumers also have the right to see what information a company has about them, request that incorrect information be corrected, revoke permission for their data to be saved, and have their data exported so they can switch to another service. If someone decides to revoke their permission, the organization needs to not only remove that information from their systems in a timely manner, they also need to have it removed from anywhere else they’ve shared that information.
• Organizations must also be able to give proof of the steps they’re taking to be in compliance. This can include keeping records of how people opt in to being on marketing lists and documentation regarding how customer information is being protected.
• Once an individual’s information has been collected, GDPR sets out requirements for how that information is stored and protected. If a data breach occurs, consumers must be notified within 72 hours. Failing to comply with GDPR can come with some very steep consequences. If a data breach occurs because of non-compliance, a company can be hit with fines as high as €20 million or 4% of the company’s annual global revenue, whichever amount is greater.

Do US-based businesses need to worry about GDPR?

Just because a business isn’t based in Europe doesn’t necessarily mean they’re off the hook as far as GDPR goes. If a company is based in the United States (or elsewhere outside the EEA), but conducts business in Europe, collects data about users from Europe, markets themselves in Europe, or has employees who work in Europe, GDPR applies to them, too.

Even if you’re working with a company that only conducts business in a very specific geographic area, you might occasionally get some visitors to your site from people outside of that region. For example, let’s say a pizza restaurant in Detroit publishes a blog post about the history of pizza on their site. It’s a pretty informative post and as a result, it brings in some traffic from pizza enthusiasts outside the Detroit area, including a few visitors from Spain. Would GDPR still apply in that sort of situation?

As long as it’s clear that a company’s goods or services are only available to consumers in the United States (or another country outside the EEA), GDPR does not apply. Going back to the pizza restaurant example, the other content on their site is written in English, emphasizes their Detroit location, and definitely doesn’t make any references to delivery to Spain, so those few page views from Spain wouldn’t be anything to worry about.

However, let’s say another US-based company has a site with the option to view German and French language versions of pages, lets customers pay with Euros, and uses marketing language that refers to European customers. In that situation, GDPR would apply since they are more clearly soliciting business from people in Europe.

Google Analytics & GDPR

If you use Google Analytics, Google is your data processor and since they handle data from people all over the world, they’ve had to take steps to become compliant with GDPR standards. However, you/your company are considered the data controller in this relationship and you will also need to take steps to make sure your Google Analytics account is set up to meet the new requirements.

Google has been rolling out some new features to help make this happen. In Analytics, you will now have the ability to delete the information of individual users if they request it. They’ve also introduced data retention settings which allow you to control how long individual user data is saved before being automatically deleted. Google has set this to be 26 months as the default setting, but if you are working with a US-based company that strictly conducts business in the United States, you can set it to never expire if you want to — at least until data protection laws change here, too. It’s important to note that this only applies to data about individual users and events, so aggregate data about high-level information like page views won’t be impacted by this.

To make sure you’re using Analytics in compliance with GDPR, a good place to start is by auditing all the data you collect to make sure it’s all relevant to its intended purpose and that you aren’t accidentally sending any personally identifiable information (PII) to Google Analytics. Sending PII to Google Analytics was already against its Terms of Service, but very often, it happens by accident when information is pushed through in a page URL. If it turns out you are sending PII to Analytics, you’ll need to talk to your web development team about how to fix it because using filters in Analytics to block it isn’t enough — you need to make sure it’s never sent to Google Analytics in the first place.

PII includes anything that can potentially be used to identify a specific person, either on its own or when combined with another piece of information, like an email address, a home address, a birthdate, a zip code, or an IP address. IP addresses weren’t always considered PII, but GDPR classifies them as an online identifier. Don’t worry, though — you can still get geographical insights about the visitors to your site. All you have to do is turn on IP anonymization and the last portion of an IP address will be replaced with a zero, so you can still get a general idea of where your traffic is coming from, although it will be a little less precise.

If you use Google Tag Manager, IP anonymization is pretty easy. Just open your Google Analytics tag or its settings variable, choose “More Settings,” and select “Fields to Set.” Then, choose “anonymizeip” in the “Field Name” box, enter “true” in the “Value” box,” and save your changes.

If you don’t use GTM, talk to your web development team about editing the Google Analytics code to anonymize IP addresses.

Pseudonymous information like user IDs and transaction IDs are still acceptable under GDPR, but it needs to be protected. User and transaction IDs need to be alphanumeric database identifiers, not written out in plain text.

Also, if you haven’t already done so, don’t forget to take the steps Google has mentioned in some of those emails they’ve sent out. If you’re based outside the EEA and GDPR applies to you, go into your Google Analytics account settings and accept the updated terms of processing. If you’re based in the EEA, the updated terms have already been included in your data processing terms. If GDPR applies to you, you’ll also need to go into your organization settings and provide contact information for your organization.

Privacy policies, forms, & cookie notices

Now that you’ve gone through your data and checked your settings in Google Analytics, you need to update your site’s privacy policy, forms, and cookie notices. If your company has a legal department, it may be best to involve them in this process to make sure you’re fully compliant.

Under GDPR, a site’s privacy policy needs to be clearly written in plain language and answer basic questions like what information is being collected, why it’s being collected, how it’s being collected, who is collecting it, how it will be used, and if it will be shared with anyone else. If your site is likely to be visited by children, this information needs to be written simply enough for a child to be able to understand it.

Forms and cookie notices also need to provide that kind of information. Cookie consent forms with really vague, generic messages like, “We use cookies to give you a better experience and by using this site, you agree to our policy,” are not GDPR compliant.

GDPR & other types of marketing

The impact GDPR will have on marketers isn’t just limited to how you use Google Analytics. If you use some particular types of marketing in the course of your job, you may have to make a few other changes, too.

Referral deals

If you work with a company that does “refer a friend”-type promotions where a customer has to enter information for a friend to receive a discount, GDPR is going to make a difference for you. Giving consent for data to be collected is a key part of GDPR and in these sorts of promotions, the person being referred can’t clearly consent to their information being collected. Under GDPR, it is possible to continue this practice, but it all depends on how that information is being used. If you store the information of the person being referred and use it for marketing purposes, it would be a violation of GDPR standards. However, if you don’t store that information or process it, you’re OK.

Email marketing

If you’re an email marketer and already follow best industry standards by doing things like only sending messages to those who clearly opt in to your list and making it easy for people to unsubscribe, the good news is that you’re probably in pretty good shape. As far as email marketing goes, GDPR is going to have the biggest impact on those who do things that have already been considered sketchy, like buying lists of contacts or not making it clear when someone is signing up to receive emails from you.

Even if you think you’re good to go, it’s still a good time to review your contacts and double check that your European contacts have indeed opted into being on your list and that it was clear what they were signing up for. If any of your contacts don’t have their country listed or you’re not sure how they opted in, you may want to either remove them from your list or put them on a separate segment so they don’t get any messages from you until you can get that figured out. Even if you’re confident your European contacts have opted in, there’s no harm in sending out an email asking them to confirm that they would like to continue receiving messages from you.

Creating a double opt-in process isn’t mandatory, but it would be a good idea since it helps remove any doubt over whether or not a person has agreed to being on your list. While you’re at it, take a look at the forms people use to sign up to be on your list and make sure they’re in line with GDPR standards, with no pre-checked boxes and the fact that they’re agreeing to receive emails from you is very clear.

For example, here’s a non-GDPR compliant email signup option I recently saw on a checkout page. They tell you what they’re planning to send to you, but the fact that it’s a pre-checked box placed underneath the more prominent “Place Order” button makes it very easy for people to unintentionally sign up for emails they might not actually want.

Jimmy Choo, on the other hand, also gives you the chance to sign up for emails while making a purchase, but since the box isn’t pre-checked, it’s good to go under GDPR.

Marketing automation

As is the case with standard email marketing, marketing automation specialists will need to make sure they have clear consent from everyone who has agreed to be part of their lists. Check your European contacts to make sure you know how they’ve opted in. Also review the ways people can opt into your list to make sure it’s clear what, exactly, they’re signing up for so that your existing contacts would be considered valid.

If you use marketing automation to re-engage customers who have been inactive for a while, you may need to get permission to contact them again, depending on how long it has been since they last interacted with you.

Some marketing automation platforms have functionality which will be impacted by GDPR. Lead scoring, for example, is now considered a form of profiling and you will need to get permission from individuals to have their information used in that way. Reverse IP tracking also needs consent.

It’s also important to make sure your marketing automation platform and CRM system are set to sync automatically. If a person on your list unsubscribes and continues receiving emails because of a lapse between the two, you could get in trouble for not being GDPR compliant.

Gated content

A lot of companies use gated content, like free reports, whitepapers, or webinars, as a way to generate leads. The way they see it, the person’s information serves as the price of admission. But since GDPR prohibits blocking access to content if a person doesn’t consent to their information being collected, is gated content effectively useless now?

GDPR doesn’t completely eliminate the possibility of gated content, but there are now higher standards for collecting user information. Basically, if you’re going to have gated content, you need to be able to prove that the information you collect is necessary for you to provide the deliverable. For example, if you were organizing a webinar, you’d be justified in collecting email addresses since attendees need to be sent a link to join in. You’d have a harder time claiming an email address was required for something like a whitepaper since that doesn’t necessarily have to be delivered via email. And of course, as with any other form on a site, forms for gated content need to clearly state all the necessary information about how the information being collected will be used.

If you don’t get a lot of leads from European users anyway, you may want to just block all gated content from European visitors. Another option would be to go ahead and make that information freely available to visitors from Europe.

Google AdWords

If you use Google AdWords to advertise to European residents, Google already required publishers and advertisers to get permission from end users by putting disclaimers on the landing page, but GDPR will be making some changes to these requirements. Google will now be requiring publishers to get clear consent from individuals to have their information collected. Not only does this mean you have to give more information about how a person’s information will be used, you’ll also need to keep records of consent and tell users how they can opt out later on if they want to do so. If a person doesn’t give consent to having their information collected, Google will be making it possible to serve them non-personalized ads.

In the end

GDPR is a significant change and trying to grasp the full scope of its changes is pretty daunting. This is far from being a comprehensive guide, so if you have any questions about how GDPR applies to a particular client you’re working with, it may be best to get in touch with their legal department or team. GDPR will impact some industries more than others, so it’s best to get some input from someone who truly understands the law and how it applies to that specific business.

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Let's Make Money: 4 Tactics for Agencies Looking to Succeed - Whiteboard Friday

Posted by rjonesx.

We spend a lot of time discussing SEO tactics, but in a constantly changing industry, one thing that deserves more attention are the tactics agencies should employ in order to see success. From confidently raising your prices to knowing when to say no, Moz's own Russ Jones covers four essential success tactics that'll ultimately increase your bottom line in today's edition of Whiteboard Friday.

Click on the whiteboard image above to open a high-resolution version in a new tab!

Video Transcription

Howdy, Moz fans. I am Russ Jones, and I can't tell you how excited I am for my first Whiteboard Friday. I am Principal Search Scientist here at Moz. But before coming to Moz, for the 10 years prior to that, I was the Chief Technology Officer of a small SEO agency back in North Carolina. So I have a strong passion for agencies and consultants who are on the ground doing the work, helping websites rank better and helping build businesses.

So what I wanted to do today was spend a little bit of time talking about the lessons that I learned at an agency that admittedly I only learned through trial and error. But before we even go further, I just wanted to thank the folks at Hive Digital who I learned so much from, Jeff and Jake and Malcolm and Ryan, because the team effort over time is what ended up building an agency. Any agency that succeeds knows that that's part of it. So we'll start with that thank-you.

But what I really want to get into is that we spend a lot of time talking about SEO tactics, but not really about how to succeed in an industry that changes rapidly, in which there's almost no certification, and where it can be difficult to explain to customers exactly how they're going to be successful with what you offer. So what I'm going to do is break down four really important rules that I learned over the course of that 10 years. We're going to go through each one of them as quickly as possible, but at the same time, hopefully you'll walk away with some good ideas. Some of these are ones that it might at first feel a little bit awkward, but just follow me.

1. Raise prices

The first rule, number one in Let's Make Money is raise your prices. Now, I remember quite clearly two years in to my job at Hive Digital — it was called Virante then — and we were talking about raising prices. We were just looking at our customers, saying to ourselves, "There's no way they can afford it." But then luckily we had the foresight that there was more to raising prices than just charging your customers more.

How it benefits old customers

The first thing that just hit us automatically was... "Well, with our old customers, we can just discount them. It's not that bad. We're in the same place as we always were." But then it occurred to us, "Wait, wait, wait. If we discount our customers, then we're actually increasing our perceived value." Our existing customers now think, "Hey, they're actually selling something better that's more expensive, but I'm getting a deal," and by offering them that deal because of their loyalty, you engender more loyalty. So it can actually be good for old customers.

How it benefits new customers

Now, for new customers, once again, same sort of situation. You've increased the perceived value. So your customers who come to you think, "Oh, this company is professional. This company is willing to invest. This company is interested in providing the highest quality of services." In reality, because you've raised prices, you can. You can spend more time and money on each customer and actually do a better job. The third part is, "What's the worst that could happen?" If they say no, you offer them the discount. You're back where you started. You're in the same position that you were before.

How it benefits your workers

Now, here's where it really matters — your employees, your workers. If you are offering bottom line prices, you can't offer them raises, you can't offer them training, you can't hire them help, or you can't get better workers. But if you do, if you raise prices, the whole ecosystem that is your agency will do better.

How it improves your resources

Finally, and most importantly, which we'll talk a little bit more later, is that you can finally tool up. You can get the resources and capital that you need to actually succeed. I drew this kind of out.

If we have a graph of quality of services that you offer and the price that you sell at, most agencies think that they're offering great quality at a little price, but the reality is you're probably down here. You're probably under-selling your services and, because of that, you can't offer the best that you can.

You should be up here. You should be offering higher quality, your experts who spend time all day studying this, and raising prices allows you to do that.

2. Schedule

Now, raising prices is only part one. The second thing is discipline, and I am really horrible about this. The reality is that I'm the kind of guy who looks for the latest and greatest and just jumps into it, but schedule matters. As hard as it is to admit it, I learned this from the CPC folks because they know that they have to stay on top of it every day of the week.

Well, here's something that we kind of came up with as I was leaving the company, and that was to set all of our customers as much as possible into a schedule.

• Annually: we would handle keywords and competitors doing complete analysis.
• Semi-annually: Twice a year, we would do content analysis. What should you be writing about? What's changed in your industry? What are different keywords that you might be able to target now given additional resources?
• Quarterly: You need to be looking at links. It's just a big enough issue that you've got to look at it every couple of months, a complete link analysis.
• Monthly: You should be looking at your crawls. Moz will do that every week for you, but you should give your customers an idea, over the course of a month, what's changed.
• Weekly: You should be doing rankings

But there are three things that, when you do all of these types of analysis, you need to keep in mind. Each one of them is a...

• Report
• Hours for consulting
• Phone call

This might seem like a little bit of overkill. But of course, if one of these comes back and nothing changed, you don't need to do the phone call, but each one of these represents additional money in your pocket and importantly better service for your customers.

It might seem hard to believe that when you go to a customer and you tell them, "Look, nothing's changed," that you're actually giving them value, but the truth is that if you go to the dentist and he tells you, you don't have a cavity, that's good news. You shouldn't say to yourself at the end of the day, "Why'd I go to the dentist in the first place?" You should say, "I'm so glad I went to the dentist." By that same positive outlook, you should be selling to your customers over and over and over again, hoping to give them the clarity they need to succeed.

3. Tool up!

So number three, you're going to see this a lot in my videos because I just love SEO tools, but you've got to tool up. Once you've raised prices and you're making more money with your customers, you actually can. Tools are superpowers. Tools allow you to do things that humans just can't do. Like I can't figure out the link graph on my own. I need tools to do it. But tools can do so much more than just auditing existing clients. For example, they can give you...

Better leads:

You can use tools to find opportunities.Take for example the tools within Moz and you want to find other car dealerships in the area that are really good and have an opportunity to rank, but aren't doing as well as they should be in SERPs. You want to do this because you've already serviced successfully a different car dealership. Well, tools like Moz can do that. You don't just have to use Moz to help your clients. You can use them to help yourself.

Better pre-audits:

Nobody walks into a sales call blind. You know who the website is. So you just start with a great pre-audit.

Faster workflows:

Which means you make more money quicker. If you can do your keyword analysis annually in half the time because you have the right tool for it, then you're going to make far more money and be able to serve more customers.

Bulk pricing:

This one is just mind-blowingly simple. It's bulk pricing. Every tool out there, the more you buy from them, the lower the price is. I remember at my old company sitting down at one point and recognizing that every customer that came in the door would need to spend about $1,000 on individual accounts to match what they were getting through us by being able to take advantage of the bulk discounts that we were getting as an agency by buying these seats on behalf of all of our customers.

So tell your clients when you're talking to them on the phone, in the pitch be like, "Look, we use Moz, Majestic, Ahrefs, SEMrush," list off all of the competitors. "We do Screaming Frog." Just name them all and say, "If you wanted to go out and just get the data yourself from these tools, it would cost you more than we're actually charging you." The tools can sell themselves. You are saving them money.

4. Just say NO

Now, the last section, real quickly, are the things you've just got to learn to say no to. One of them has a little nuance to it. There's going to be some bite back in the comments, I'm pretty sure, but I want to be careful with it.

No month-to-month contracts

The first thing to say no to is month-to-month contracts.

If a customer comes to you and they say, "Look, we want to do SEO, but we want to be able to cancel every 30 days." the reality is this. They're not interested in investing in SEO. They're interested in dabbling in SEO. They're interested in experimenting with SEO. Well, that's not going to succeed. It's only going to take one competitor or two who actually invest in it to beat them out, and when they beat them out, you're going to look bad and they're going to cancel their account with you. So sit down with them and explain to them that it is a long-term strategy and it's just not worth it to your company to bring on customers who aren't interested in investing in SEO. Say it politely, but just turn it away.

Don't turn anything away

Now, notice that my next thing is don't turn anything away. So here's something careful. Here's the nuance. It's really important to learn to fire clients who are bad for your business, where you're losing money on them or they're just impolite, but that doesn't mean you have to turn them away. You just need to turn them in the right direction. That right direction might be tools themselves. You can say, "Look, you don't really need our consulting hours. You should go use these tools." Or you can turn them to other fledgling businesses, friends you have in the industry who might be struggling at this time.

I'll tell you a quick example. We don't have much time, but many, many years ago, we had a client that came to us. At our old company, we had a couple of rules about who we would work with. We chose not to work in the adult industry. But at the time, I had a friend in the industry. He lived outside of the United States, and he had fallen on hard times. He literally had his business taken away from him via a series of just really unscrupulous events. I picked up the phone and gave him a call. I didn't turn away the customer. I turned them over to this individual.

That very next year, he had ended up landing a new job at the top of one of the largest gambling organizations in the world. Well, frankly, they weren't on our list of people we couldn't work with. We landed the largest contract in the history of our company at that time, and it set our company straight for an entire year. It was just because instead of turning away the client, we turned them to a different direction. So you've got to say no to turning away everybody. They are opportunities. They might not be your opportunity, but they're someone's.

No service creep

The last one is service creep. Oh, man, this one is hard. A customer comes up to you and they list off three things that you offer that they want, and then they say, "Oh, yeah, we need social media management." Somebody else comes up to you, three things you want to offer, and they say, "Oh yeah, we need you to write content," and that's not something you do. You've just got to not do that. You've got to learn to shave off services that you can't offer. Instead, turn them over to people who can do them and do them very well.

What you're going to end up doing in your conversation, your sales pitch is, "Look, I'm going to be honest with you. We are great at some things, but this isn't our cup of tea. We know someone who's really great at it." That honesty, that candidness is just going to give them such a better relationship with you, and it's going to build a stronger relationship with those other specialty companies who are going to send business your way. So it's really important to learn to say no to say no service creep.

Well, anyway, there's a lot that we went over there. I hope it wasn't too much too fast, but hopefully we can talk more about it in the comments. I look forward to seeing you there. Thanks.

Video transcription by Speechpad.com

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