James Kinsley’s Post

SEO is always changing Almost as fast as the ecom industry does! So staying ahead of the game is crucial, especially in competitive niches.  The recently leaked Google algorithm data has shed new light on what really matters when it comes to links in 2024. Here’s a key takeaway: real links that get traffic matter. Buying a link and stuffing it on an old, never-visited page isn’t really going to get you very far. Google focuses on relevance and the potential traffic through that link. This means that the links driving real traffic are the ones that will truly impact your SEO efforts. So how can ecom sites trying to build SEO strength get real, quality links? There are hundreds of tactics, but here are 3 to get you started: 1. Sharable, collaborative content. Try to find a partner site that shares your audience, but isn’t competitor. For example, if your audience is older women you can look for an appropriate community website or blogger and ask them if they would like to collaborate on a piece of content. For example, a survey to their audience that would be written up by your team and promoted out, dual branded. You can ask for a link back from their site / social when it goes out. Doing things like this also opens up opportunities to partner with new potential affiliates or just different exchanges of value. For example, free products for their newsletter audience in exchange for promotion. 2. Guest posting Finding relevant sites (similar to point 1) and seeing if they take guest posts is another angle. This is where you write quality content and it features only on their blog. This benefits them by giving them content for their audience and saving their writing team, and helping build their SEO performance. And of yours, you get a link back. You can find these opportunities using a Google Search like: Your niche blog + ( "write for us" OR "guest post" OR "contribute") 3. Collaborate with your suppliers! If you have had a good experience with a piece of software for example, you could pitch your provider and say you’d happily do a great review and be part of a case study post they could add, if they’d be happy to provide a link from it. I’ve used this tactic to great effect in the past and some of these sites can be quite strong! 4. Bonus: Try a service like Featured to get real exposure This site essentially connects people looking to be featured in content with blogs/journalists etc who are writing content and want to include quotes from relevant, authoritative sources. Win win! These free, real links can provide a lot of value. Links are unfortunately still important and can be a hassle to go after. But on the positive side, your competition probably isn't doing a great job either! If you need help measuring and marketing your ecom business, check out Incendium

More privacy regulation is making its way through the USA now. Florida is the latest state to implement stringent data privacy laws with the Florida Digital Bill of Rights (FDBR), effective July 1, 2024. There are similarities with other regulations, but it’s a little softer. Though their approach primarily targets large tech companies, which is nice to see. Compliance is only required if: - The business makes more than USD 1 billion in global gross annual revenue AND - derives 50 percent or more of its global gross annual revenue from the sale of advertisements online, including providing targeted advertising or the sale of ads online - operate a consumer smart speaker and voice command component service with an integrated virtual assistant connected to a cloud computing service that uses hands-free verbal activation - operates an app store or a digital distribution platform that offers at least 250,000 different software applications for consumers to download and install I like this approach a lot more than what we see with the GDPR. Bravo! #DataPrivacy #FDPR #Compliance #DigitalRights

Do the tech giants really care about privacy? Here’s what they say: Apple: "We believe privacy is a fundamental human right." Meta/Zuckerberg: “What people want isn't complete privacy. It isn't that they want secrecy. It's that they want control over what they share and what they don't.” Google: “privacy must be equally available to everyone in the world” Here’s what they do: Apple: Fined by France’s Data Protection Authority for privacy violations. Meta: A record $1.3 billion privacy fine from the EU for privacy violations. Google: A $392m fine from the US for privacy violations. Privacy is used as either an anti-competition tool or as a means to profit from users' data. Unfortunately for smaller businesses, getting massive privacy fines can’t just be a cost of doing business. Fines for GDPR violations can kill a company. Make sure your analytics setup is not violating privacy regulations. If you need help, speak with one of our team. #data #privacy #gdpr #analytics

Many years ago, I consulted for Sony to help them fix up the technical SEO on their website. ~15 years later, with many advances in CMS’ like shopify, technical SEO is still very much a thing. ‘But shopify is technically optimised out of the box?’ Shopify is great, but technical SEO is a lot more than a CMS can do out of the box: - Site speed - Title tag format - Externally linked 404 pages - Robots.txt issues - Internal linking Just to name a few. All of these things are good out of the box, but can degrade over time. Or they can just be optimized further. Shopify doesn’t know the searcher behavior in every niche for example, so it can’t give you title tag formats that are 100% ideal. Any customization done to the base can introduce problems. Internal link architecture (passing strength about the site) if you put that in the technical box, also can’t possibly come ‘done for you’. It’s dangerous to assume your site is optimized because you’re on a modern, popular CMS. You’re probably in better shape than many, but you could have a big problem holding you back and not know it. #Shopify #Technical #SEO

With Incendium we’ve evolved marketing metrics from vanity to sanity. I’ve mentioned before how flawed engagement measurement is in the analytics industry. How do you separate a 2 second category page visit, where someone found what they needed and quickly clicked to a product, and a 2 second blog page visit where the user clicked to another article because they didn’t like the first one? When all you have is ‘average time on page’ and ‘engaged sessions’, you’ll find yourself asking ‘so what’ and struggling to find actionable takeaways from your data. This is what we first set out to improve and it sent us down a 4 year journey building out our complete analytics solution. And it blows GA4 out of the water. Engagement measurement should be nuanced. It has to be nuanced, or it’s really not useful. With Incendium, you can: Create template specific rules to measure whats good, and whats bad, at scale Create page specific rules for special cases Measure engagement rates on blog content differently to product pages or category pages Understand exactly which templates need work, in seconds Instantly find your opportunities for improvement in user journeys Analytics should be actionable. If you want to give Incendium a try, DM me! #data #analytics #ga4 #atttibution #ux

From a single small boat, to a small fleet and one of the top boat hire companies in Sydney. And it would have failed without a simple hand-coded attribution system. My first non-marketing business began with a single small boat and grew into one of the top boat hire companies in the most beautiful harbour in the world, Sydney, Australia. It was scrappy; we coded the website and custom CRM in-house (there were only 3 of us – and only one amateur coder, one amateur designer), constantly building in bugs, at the same time as manning phones. The bugs would mean people got the wrong boats or double-booked - so that was always fun dealing with. But despite all the setbacks, we were able to grow with a tiny marketing budget. How? Because we could measure our marketing. Competitors could only see: spend X, get Y number of enquiries. They didn't have revenue attribution to the ad level like we did. This meant we could optimize our ad spend better than anyone else, and reinvest to become the top spender in Sydney on Google very quickly. We grew from nowhere to being a 7-figure business. This journey shows the power of attribution and having an unfair advantage in data. Now, with Incendium, we provide other businesses with that same unfair advantage, but 1000x better. Ready to see what precise attribution can do for your growth? Let's connect and give your business the unfair advantage it deserves. #Data #Attribution #DataDriven #Entrepreneurship #Marketing #Analytics

Visuals in ecom marketing are so important. But it's hard to keep coming up with new ways of presenting products. Even elite level graphic designers and marketers can hit creative brick walls. This is where AI can save the day. Within a few minutes with some very basic prompts, you can have Midjourney churning out ideas for campaign visuals, landing page heros, product photo settings and loads more that your expert team can use as a springboard for the full design: Prompt 1 - "Landing page design for a facial cleanser, the page title is "Fresh Wave" and there is a title and subtext on the image, cutting edge website design, desert island color palette, web design, ux/ui design, face cream, ultra detailed --chaos 15 --ar 16:9" Prompt 2 - "E-commerce product photograph for a facial cleanser called "Fresh Wave", desert island color palette, realistic setting, web design, ux/ui design, face cream, ultra detailed --chaos 15" Of course, you're probably going to get some not-so-great ideas, just like in a normal brainstorming session! Pro tip... When you're using #Midjourney for idea generation, nail your prompt first, then add a "chaos" parameter to it. By adding "--chaos x", where x is a number between 1 and 100, you can control how varied the initial image grids are and get a wider variation on your brainstorms. I've found 15-20 is the sweet spot but slap on 100 if you want to see some trippy ideas!

Simon highlighted an essential stat: The average B2B SaaS sales cycle is 84 days, nearly three months (HubSpot Research). For many it's even longer, sometimes closer to 12+ months. So imagine your #analytics #data only goes back 30 days? It would be useless wouldn't it? Yet that's essentially what you get with #GA4. Most users aren't aware but the lookback window for first source attribution in GA4 is a maximum of 30 days!? It makes tracking the value of blog posts / content marketing campaigns or any top of funnel activities pretty much impossible. The attribution in GA4 will probably tell you the channel responsible for that conversion was a bottom of funnel PPC click. To really understand the value of your top of funnel activities, you need a specific #attribution solution which doesn't have unnecessary limits built in to the models.

Here’s 3 common mistakes people make when interpreting data. And how you can avoid them to make better decisions! Data is the foundation of any successful digital marketing strategy, but it's only as powerful as your ability to interpret and act on it correctly. Many people fall into common traps that can skew their understanding and lead them in the wrong direction. 1. Ignoring technical limitations of tracking If you are trying to measure the ROI of top of funnel activities, you can’t look at DDA/last click attribution or Facebook’s data. GA4 only has a window of 30 days when it’s looking at first source - so those awareness campaigns that drove new visitors 3 months ago aren’t getting counted. 2. Avoiding painful truths It's human nature to gravitate towards metrics that paint a rosy picture of our performance, even when deep down we know they're not truly indicative of success. “Engaged sessions” for example might help you show PPC as being effective, but does this align with your ultimate business goals, such as conversion rate or customer lifetime value? Choose metrics and measures that matter. 3. Overlooking Context Data doesn't exist in a vacuum. One of the most significant errors is ignoring the context in which data is collected. Seasonal trends, market shifts, and external events can dramatically influence your results. To avoid this, always contextualize your data within broader market and internal variables. Avoiding these pitfalls doesn't just improve your use of data; it transforms data into a true strategic asset. Want to track those top of funnel activities properly without a 30-day limitation? Book a meeting in with our team and see how you can turn your #data into #ROI #DataDriven #MarketingInsights #Analytics #DigitalMarketing

It's time to throw your website in the trash. At least that's what a lot of 'marketing gurus' have been saying recently. I’ve seen a few posts on how we’re moving to a ‘zero-click’ world. Social platforms don't want you to link out to your site (reducing your reach if you do). Video content on YouTube etc keeps users on the platform and search engines are serving AI answers rather than sending people to results. This is all true. However the conclusion has often been ‘forget about your website, it’s going to die’. This is BS. All of these platforms just give you MORE opportunities to drive brand awareness, trust, authority and likability. If your content is strong enough on these external platforms, and you give people a reason to visit your site coupled with a good CTA, you’ll drive quality traffic. Ok it might not be as much as it could have been if Google sent people to your site directly instead of stealing your content and training their AI on it….. But, you have to adapt. Not everything is going to result in an AI answer in the near term, so content still works. And all other activities should lead people to your site so you can build your owned audience. Just because Linkedin doesn’t really want you to share URLs to your content, doesn’t mean you should stop sharing useful advice and building awareness with your target audiences. The best way to maximize quality traffic to your site with these walled gardens is content extension. For example produce one big video content asset, break it down into short form versions, build an article version, share chunks as native posts on your personal / staff profiles. You’ll 10x your content production and reach across 10x the audience. This has the potential to drive a lot more value than the AI generated articles you might be annoyed Google is pulling AI answers from 🙂 #DigitalMarketing #ContentStrategy #BrandAwareness #SocialMediaMarketing #MarketingTips #SEO #AI