Sep 3, 2022 864 reads

How to Prepare Your Brand for Black Friday in 3 Steps

The big November sales are starting! Is your brand ready for Black Friday? Follow these 3 steps to get the most efficient results for your brand during this hectic period.1. Plan Your Black Friday Campaign CalendarThe planning stage before Black Friday begins is crucial. First, define your campaign calendar and decide which audience you will contact, when, and how. You should create different strategies and plans for before, during, and after Black Friday.2. Forecast Your BudgetsTo make accurate forecasts, use tools like Performance Planner, Keyword Planner, and Google Trends, and review last year’s Black Friday data in Google Analytics. This will help you estimate more accurately and manage your budgets effectively.When planning budgets, consider all dynamics: media mix, channel distribution, brand and programmatic plans for maximum visibility, and include third-party channels in your plan.3. Divide Your Plans into PhasesHistorical data shows that shopping interest ramps up before November, peaks during Black Friday week, and then tapers off afterward. Therefore, split your planning into three phases: pre-sale, sale week, and post-sale.a) Pre-Black Friday PhaseBecause competition and costs spike during the sale week, start your campaign early to build awareness and expand your remarketing audiences. By driving traffic to your site before the sale at lower cost, you’ll have data ready to retarget more efficiently when costs rise.Be sure your promotional visuals and videos are ready well before peak week—dynamic creatives work best for awareness.Update your CRM segments with last year’s online and offline purchasers in Google Ads and Facebook, so you don’t miss any high-value customers.Also, ensure your website infrastructure can handle peak traffic: verify Google Tag Manager, conversion tags, and Facebook events before the rush.On the product side, check inventory levels and variety for your best-sellers and planned discount items to avoid stockouts during the surge.b) Black Friday WeekIn Google Ads, watch for “limited by budget” alerts—manual bidding campaigns can run out of budget quickly when volume spikes. Wherever possible, use automated bidding strategies to stay competitive.To broaden your reach, diversify campaigns: alongside programmatic and third-party buys, use Google Discovery, YouTube, and Dynamic Search Ads. Don’t forget to add all relevant ad extensions.On Facebook, build separate campaigns for awareness, consideration, and conversion, each with tailored messaging.Prioritize low-competition categories to avoid skyrocketing costs. In search campaigns, favor long-tail keywords over ultra-competitive terms like “Black Friday” or “Cyber Monday.”Launch new campaigns early so they finish learning before peak week. On Facebook, use Dynamic Creative; in Google Ads, use Responsive Display and Responsive Search Ads, with varied extensions.Traffic during peak week often stays for a while after. Segment users by behavior—e.g., abandoners—and set up a post-sale phase with special offers like “We Miss You” coupons for those who added to cart but didn’t purchase.c) Post-Black Friday PhaseSince sales taper off gradually after Black Friday, plan for a smooth transition. Prepare your post-sale creatives and messaging in advance.A common mistake is forgetting to pause sale campaigns afterward. Use automated rules in all platforms to turn off or adjust campaigns, and audit any leftover promotions from last season.

Sep 3, 2022 33622 reads

React & Google Analytics: How to Integrate GA4 in React?

It is an undeniable fact that React and Google Analytics are one of the most popular tools and libraries among the web-analyst community. Google Analytics is the most widely used web analysis tool, which helps you easily track and retarget your users.Google Analytics 4 (GA4) provides you with more comprehensive measurement methods such as personalized reports and intelligence analytics, by blending your web and mobile application together. Moreover, it provides you with better insights into your digital marketing strategies compared to Universal Analytics (UA).Known for being fast and simple, React is the most popular front-end JavaScript library in the field of web development. Using Google Analytics on your React-based website gives you the following benefits:You can find out from which country your users are driving traffic and what demographics they have.You can see how much time your users spend on which pages.You can measure the Enhanced Ecommerce and custom events.You can report bugs in your React application.You can measure user behavior for A/B tests in your application.Assuming you have a Google Analytics 4 account and a react-based website, let's see how you can set up a healthy react google analytics property step by step.First of all, you need to create a GA4 property within your current Universal Analytics account. You can use the GA4 Property Setup Assistant for this. Click on Get Started and it will be installed instantly without any pre-configuration.You can see that the GA4 installation was successful from the Connected Property section.Google Analytics 4 Measurement IDHalf of our work is done. Now that we have received the most important part, which is GA4 Measurement ID, which starts with G-, so that you can complete the GA4 installation on our React-based website.React Google Analytics IntegrationIn the React ecosystem in the digital marketing world, Static Site Generators (SSG) such as Gatsby and NextJS are generally used for page management, plugin support, CMS, site speed, and SEO compatibility concerns.Now let's start with possible integration methods.Adding Gtag ScriptFirst you need to install the react-ga package in your application.yarn add react-gaThen you have to add the react-ga package into index.js or app.js.import ReactGA from 'react-ga'; const TRACKING_ID = "UA-12341234-1"; // YOUR_OWN_TRACKING_ID ReactGA.initialize(TRACKING_ID);One of the most common problems in React applications occurs in the rendering methods, specifically, CSR (Client Side Rendering) and SSR (Server Side Rendering). You can access detailed information here for rendering methods.In your SPA (Single Page Application) applications, you should send your events with history.listen using react-router-dom in order to prevent these rendering problems.import React from 'react' import { withRouter } from 'react-router-dom'; import ReactGA from 'react-ga'; const RouteChangeTracker = ({ history }) => { history.listen((location, action) => { ReactGA.set({ page: location.pathname }); ReactGA.pageview(location.pathname); }); return ; }; export default withRouter(RouteChangeTracker);Gatsby GTAG PluginIf you use Gatsby engine on your website, adding gatsby-plugin-google-gtag /) is recommended.First of all, you need to install the gatsby-plugin-google-gtag plugin.yarn add gatsby-plugin-google-gtagThen you should update the gatsby-config.js file as follows:module.exports = { plugins: [ { resolve: `gatsby-plugin-google-gtag`, options: { trackingIds: [ "GA-TRACKING_ID", ], gtagConfig: { optimize_id: "OPT_CONTAINER_ID", anonymize_ip: true, cookie_expires: 0, }, pluginConfig: { head: false, respectDNT: true, exclude: ["/preview/**", "/do-not-track/me/too/"], }, }, }, ], }Because of the SSR, you may also have to send your custom events as shown below.typeof window !== "undefined" && window.gtag("event", "click", { ...data })Adding GTAG Script in Next.jsIn the folder where your Next.js application is located, you can open the .env.local file, so that you can add your Measurement ID.NEXT_PUBLIC_GOOGLE_ANALYTICS=You can easily add this variable in the .env.local file, for example if you are using Vercel.Then it will be enough to add the snippet into the _document.js file.import Document, { Html, Head, Main, NextScript } from 'next/document' export default class MyDocument extends Document { render() { return ( {/* Global Site Tag (gtag.js) - Google Analytics */} ) } }To pull custom events, you should use this following method;export const event = ({ action, params }) => { window.gtag('event', action, params) }As you can see, there are different Google Analytics 4 integration methods according to different frameworks.However, no matter what React framework you are using, you must first understand how Google Analytics pulls data from any web application. This will prevent possible measurement and integration errors on your website.You can access the source on how Google Analytics 4 works on the Gtag script here.

Sep 3, 2022 1216 reads

Adapting New Tool for Our Automated Jobs: Apache Airflow

Performance marketing combines advertising and innovation to assist merchants and affiliates expand their companies in any aspect. Each retailer's campaign is carefully targeted, ensuring that everyone has a chance to succeed and win. When all the operations on each side are done correctly, performance marketing offers win-win situations for both merchants and affiliates.As Tech Team , we gave a decision about writing new blogs about the digital marketing projects we build with the software engineering skill sets. We mainly produce new solutions for different brands and our main goal is to increase their performance with data analysis and automation projects. On that sense, we decided to publish new blogs related to our projects.What do we produce as a team?As a tech team ,we adopted the modern performance marketing ideology and as a result of this , we produce an automation project using Airflow to schedule product reports for our customers. On our product reports , we are gathering information about the unique codes , availability , discounted prices , discount percentages and many more related features about the products by visiting their urls. Moreover , we have a solid background on the Google Sheets to add more power on our automation projects for more monitoring&reporting purposes. Furthermore we also used docker container technology to adapt the airflow environment into a virtual environment for the problems that we can face during deployment phase.To be more clear , Airflow is a an automation tool to create data pipelines for multiple purposes. The main reason we work with airflow is , rather than cron jobs , airflow provides us a UI services to monitor all the processes in a almost real-time. In addition to that , analyzing the logs on the platform has a significant impact on catching and regulating errors during the process. Moreover , when an error occurs on the system during the processes , with the configuration file , we can get emails for any kind of errors and it provides us a service for instant interference.First of all ,whole process depends on the scraping and on the performance side of the whole process , we mainly use parallel threads working asynchronously and with that way we can scrap all the data in minutes for large scale of urls to be checked. We designed a multiple virtual machine templates on the Google Cloud which can operate all the required tasks in a given order. The most significant part of the order is to deliver data through the processes in a single template for the upcoming reports on the airflow platform.What is Airflow?Let’s get more deep inside into the main structure of the airflow to understand how it works and how we can adapt this data pipeline environment to different projects for future purposes. “A DAG specifies the dependencies between Tasks, and the order in which to execute them and run retries; the Tasks themselves describe what to do, be it fetching data, running analysis, triggering other systems, or more”[1]. Basically we can think Airflow as a way more complex version of cron jobs.In Airflow we are using workers as threads to operate all the Tasks.First of all , we need to know that all airflow tasks work on a pre-structured object named ‘DAG’ , which is a terminology to annotate each task we scheduled on the Airflow system. For example;with DAG( "Company_X_Product_Report", schedule_interval='@daily', catchup=False, default_args=default_arguments ) as dag:1- We can define DAGs using Context Manager, DAG structure has so many features such as time scheduling ,naming and retry options in case of any errors, helping us to regulate and set each of them on the data pipeline environment.In addition to that we also have default-arguments to add more features on the DAG structure. For example ;default_arguments = { 'owner':'AnalyticaHouse', 'start_date':days_ago(1), "sla": timedelta(hours=1), 'email': ['analyticahouse@analyticahouse.com'], 'email_on_failure': True, }2- We used multiple functions to operate each task in a DAG. To be more clear , whole process can be expressed asurl_task >> scrape_task >> write_to_sheet_task >> find_path_task >> parse_message_task >> write_message_task3- We also separate each task with corresponding functions with using PythonOperators. Mainly these operators are responsible from the python functions handling the required duties. One of the most used ones are Bash operators and Python Operators for executing bash and python scripts. In our project , we mainly used Python Operators for executing each function one by one. In this example we showed that , each scheduled python function needs to get implemented in a such fashion that airflow will be interpreting all the implemented format as a job. We used more than 5 main functions to operate the whole scheduled job and we can think like we are adding the scheduled jobs to a stack structure. In this manner, all the PythonOperators will be added into a line and get executed one by one in a row. If one of the tasks failed(if exception raises) all operations fails and airflow informs us.url_task = PythonOperator( task_id='get_url_data', python_callable=getUrlData, )Combining the Airflow architecture with DockerDocker is a free and open platform for building, delivering, and operating apps. Docker allows you to decouple your apps from your infrastructure, allowing you to swiftly release software. In that sense , we also used docker in our development stages and at the end of the day , we created a docker image based on apache’s docker image on the DockerHub[3]. We come up with small changes such as network bridging and port directions for other purposes. Basically , while we are developing the airflow environment , we are faced with different minor and major problems including packet incompatibilities and version problems. Moreover , before we started working with airflow , we did research about how we can adapt docker technology to the airflow project and then we made several meetings to have a common sense about the advantages that docker can bring into action. Shortly after , during the development process we got stuck in so many points and every time we crash into the wall , rather than removing airflow from the server , we deleted the container that we created and re-deploy it with the same docker image .In addition to that , composing or creating a docker container helped us to save so much time during the development part of the project.Advantages:Time saving in case of any unexpected errors during the development phaseEasy to configure networking and volume features for the development of the projectIsolated environment which is good for managing small bugs and errorsContainerized structure brings easy configurations for each build time Challenges during the development Before we start implementing the project , we made so much brainstorming to figure out the critical parts of it because every time we come up with an architectural design , we were always adding more features on top of it to make it it’s best in the industry. We are a team sharing the ideology of creating a product in a impeccable way. As a result of this ideology , starting point of the project differs from the end product at the end. First we build the project on Google Cloud VM and then with the other projects we developed , it started to get harder for us to manage and deploy all of them. Then ,as a team we decided to work with the docker to make everything easier. We are a young team having an eager to learn build new projects with the latest and reliable technologies. In that manner, we also implemented error catching modules because while we were developing the project , we faced with server and airflow crashes for no reason. Catching errors has an essential impact on us because customers that we are working with needs to receive product reports daily and during the flow of the whole automation project , in case of any errors it results with undelivered reports.References[1],[2]-https://airflow.apache.org/docs/apache-airflow/stable/concepts/overview.html[3] https://hub.docker.com/r/apache/airflow

Sep 3, 2022 1088 reads

The Key to Personalizing your Content: Persona Building for Digital Marketing

If you’ve ever wondered how classical marketing has evolved over the years into personalized marketing, this blog post right here presents one of the building blocks of the matter. The digital age presents us with a constantly evolving environment when it comes to marketing practices. When some brands are flexible and agile with keeping up with these evolvements, some are having a much harder time adapting. Our deep dive will begin by explaining how classical marketing is evolving into personalized marketing, and continue by explaining the importance of building spot-on personas that align with our key performance indicators.Classical Marketing vs. Personalized MarketingWe’ve been observing different ways of managing masses ever since the 1928 release of Edward Bernays’ Propaganda studies, which goes into detail of how people can be manipulated into taking action around a common goal. It is safe to say that the classical understanding of marketing formed around this idea, way before the concept of digital. Before, products were presented by creating a hype around them, a hype that assures that individuals are missing out on something by not owning them. However, in modern society, when there are innumerable products and services, is there really one type of hype that motivates all individuals? This is exactly when personalized marketing comes into play.Individuals that are motivated by the exact same needs do not exist in modern society anymore. Sure, there are some commonalities between different individual needs, but there are many varieties that did not exist beforehand. Whether you are a world famous, well-routed brand or a beginner, this is one fact that applies to all: We must acknowledge the existence of not one but multiple different target audiences that our brand can attract. Later on, we must find the common purchasing motivations within these audiences and form our ad creatives accordingly. But let’s not get ahead of ourselves.What is a Persona?A persona is basically a fictional character that we create in marketing studies in order to get to know our target audiences. Personas’ characters are defined by their characteristics via demographic details along with their interests, behaviors, motivations, fears and goals. These characteristics should align with our brand’s value proposition and be identified accordingly. Creating personas can be interpreted as designing interactions with our audiences. With our personal interactions, as we understand what someone is motivated by, we shift the way we talk to them. It is a very similar case for a brand. As a brand, we have an established tone of voice and we shift our messages according to the wants and needs of our personas. Now that we know the “what” of personas let’s move onto the “how” we create them.How to create personas for marketing operationsWe’ve established that personas are fictional characters that are formed to represent certain percentages of a population. However, we must not rely on our imagination while creating them. Characteristics of a persona should be defined according to research and/or data gathering processes. If you are a rooted brand that is already engaged in digital operations, the best thing to do would be to analyze your existing customers and group them under certain criteria. This part may sound like classical CRM methodologies and we cannot say that they are totally unrelated. The real challenge is for new brands or brands who wish to reach a completely different audience profile than the ones that existed beforehand.The first thing we need to do is market research. As any source on marketing will tell you, knowing your audience is the key. However, the research should not stay limited to the people who are most likely to use our products.If our product is a rather expensive one, we can assume that it will be more desirable for people with higher income. But is that all? Aren’t there moments in other people’s lives where they save up intensely in order to become an owner of our product? The answer is yes. Therefore, our biggest challenge would be to determine these moments for our audience and choose where we will catch their attention. That is why, when creating personas for marketing operations, aspects such as motivations, fears and interests are much more relevant and important than generic demographic segmentations. In order to presume our audience’s moments of intent, we need to be looking into their other habits so that we can decide on what part of their life journey our products or services would fit the most. If you wish to dig into this way of thinking more, you can start by researching what an empathy map is, but that is not what we are mapping out today.How we get to know our audience is done through data gatheration. Whether the data comes from website cookies or general publicly available research findings, we need to make sure that our presumptions about our audience is as accurate as can be.Not sure where to start? Well, there is always Google Trends which shows the related searches your audience is more likely to make if they show an interest in what you offer. There are websites such as Statista that publish research reports and give you a wider understanding of your audience’s habits. Keyword Planner is also a crucial source as it offers related search terms that might be outside of our scope when trying to understand our audience’s behavior.When you think you have different enough characteristics to compile under different personas, start creating the structure. If some personas have a lot more motivations or fears than others, perhaps they can still be divided into different personas. If they have less motivations or fears than others, perhaps there isn’t much need for taking them into account separately. After your personas are done, start building your creative structure accordingly.How to create personalized communication for different personasNow that we have decided on our personas, it’s time to decide how we communicate with them. Since we know that all of our personas are differentiated with their motivations, we need to come up with different visual assets and texts that will feed into their motivations the most while reviewing our brand. Do we use video assets or static ones? Do we ask intriguing questions to our audience or do we simply state how awesome we are? The answers all depend on how we’ve built our personas and how we think we can best catch their attention. Let’s talk about Spotify for a moment. They provide the ability to stream music, and everyone likes music right? Then why does Spotify use different ad creatives? Well, it has several different premium packages that apply to different types of people. Everyone listens to music, but not everyone’s motivations for listening to music are the same. Even our own motivations may differ during the day! That’s why it is crucial for us to see different ad visuals that will attract different kinds of emotions and users. Taking a look at some of these visuals, it is possible for us to compile them under 4 different motivations to use Spotify. The first image reflects capacity, which implies that it is an all-in-one platform for your music needs and you will most likely find what you are looking for in there. The second image talks about finding your own beat, which emphasizes your individual music taste, and no matter how typical or edgy you are, you have a place within Spotify! The third image talks about finding your own rhythm, which suggests that no matter how your mood can vary throughout the day, Spotify has got the song to match your level of emotion. The last image focuses on the price aspect of Spotify, which does not apply to a more particular need than financial benefits. Depending on our mood, all of these visuals may have an effect on us at some point. Regardless, they are likely going to hit all their potential users in the right spot for choosing different benefits to talk about all at once. It is important to note that there is prejudice when it comes to personalized marketing, and it is believed that it is the costlier way to go. While that may be true in some cases, spending a large budget on a standart mass audience does not allow you to test out what you are doing right. Although mass targeting is a viable option for the awareness stage of the marketing funnel, we still need to understand what makes the funnel go more and more narrow.

Sep 3, 2022 1178 reads

Top 10 Things to do to Improve your Brand’s Social Media Presence

It is a well known fact that social media presence is one of the pillars of the digital marketing activities of a brand. However, are we using it correctly? When there are so many social media channels to choose from, are we getting lost in the mess when it comes to strategizing or are we simply trying to exist in the most popular ones? Granted, one might even argue that there is content pollution on social media. In a world where each and every individual has something to say, how can brands speak louder? With Gen-Z dynamically dominating their online presence through their selectiveness and creativity in creating content, brands sure have hardships to face. Here are 10 things to do to improve your brand’s social media presence. Remember, these 10 factors can be considered as a form of investment. You need time to acquire the desired results! 1) Channel Selection Not that it should come as a surprise but your brand does not need to have an account on every social media platform. Selecting a channel determines where you as a brand will invest all of your efforts into content creation, so the effort should be worth it. First, determine the visual standing of your brand. Is it image oriented? Does it have more of an illustrative approach? Are you blessed with video assets? How applicable is your brand for aesthetic content creation? If you are a clothing brand for example, Instagram appears to be a must. However, that does not mean you should be overlooking Pinterest as Pinterest SEO is also crucial in reaching your target audience. Make sure you know your target audience and determine which platforms they exist in. Even if you are a well established brand with one high functioning social media account, you might question the need for existence on other social media platforms that are not doing as well. 2) Content Mix According to the purpose of your brand, it is not a wrong move to exist on multiple social media channels. However, it is wrong to post the exact same content on each medium. Every channel has its own algorithm and not producing content in accordance with that  may waste efforts in making the channel beneficial to your brand. Therefore, each brand should create a content mix for each related channel that they hope to exist in. Preparing a content mix is no more than simply deciding what kind of content is going to be shared on each channel. For example, an event agency may prefer to announce their events on Meta, post event pictures on Instagram and promote the events via TikTok live streaming. The purposes of these channels can of course be interchangeable according to the interactions they gain on each medium. 3) Post FrequencyThe one thing that is common for all social media algorithms is that it boosts accounts that are higher in their frequency of posting. In summary, the more you post, the more people see your brand. This is one thing that is easier said than done of course, since content creation for brands requires care and construction. For each platform, there is a recommended frequency of posting. For channels such as Pinterest, this is much less complicated. However, for multi-purpose share channels such as Instagram, the frequency of stories, Reels and regular static posts all contribute differently to how much the  algorithm will support your account. Contradictory to popular belief, there is not a fixed formula when it comes to frequency. However, if you are posting one static post and one story from your brand’s Instagram account each day, expecting high organic impressions is not very realistic.4) Active Follower TimesOne of the things that brands want to know about the most is when to post content on social media. There is not an exact formula for this particular topic either! The best thing to do here is to check out the analytics of the given social media platform and find out the active times of your followers. The channels determine a time gap for when your followers are most active, and that is when you should post. If you are a motivational account, you might find that your followers are most likely to engage with your content in the morning, as a kickstarter for the day. If you are again a clothing brand, you might find your account to be the last thing your followers check before going to bed. Of course the situation can be vice-versa just as well. If you are just starting off your account and do not have a fixed follower base, you can play around with different sharing times to see which one brings you the most interaction until your analytics has gathered enough of a base to make sensible remarks.5) Emphasis on Video ContentEver wondered why TikTok has become the most downloaded app of 2021? Is it Gen-Z and their inexhaustible desire for video content? Funny enough, although a large percentage of TikTok users are made up of the Gen-Z youth, about 35% of them are between the ages of 24-35. So what does this tell us? It is not just Gen-Z that cares about receiving video content anymore. People are more likely to engage in video content than they are in static content, and your brand should definitely stay on top of that! According to research, the first 3-4 seconds of a video is when your audience decides whether they are going to watch it further or not. Even YouTube, the largest video platform has come up with “YouTube Shorts” in order to serve the purposes of this development. Therefore, your message should relay in those first 3-4 seconds of the video. Sounds challenging enough, huh? Producing video content surely requires a lot more time, effort and sometimes even financial means than creating static content. Which is why most brands do not go forward with this option. Forming your strategy on the basis of video production might be the key that differentiates your brand after all.6) User Generated Content as an InspirationWhat is user generated content? Well, that would be an entire blog entry on its own. So we will just stick to why we need it. As we mentioned in the beginning, content creation has become so individually common that there are even higher expectations from big establishments such as brands. But are there, really? Since brands have local or global guidelines and have established visual standards, they might feel pressure into creating highly produced video content. However, since user generated content has become such a widespread phenomenon, naturally produced content can be just as well received as long as it follows trends! The best thing for brands to do in this case is to stay updated with the latest trends and look for ways to recreate them for their own purposes. While producing content like a regular user is a tip on its own, resharing already produced content from your followers is a definite must-have for your brand accounts. Believing products is one thing, but believing in the lifetsyle that the brand offers is a whole other story that increases user lifetime value. Giving your audience a voice in your own platform is something that definitely needs to be in your brand’s content strategy.7) Influencer MarketingReady for one of the most misunderstood phenomenons of our day? Influencer marketing has become and still is one of the most commonly preferred methods of brand promotion there is. Even though it is relatively a new practice, there are still many changing dynamics of it. For example, collaborations that are based solely on link shares that are directed to conversion are not as effective as they used to be! Of course, these statements are interchangeable according to sectors and different geographies, however the general idea remains the same. Individuals are noticing that being an influencer has become a job title and influencers do not necessarily promote the products that they believe in. Therefore, if your goal is to increase brand awareness, it would be an unrealistic expectation to do a one time collaboration with an influencer and make sure it creates the desired outcome. There are many influencer collaboration models to choose from. These differ from channel to channel as well as within the channel as a whole. No matter what you choose to proceed with, you need to make sure that your content appears organic and sincere.8) Visual and Written CommunicationAnother factor that is usually overlooked when it comes to social media appearances is surely the elements of visual design. Aesthetics are relative, and there is no way to reach a universally acceptable standard. There are brand guidelines though. Why is it important? Well, obviously it reflects the identity of the brand. Why should we pay attention to it in our social media channels? Imagine seeing a social media post about Coca Cola. Would you be able to tell that it is a Coca Cola post without seeing the actual product? The answer is yes. You are able to differentiate the brand through its colors and fonts, so without even seeing the product itself, you are able to recognize the brand. Therefore, your social media designs should stay within the limitations of your color palette and font selection. This way, your account is more likely to gain recognition in comparison to a baseless feed look. There should be repetitive assets in your designs whether this repetition is of the color, of the font or the illustrative touches you choose to embed.Similarly, your brand should adapt a tone of voice that repeats itself through each means of communication. The captions of your social media posts should adapt either a formal or informal language, and stick to it. If the communicative texts are inconsistent throughout the accounts, the users are less likely to engage with the content. This aspect should not be limited to social media accounts and it should be mimicked on the brand’s website as well.9) The Use of HashtagsThe more the merrier? Not so much. While hashtags prove to be beneficial for all social media channels, there is a limit to how much you should use them. Fake accounts and bot accounts are more likely to be using a ton of hashtags, so their density may cause your brand posts to become unreliable, as well as not really serving the needs of the algorithms. Choosing the correct hashtags is a bit of a challenge. Do you go for the most used ones? Not exactly. Using the most popular and most preferred hashtags may cause your posts to get lost within the crowd whereas unused hashtags make it impossible for your post to be found. You are looking for a density that is neither too high nor too low. Pick up to 10 hashtags that fit your brand the most and use them. Make sure that one of those hashtags is one that you created specifically for your brand. This way, you fairly create a collection of your posts under a certain hashtag which will be a reference point for your followers in the future, as well as another aspect that makes your brand recognizable.10) Analytics & Social Media Monitoring ToolsThroughout this article, you have read a few times that most actions relating to social media do not come with a clear formula. Social media channels operate differently for individuals, brands, NGOs and they differ within each other as well. In order to find the formula that works best for you and your brand, you must constantly check the analytics of your social media accounts. There, you will get a clearer picture of the numeric outputs of your actions, what seems to be working and what is not. None of the ideas that are mentioned above are set in stone. The algorithms are constantly changing, there are new features within each channel that are constantly released, so coming up with one system that keeps everything on track forever is nearly impossible. We need to be constantly changing and adapting. If you need an even wider point of view of our accounts, you can also purchase membership packs of different social media monitoring tools which will automate your processes of reporting results and paint a clearer picture of what action needs to be taken. Tools such as Sociality, Brandwatch, Social Blade and Monday can be examples of these tools.There you go! Here are the top 10 things you can do in order to improve your brand’s social media presence! If you are a beginner or cannot seem to find the hype that you once had on social media, remember to check out this guide every once in a while to identify your areas of improvement and carry your brand’s social media profiles to the next level!

Sep 3, 2022 2696 reads

How to Do an SEO Competitor Analysis Step by Step?

SEO competitor analysis, in other words, SEO competitive analysis, is a process in which you investigate the keywords, content, links, user experience, and more of your competitors in order to improve your SEO strategies. SEO competitor analysis allows you to enhance organic traffic and the ranking of your website by surpassing your competitors.Performing an SEO competitor analysis for SEO Companies, can help you understand your strengths and weaknesses inferred from the competitors. Instead of relying on guesswork for your SEO strategy, you can create a real plan by knowing your competitors.So, SEO competitor analysis is a strategy that gives you an idea about how to improve the performance of your website by analyzing and comparing the bests and worsts of your competitors. Why Is Competitor Analysis Important for SEO?Before diving into the details of competitive analysis, let's make it clear why it is critical for your business. Performing an SEO competitor analysis is important because it lets you: Understand your industry better: Numerous different strategies are going on by your competitors. Figuring out which strategies work and which do not can be valuable to specify the SEO strategies you should focus on by outperforming your competitors.Identify strengths and weaknesses of your competitors:  Knowing the strengths and weaknesses of your competitors help you to identify what you are doing well and worst. It can help you pinpoint the gaps between your website and your competitors' websites. So that you can work on new strategies to fill the gaps and improve the deficiencies.Reprioritize your SEO strategy:  Once you identify and realize the positive effects of competitors' SEO strategies, you can prioritize your new tactics and existing SEO strategies according to them.How to Conduct SEO Competitor Analysis?Step 1-) Identify Organic Search CompetitorsThe first step of performing a competitive analysis is determining your actual competitors because you cannot make any comparison and work on a new strategy for your business without knowing the competitors. You may think that you already know your biggest rivals in the industry, but they do not have to be the same as your SEO competitors. Depending on the industry and the scope of your business, SEO competitors can be different from your real-world competitors.For example, a vintage store located in the same neighborhood as your store can be an important rival for you in the real world, yet if the same vintage store does not rank for one of your target keywords like red vintage dresses, then that store would not be your organic search competitor. In this case, you would be competing online with other stores that rank for red vintage dresses on the first page of SERP. Accordingly, your organic search competitors are the ones who rank on the first page of SERP for your target keywords, and they may differ from your real-world competitor. Also, please keep in mind that if you work in more than one distinct category, you may probably have different lists of competitors for each service you provide. But, the question here is how will you find your search engine competitors? There are two different ways of identifying your search engine competitors; using Google or getting help from SEO Tools.   Firstly, you should decide on your top keywords for each service you offer. Then, search the keywords on Google and analyze the top sites on the first page of SERP to determine your actual competitors. By repeating this process for all the keywords, you can create your competitors' list from the top pages of particular categories. The biggest problem of this process is working manually. If you have dozens of unique services, unfortunately, the process will take so much time. Therefore, you can always consider getting help from SEO tools such as; Ahrefs, Ubersuggest, Semrush, etc. However, even if you decide to use a SEO tool, we recommend you to always keep an eye on SERP to analyze better in a concrete way (e.g., if the most popular content form is blog posts for your target keyword, you can not know it without controlling SERP).  Step 2-) Conduct Competitor Page AnalysisOnce you decide your competitors according to the scope of your business, the next step to do is perform page analysis to take the competitive advantage. While examining the pages, you should try to understand their performance by looking at which pages of your competitors get the most traffic, rank top, and how. Understanding competitors' performance on a high level will give you an idea about the current SEO performance of your website compared to your rivals. And the easiest way to monitor performance is controlling SEO metrics by using SEO tools which can be free or paid (e.g., Semrush, Moz, Ahrefs).So, the metrics that you should monitor are as follows;Domain authority and ratingAlexa rankOrganic traffic volumesPage impressionsRanking positionRanking keywordsReferring domains According to the metrics above, you can investigate the weaknesses and strengths of your competitors that you can turn to your advantage. However, please note that the higher the competitors' metrics than yours, it will be harder to dominate them.Step 3-) Perform Content Gap AnalysisAfter analyzing the pros and cons of competitors, the next step is performing content gap analysis (also called keyword gap analysis). Content gap analysis is a method that helps you to find the high-search volume and business-relevant keywords that you do not rank, but your competitors rank at the top. Content gap analysis gives you a chance to gain a competitive advantage by ranking for new keywords and threatening the SEO performance of competitors. Therefore, it is a critical part of the SEO competitor analysis.Doing the content gap analysis manually can be difficult because your competitors probably rank for hundreds of keywords on SERP. Therefore, using an SEO tool can honestly be helpful to save your time and not miss any opportunity. You may consider tools like Ahrefs Content Gap tool to perform the analysis and find new opportunities. While performing SEO content gap analysis, you can ask yourself the following questions below;Which keywords do my competitors rank?Why do they rank for those keywords which you do not? What do they do differently and extra from you? How do they drive organic traffic to their websites instead of yours? What can you do next to improve the performance of your pages and outrank your competitors?When you complete your content gap analysis, you can optimize your pages according to the new and existing keywords to increase your traffic and ranking.Step 4-) Analyze On-Page SEO and ContentThe next step you must follow for the competitor analysis is studying the on-page SEO strategies of your competitors. Analyzing competitors' on-site SEO strategies and performance will help you determine what you can do better and differentiate to improve your performance.You should check and try to understand the following parts below;Page titleMeta descriptionHeadingsContent (check content and media types, topics, length, style, keywords, and publish and update dates)Internal linking, breadcrumbs (pay special attention to schema markup and featured snippets for advanced ranking opportunities) URL structureSo, performing on-site SEO analysis and making comparisons with your rivals can help you recognize issues related to your pages which you can optimize and work on to rank better.Step 5-) Study BacklinksThe next step to do is research the backlinks of your competitors. As link building is a significant ranking factor for search engines, it is one of the critical SEO strategies. If your competitors put so much effort into link building and have high-quality backlink profiles then, you should work on your backlink strategies. Otherwise, it will definitely be more challenging to compete against them to improve your SEO performance. You should look at the following features below while working on backlinks of your competitors;Quality over quantity (prefer high-quality backlinks from reliable sources) Link-type (focus on dofollow links but do not ignore nofollow links which are great sources to increase traffic, brand awareness, and site performance)After finishing backlink analysis, you can work on building your backlink strategy according to the sites where your competitors get their backlinks.Step 6-) Focus Web Design and User Experience (UI/UX)The final step of the SEO competitor analysis is making better the design and user experience of your pages compared to competitors. As it is known that Google has attached importance to user experience with improved page speed, better mobile experience, or rich search results over the past few years. Therefore, if your site is not performing better than your competitors and not working in accordance with the Google algorithm, you should clearly work on user experience. Controlling and focusing on the following topics below can help you to learn what your competitors are doing, what you are currently doing, and what you can do to achieve the best; Responsiveness (both mobile and desktop)High page speed and performance (both mobile and desktop)Well organized and understandable site structure (especially check site navigation)Meeting with user intentProviding basic but smartly designed pagesThus, if you realize problematic issues after your analysis, this is an excellent chance to get the competitive advantage on your side on SERP. Final WordsFinally, SEO competitor analysis is an ongoing process that you should redo every month that depends on the industry and scope of your business to survive in the market and be competitive. And do not forget that even the basic improvements can matter when it comes to SEO. If you have more questions about the competitor analysis or need any help related to SEO, do not hesitate to contact our team!