10 tips for successful Pinterest advertising

How do you pin to win? Columnist Brad O'Brien offers some tips to help you step up your advertising on Pinterest and stay ahead of the curve.

Pinterest has always been about the sharing and discovery of ideas. It’s also becoming quite thepowerful advertising platform to drive performance marketing through the concept of idea discovery.

With the 10 tips below, you’ll be ready to take on Pinterest advertising like a true pro.

1. Use one pin per campaign

A/B testing of creative (pins) should be done at the campaign level. The main reason this is effective is that when multiple promoted pins are within a campaign, inevitably the lion’s share of impressions and spend will go to one pin.

Note, too, that Pinterest optimizes for click-through rates and not conversion goals (although it can track conversions).

2. Group campaigns by keywords and themes

When structuring your Pinterest campaigns, think of each campaign as its own category comprising an overall theme and corresponding keywords. For example, a healthy meal subscription service may create campaigns such as Gluten-Free, Vegan, Paleo and Low Carb.

Work with your Pinterest rep (if you have one) or your agency to determine which themes have the highest monthly search volume to prioritize campaign creation.

3. Remember that creative is a more powerful lever than keywords

Given Pinterest’s obvious similarities to a digital channel like SEM, it can be tempting to over-analyze keywords on the platform. While there are keyword-focused approaches you can and should take, the pin itself will carry more overall weight than the keywords themselves.

This is because of the Pinterest search algorithm itself, the fact that most searches on Pinterest are exploratory and the platform’s highly visual nature.

4. Know how the keyword algorithm works

Pinterest is making efforts towards getting closer to exact match, but many elements are still broad match, and broad match should be assumed when choosing keywords.

Use the related keyword suggestions from the Ads Manager, and add keywords from Pinterest’s guided search. A good number to start with for campaigns would be 30 to 40 keywords; plan to expand from there after letting those build data.

5. Use a vertical aspect ratio in your pins

Put another way, pins that are much longer than they are wide perform extremely well. The reason is that they physically take up a lot of space in Pinterest results and get noticed. This is especially true for mobile, where one pin that is vertically oriented could even require a user to scroll to view the whole pin, increasing exposure time to the pin.

6. Repurpose best organic pins for advertising

The best-promoted pins are those that are able to pull their own weight through organic activity. A promoted pin is like a foot in the door, but real efficiency comes from the virality of your pins.

When launching campaigns, use Pinterest Analytics to find your pins with the highest number of clicks, repins and likes, and promote those. For outside inspiration, check out Pinterest’s Great Promoted Pins board.

7. Leverage interest targets

Interest targets are available now in Pinterest, and they’re said to be here to stay. Currently, Pinterest offers more than 420 different interest targets such as travel, weddings and men’s/women’s fashion, as well as sub-interests within these.

A best practice for interest targets is to use these in addition to keywords as targets within campaigns, as interests are behavior-based vs. search-based.

8. Separate mobile & desktop by campaign

As digital marketers know, mobile user behavior can vary greatly, and that also applies on Pinterest. One major benefit to separating out placements by campaign is that you can manage the costs separately, as mobile will have cheaper CPCs.

Let the budgets flow independently between placements so that you can manage towards placements providing the highest ROI (return on investment).

9. Consider a shallower conversion metric

While Pinterest can certainly drive bottom-funnel conversions, you may want to consider tracking shallower conversions, as well. You may find that Pinterest will drive incredibly efficient email signups, but not purchases. Tracking a shallower conversion allows you to define true value from Pinterest most accurately.

Pro tip: Use “gated” landing pages for Pinterest, requiring email signup/sign-in when the user arrives on your site.

10. You can retarget on Pinterest

If you work with a Pinterest Marketing API Partner, retargeting is available in select ad platforms. You can access retargeting by placing Pinterest’s conversion tags on your site, as well as uploading your CRM list into the API.

But be patient, as retargeting is on the Pinterest Ads Manager roadmap, though the company hasn’t publicly shared timing for availability of its customer database targeting.

Source: http://marketingland.com/10-tips-successful-pinterest-advertising-174127

Mobile vs. desktop: Are you optimizing both experiences?

Columnist Aaron Strout takes a look at the similarities and differences between the desktop and mobile experiences and how you can take advantage of both to provide the best results for your customers.

In March of 2015, the number of mobile-only users overtook desktop users, according to ComScore. This is a trend that will only become more pronounced over the next 10 years, as both business and personal users shift away from being tethered to desks and instead choose to access the internet any time from anywhere.

Tech giant Intel (disclosure: client) recently announced that it was shifting its focus away from PCs and onto enterprise business needs (servers) and mobile-enabled technologies, or the Internet of Things (IoT). This doesn’t mean the death of PCs and laptops is upon us, but it does signify that for those creating online experiences, more thought needs to be put into the differences between the desktop and mobile experiences.

While many companies over the last several years have invested in mobile experiences for their customers, they have taken a fairly narrow approach to creating the applications or responsive designs. What this means is that while the navigation, text, graphics and download speeds have been optimized for smartphones and tablets, the overall experience, user needs and content have not been similarly thought through.

This article will address the similarities and differences between the desktop and mobile experiences, along with some prescriptive ways to take advantage of both.

Similarities

A lot of time is spent looking at the differences between desktop and mobile experiences, but it’s worth noting there are quite a few areas that the two have in common:

• Good user interfaces (UI) win. Have you ever been on a website, whether mobile or desktop, that’s hard to read? Or the navigation makes it hard to accomplish what you set out to do? We all have at some point in our browsing experience, and it’s a direct result of a poorly thought-out user interface.

While a bad desktop user experience can sometimes be a little more forgivable, on both platforms, this leads to higher bounce rates, less time spent on site and lower likelihood that customers can and will complete the task we want them to.

• Researching and digesting content. There are obvious trade-offs when it comes to researching and digesting content on desktop versus mobile devices. It’s much harder to read on one’s laptop on a crowded train or plane than with a tablet. It’s also less enjoyable to read a book on a phone.

But most publishers today have figured out how to deliver reasonably good experiences on all types of devices. And research tools like Yelp, Google or Kayak have made it pretty straightforward to find what you want, when you want.

• Email. While there are definitely different benefits to reading and writing email on a PC or a laptop versus a tablet or phone, people have become pretty facile at both. And in many cases, people use both experiences to their advantage (Mobile for quick perusal and responses to urgent emails and desktop for digesting or crafting lengthier emails).

• Photo browsing/editing. Taking photos or videos is still much easier to do on a mobile device than on a laptop or PC, but browsing, and even editing, are relatively easy to do on both formats now. In fact, one might argue that it’s easier for the novice to edit photos on a mobile device with built-in capabilities in applications like Instagram, Snapchat and Facebook than on the desktop.

However, it will be a while before creative types choose their smartphones for deep-dive Photoshop editing over their MacBooks.

Differences

While there are obvious differences between desktop and mobile experiences, some matter more than others in delivering the optimal experience to customers. Here are a few differences that are critical when thinking about the overall user experience (UX):

• Real estate. In a desktop world, page real estate is rarely an issue, whether the user is tracking supply chain activities, scrolling through Facebook or researching which car to lease. Although I personally find that I am more facile with Facebook on my phone than on my desktop (too many choices and less intuitive placement of features).

On a phone, less real estate means different choices, including more compact navigation, different graphic layouts, bigger type and less text.

• Location. Although more desktop sites are now asking users if they can “access their location,” the means for tracking a user’s whereabouts are much less precise than on a mobile device, which usually knows where a person is in the world down to a five- to 10-meter radius.

Desktops will continue to get better at this as IP addresses provide more precise locations, but mobile users are increasingly reliant on their devices knowing where they are and leveraging that to help them with smarter searches, photo-tagging capabilities, directions and even weather alerts.

• Photo/video capabilities. In the “Similarities” bucket, I discussed the fact that browsing and editing photos on a desktop/laptop and a mobile device was not radically different (at least at a surface level). However, taking photos and videos with a mobile device is much easier than in a desktop environment, and technologies like Periscope (Twitter) and Facebook Live are now enabling true broadcast capabilities.

As smartphone and tablet cameras catch up with the megapixels offered by high-end digital cameras, more and more photos and videos are being captured every day, allowing more people (and businesses) to become their own media outlets.

• Push notifications. Alerts on our PCs and laptops have been around for dozens of years. And while those aren’t going away any time soon, they don’t have the same impact (or messaging opportunity) as push notifications on a phone or tablet.

I explored this topic a little over a year ago, when I asked if push notifications could eventually replace emails. (I think the answer is no, but we will see a greater bifurcation in how we use both over the next few years).

• Portability. File this under “no duh,” but this is one of the reasons mobile-only usage has overtaken desktop usage. At the end of the day, many of us have our smartphones (and maybe even our tablets) with us everywhere we go.

With a laptop, we gained more mobility than we used to have with the PCs that sat in our offices, but even then, we wouldn’t carry our laptops with us to the beach, up the slopes, or even to our kids’ soccer games.

As a marketer, what can you do?

One of the things I’ve thought a lot about recently is that I need to be careful when I talk about mobile and location-based technologies with customers, because my enthusiasm for mobile might be construed as a discredit to the PC/laptop world. And while the latter is clearly dying a slow death, we still have a long way to go before we see the last of the larger-format computing devices.

To that end, as marketers, we don’t need to look at mobile versus desktop being an “or,” but rather an “and.” What is critical is to ensure that we are providing the best possible outcomes for our customers as they navigate their omnichannel experiences.

Here are five areas marketers can and should focus on as they think through these experiences:

1. A good UX starts with marketers asking the question, “What does my customer want to do?” My friend (and former head of social/mobile at McDonald’s), Rick Wion, told me that customers using their mobile app fell into two primary categories: a) job applicants who didn’t have a PC and wanted to fill out an application online; and b) parents with young children who wanted to find a location with a jungle gym on premise.

While I’m sure those two activities take place on the desktop version of McDonald’s site, they may rank far below other use cases like finding nutritional information and downloading coupons.

2. As I highlighted above, even if customers can do a task like email equally well on desktops and mobile devices, leveraging the benefits of each environment can be a huge win.

Desktops are great for more intensive tasks that require heavy-duty editing, reading, writing and processing, while mobile is better for real time, digesting and capturing. Are you creating the best experience on both for your customers?

3. Have you mapped out your customer journey? Very often, your customers will likely use more than one device as they consider buying a product or service from you. Leverage these so that the experience you create across mobile and desktop works in a complementary fashion.

As an example, if you know customers are on their mobile phone and researching a car, you may want to offer to email them a link to a more in-depth report from Consumer Reports that wouldn’t be easy to digest from their phone. Or if you know it’s easier to scan a barcode with their phone versus their desktop, ask them in an email if they would like to SMS a link to their mobile device for later usage.

4. Take into account which demographics prefer which devices, but don’t assume that always holds true. For instance, it’s always assumed that Millennials dislike email and desktop environments and prefer to use smartphones and social apps like Snapchat and Instagram. While this can be a good starting place, prove this true by looking at your web stats, surveying your customers, or better yet, watching their behavior over time and adapting how you interact with them.

5. Keep abreast of evolving trends. I remember 15 years ago when I was working at Fidelity Investments, we had a “Chief Mobile Officer” who would tell me every year that “this is the year of mobile.” He wasn’t incorrect, because every year, mobile became a little more important.

But what you could do then versus now is night and day. And while that might be obvious, think of how much smartphones have evolved just over the last three to four years — new hardware, more functionality, greater processing power.

As a fellow marketer, I know just how hard it is to add “one more thing” to think about when it comes to creating digital experiences for our customers. But no longer is it enough to just offer a responsive experience in mobile — or to eschew the importance of a desktop experience for the sake of mobile. Today, we live in a world where both are critical, and if we map the usage to our customers’ journeys and needs, everybody wins.

Source: http://marketingland.com/mobile-vs-desktop-optimizing-experiences-175380

How To Get Started With Accelerated Mobile Pages (AMP)

Google is currently rolling out accelerated mobile pages in its mobile search results, but how can you get in on the action? Columnist Paul Shapiro explains how you can mark up your mobile pages for a better mobile user experience.

Google’s Accelerated Mobile Pages (AMP) project is being launched today. Are you ready for it? In today’s column, I’ll give you an overview of the offering and show you how to get started with it.

What Is AMP?

This past October, Google announced Accelerated Mobile Pages (AMP), a very accessible framework for creating fast-loading mobile web pages. The open-source initiative is designed to enable publishers to easily improve speed (and consequently, the user experience) for their mobile readership without sacrificing any ad revenue that they may rely upon.

Although experienced developers can often achieve similar results through intensive performance optimizations, publishers often neglect this due to resource constraints. AMP allows these optimizations to be easily achieved without altering the primary mobile web experience.

There’s also the added benefit of its future usage by Google and other prominent web technology companies, who are encouraging its use by integrating it heavily into their respective platforms.

How Does AMP Work?

Essentially a framework for creating mobile web pages, AMP consists of three basic parts:

1. AMP HTML: A subset of HTML, this markup language has some custom tags and properties and many restrictions. But if you are familiar with regular HTML, you should not have difficulty adapting existing pages to AMP HTML. For more details on how it differs from basic HTML, check out AMP Project’s list of required markup that your AMP HTML page “must” have.
2. AMP JS: A JavaScript framework for mobile pages. For the most part, it manages resource handling and asynchronous loading. It should be noted that third-party JavaScript is not permitted with AMP.
3. AMP CDN: An optional Content Delivery Network, it will take your AMP-enabled pages, cache them and automatically make some performance optimizations.

How Will You AMP Your Site?

For starters, you will have to maintain at least two versions of any article page: The original version of your article page that users will typically see, and the AMP version of that page.

Since AMP doesn’t permit things such as form elements and third-party JavaScript, you likely will not be able to have lead forms, on-page comments and some other elements you may be used to having on your page in a standard implementation. (Although there is currently a hack using iframesthat provides a solution to this. Thanks to Conrad O’Connell for helping me verify the hack.)

It is also likely that you will have to rewrite your site template to accommodate the restrictions. For example, all CSS in AMP must be in-line and be less than 50KB. Due to loading-intensiveness of custom fonts, they must be loaded using a special amp-font extension, in order to better control that loading.

Multimedia must be handled specially. For example, images need to utilize the custom amp-img element and must include an explicit width and height. (When converting a legacy website to an AMP template, this can be a major pain if the width and height attributes aren’t already being used). Additionally, if your images are animated GIFs, you need to use the separate amp-anim extended component.

Like images, there is a custom tag that must be used to embed locally hosted videos via HTML5, called amp-video. For embedding YouTube video, however — which the majority of web videos are — there is a separate extended component, amp-youtube.

There is also support for things such as slideshows via amp-carousel and image lightboxes via amp-image-lightbox, as well social media embeds for Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, Pinterest and Vine via their own extended components.

These tag and extended components aren’t difficult to use; they just require some planning in your site design.

In order for Google (and other technologies supporting the AMP Project) to detect the AMP version of your article, you will need to modify the original version of the article page. The original article page must include the following tag, essentially a canonical tag for AMP pages:

<link rel="amphtml" href="http://www.example.com/blog-post/amp/">

The AMP Discovery page also mentions that some platforms that support AMP will require Schema.org meta data to specify the content type of the page. (Currently, “article,” “recipe,” “review” and “video” are listed as page type examples on GitHub.)

Moreover, it also indicates that Schema.org meta data “is a requirement to make your content eligible to appear in the demo of the Google Search news carousel.” So if you’re trying to get a future benefit from Google by implementing AMP, make sure you get your schema right!

How Can I Monetize With Ads In AMP?

The increased rise of ad blockers has made it difficult for publishers to monetize their websites. For some users, improving website load time has been an incentive to use ad blockers, which can aid in improving browsing speed. AMP may be seen as a response to this issue, with the project stating:

A goal of the Accelerated Mobile Pages Project is to ensure effective ad monetization on the mobile web while embracing a user-centric approach. With that context, the objective is to provide support for a comprehensive range of ad formats, ad networks and technologies in Accelerated Mobile Pages.

As a result, a number of the most popular ad networks are currently using the amp-ad extended component (with more compatibility likely on the way):

• Amazon A9
• AdReactor
• Google AdSense
• AOL AdTech
• Google Doubleclick
• Flite
• Taboola
• Adform
• DotAndAds
• plista
• Smart AdServer
• Yieldmo

If you want to see what these look like, examples for each ad network are provided within the .md files on AMP’s GitHub page.

If your monetization is more complex — utilizing paywalls or subscriptions — there is documentation available for implementing it within AMP, as well, using the “AMP Access” extension.

Does AMP Have Analytics?

Yes. In fact, analytics in AMP is very smart. To prevent multiple analytics tracking from slowing down a site, they implemented the philosophy of “measure once, report to many.” There are two paths to enable analytics functionality with AMP for your website:

• The Amp-Pixel Element: This is a simple tag that can be used to count page views as a typical tracking pixel would, using a GET request. There are a number of variables that can be passed through it, such as DOCUMENT_REFERRER and Title.
• The Amp-Analytics Extended Component: This is a little bit more advanced than the amp-pixel. It is likely what you’ll use to implement analytics on your site because it allows for a greater level of configuration for analytics interactions.

If you aren’t trying to get Google Analytics working, amp-analytics is the way to go. You will need to add the necessary JavaScript library in the <head> and then configure it via some JSON markup in the <body> section of your page.

If you are interested in Google Analytics in AMP, check out the Google’s AMP Analytics section on their developer page. It has several examples of implementations.

What Will AMP Look Like On Google?

Google has provided a demo of what an AMP feature would look like in the SERP. You can try it out by navigating to g.co/ampdemo on your mobile phone (or emulate it within Chrome Developer Tools). Then, search for something like “Mars.” You will see a carousel toward the top with AMP articles.

Click on one for a reading experience embedded in the SERP. You can swipe right or left to read another AMP-enabled article. It’s a different experience from simply navigating to a publisher’s AMP page.

Several major publishers can be found within the demo, such as The Guardian (example AMP page) and The Washington Post (example AMP page).

How Do I Get Started With AMP In WordPress?

One of the easiest ways to get your hands dirty with AMP right now is to implement it on a WordPress website. An official plugin is being developed by Automattic/WordPress, and it is frequently being updated on GitHub.

Step 1: Install The Official WordPress Plugin

To get started, head over to the amp-wp GitHub page and click the “Download ZIP” button.

You can install this on your WordPress site just as you would any other WordPress plugin.

Once it’s installed, you simply need to append “/amp/” to an article page (or, if you don’t have nice permalinks, you can alternatively append “?amp=1”).

Step 2: Validate & Tweak

Eventually, the Google Search Console should pick up on the AMP version of your articles via the rel=”amphtml” tag appended by the plugin, allowing easy validation of articles in bulk. The only problem with it, in my experience thus far, is that it doesn’t detect changes very quickly. If you fix something, the correction may not show up for days.

I recommend using a combination of the Search Console and Chrome validation process. To use the Chrome validation process, go to one of your AMP pages in Chrome and append “#development=1”to the end of the URL. Hit Control + Shift + I to open Chrome Developer Tools and head over to Console.

You may need to refresh the page, but once you do, it will either say “AMP validation successful” or give you a list of issues to fix.

More than likely, simply installing the WordPress plugin will not be enough, and you will have to go through and validate all of the pages you’d like to benefit from Accelerated Mobile Pages.

Depending on how your articles are formatted, you may need to make some changes in order to get the AMP pages to validate. The most common problems I personally experienced were with specifying height and width attributes for images and correcting old YouTube embed codes that weren’t using https.

Step 3: Get Schema Markup To Validate

As previously mentioned, it is also important to have valid schema markup on your AMP pages. To test your pages for valid markup, you can use Google’s Structured Data Testing Tool. I had some issues with WordPress not displaying a publisher logo and needed to make the following modification to the plugin.

Edit the class-amp-post-template.php file, either via FTP or within your WordPress Dashboard (go to Plugins > Editor and then select “AMP”) and change:

if ( $site_icon_url ) {

$metadata['publisher']['logo'] = array(

'@type' => 'ImageObject',

'url' => $site_icon_url,

'height' => self::SITE_ICON_SIZE,

'width' => self::SITE_ICON_SIZE,

);

}

to:

$metadata['publisher']['logo'] = array(

'@type' => 'ImageObject',

'url' => 'http://domain.com/wp-content/uploads/logo-60.png',

'height' => 60,

'width' => 170,

);

Make sure to replace the URL with a path to your own publisher logo and to specify height and width in pixels. You can find information for relevant markup here, which specifies that “ideally, logos are exactly 60px tall with width <= 600px.”

Step 4: Getting Google Analytics Working 

With The AMP WordPress Plugin

What good is a website if you can’t track it with analytics? The AMP WordPress plugin doesn’t enable amp-analytics out of the box, but it’s fairly straightforward to enable.

To enable the AMP WordPress plugin to work with Google Analytics, edit the amp-post-template-actions.php (different file from that previously mentioned) file, either via FTP or within your WordPress Dashboard (go to Plugins > Editor and then select “AMP”), and add the following to the end of it:

	add_action( 'amp_post_template_head', 'amp_post_template_add_analytics_js' );
	function amp_post_template_add_analytics_js( $amp_template ) {
	$post_id = $amp_template->get( 'post_id' );
	?>
	<script async custom-element="amp-analytics" src="https://cdn.ampproject.org/v0/amp-analytics-0.1.js"></script>
	<?php
	}
	add_action( 'amp_post_template_footer', 'xyz_amp_add_analytics' );
	function xyz_amp_add_analytics( $amp_template ) {
	$post_id = $amp_template->get( 'post_id' );
	?>
	<amp-analytics type="googleanalytics" id="analytics1">
	<script type="application/json">
	{
	"vars": {
	"account": "UA-XXXXX-Y"
	},
	"triggers": {
	"trackPageview": {
	"on": "visible",
	"request": "pageview"
	}
	}
	}
	</script>
	</amp-analytics>
	<?php
	}

view raw

amp-post-template-actions.php hosted with  by GitHub

Make sure you change UA-XXXXX-Y to represent your website’s Google Analytics property ID.

Now, re-validate your AMP pages, and you should have a basic AMP setup with tracking enabled for your WordPress website.

Conclusion

AMP provides a relatively easy way to improve the speed of mobile websites for publishers. With the end of February approaching, and the Google News Lab conducting regular office hours via Hangouts, we can expect to Google to roll out its integration soon. In what appears to be a response to the AMP Project’s momentum, even Facebook may be reacting. It recently decided to open Instant Articles to all publishers.