Why Fospha’s Ultimate TikTok Playbook is a Must-Read  

TikTok has rapidly become a powerhouse for ecommerce growth, making it essential for digital marketers. Fospha’s Ultimate TikTok Playbook provides actionable insights and proven strategies for brands at any stage of their TikTok journey, from starting out to scaling and maximizing long-term performance.  

“Our playbook demystifies the process, offering clear, data-driven guidance to help brands achieve exceptional results on the platform,” says Jamie Bolton, VP of Growth at Fospha.  

Key highlights of the playbook include:  

• Full Funnel Strategies: Optimize each stage from awareness to conversion.  
• Enhanced Measurement: Achieve clear visibility with multi-touch attribution and marketing mix modeling.  
• Creative Optimization: Best practices for engaging, trend-leveraging content.  
• Peak Period Strategies: Maximize returns during high-traffic periods with tools like Spark Ads and Branded Effect.

Case Studies Highlight Success  

Learn from brands like Underoutfit, Represent, Nutrimuscle, and The Essence Vault who have leveraged Fospha’s insights to achieve remarkable results on TikTok.  

About Fospha  

Fospha is pioneering a new approach to cross-channel digital marketing measurement. With no-code implementation, clients are live in 2 to 3 weeks with a year of full funnel performance modelled, ensuring complete privacy safety.  

For more information, visit www.fospha.com and follow us on LinkedIn and Twitter for the latest updates.  

Contact: Snezhina Kashukeeva: snezhina.kashukeeva@fospha.com 

A recent analysis of 71 brands offers valuable insights into the optimal strategies for startups, scaleups, mature brands, and majority offline businesses. Here’s what we learned. 

Startup Stage: Building the Foundation 

Key Strategy: Startups focus on impressions-driven channels like Paid Social to establish their audience base. This approach is essential for gaining visibility and creating a strong initial footprint in the market. 

Case Study: Pooch & Mutt exemplified this strategy by leveraging Paid Social to achieve significant year-on-year revenue gains while also improving acquisition costs. This foundational step is crucial for setting the stage for future growth and stability. 

Scaleup Stage: Accelerating Conversion 

Key Strategy: For scaleups, having already established an audience, the focus shifts to conversion activities. Increasing spend in impressions-led media helps continue generating demand while maintaining a balance with acquisition costs. 

Case Study: The Essence Vault successfully applied this approach, scaling their Meta presence while minimizing cost increases. This stage emphasizes the importance of efficient spending to maximize conversion rates and sustain growth momentum. 

Mature Stage: Expanding Horizons 

Key Strategy: Mature brands invest in higher funnel activities to avoid market saturation and explore international expansion opportunities. This strategic pivot ensures sustained growth and market diversification. 

Case Study: Represent scaled their efforts on TikTok, enhancing growth and improving Meta efficiency. By expanding their presence in the US, they exemplified how mature brands can navigate saturation and seek new markets for continued success. 

Majority Offline Brands: Embracing Digital Channels 

Key Strategy: Majority offline brands primarily invest in click-based channels like Performance Max. However, the analysis reveals significant opportunities in Paid Social, suggesting a balanced approach for optimal results. 

Nutrimuscle is a fast-growing sports supplement brand that started using Fospha in June 2023. Their goal was to grow by increasing conversions and effectively allocating spend, but like many businesses, one of the primary challenges they faced was the inability to track key metrics (i.e. Cost of Acquiring Customers) and lack of transparency into campaign performance.

Nutrimuscle wanted to understand where to allocate spend, and which channels would be most effective for increasing reach and conversions. Last click and ad platform measurement wasn’t enough- this is where they turned to Fospha.

The report reveals a significant underinvestment in paid social channels, with advertisers reaching only 59% of their potential, suggesting an opportunity to nearly double spend for profitable returns.  

Here are some key takeaways from the report: 

• Meta and TikTok emerge as leaders in paid social success, with Meta boasting the highest relative Return On Ad Spend (ROAS). Notably, TikTok stands out for new customer acquisition, outpacing other channels in driving new conversions.  
• Snapchat’s major update has catapulted it as a growth channel worth watching, with a remarkable 504% increase in ROAS year-over-year.  
• The report highlights a widespread issue in the industry: the underrepresentation of impressions-led channels by Google Analytics and ad platforms’ own attribution models. This discrepancy emphasizes the need for standardized measurement methods to accurately report performance.  

Now is the time to reassess your investment in paid social, explore the potential of emerging channels like Snapchat, and adopt reliable measurement methods to navigate the complex digital marketing landscape effectively. 

For a deep dive into these insights and to leverage them for your digital strategy, download the full Fospha State of eCommerce Report Q1 2024. Embrace the data-driven insights to refine your approach, optimize spend across platforms, and drive your eCommerce brand towards profitable growth.  

What’s the problem this partnership is solving?

Measuring the true impact of impressions-led advertising has long been a tough task, especially with new privacy measures, which have made getting the right data even harder.

Fospha has found that basic click-tracking methods (like last-click and MTA) don’t fully recognize the value of upper-funnel activity, with a 2023 study finding that these methods miss about 74% of the sales that come from impression-based media. Across their client base, Fospha also found that brands that aren’t investing in higher-funnel activity like Snapchat have significantly higher acquisition cost and lower return on advertising spend.

Fospha’s latest report reveals Snapchat to be a key growth channel amongst their brands, with ROAS increasing by 504% from 2022 to 2023, even while spend grew 76% YoY. Fospha states that this demonstrates an opportunity to capitalize on strong performance at higher spend levels.

On Snap’s Q4 2023 earnings call, co-founder and CEO Evan Spiegel highlighted the importance of continuing to drive improved performance for advertising partners as a focus for Snap in 2024. Fospha data supports this, showing Snap ROAS has been rising since the company began updating its performance products in late 2022 and early 2023. The Fospha partnership highlights the importance for both companies of empowering brands to improve their attribution capabilities, identify growth opportunities, and maximize returns on their advertising investment.

Why Fospha?

Fospha is pioneering a transformational new approach to cross-channel digital marketing measurement. A no-code implementation means clients are live in 2 to 3 weeks with a year of full funnel performance (impressions, clicks, zero-party data) modelled and it’s completely privacy-safe (no user-level personal data is used).

Sam Carter, Fospha CEO, said, “We’re delighted that Snap is certifying Fospha as a key partner, further validating our mission to help eCommerce brands spend with confidence. Our product allows us to clearly see the massive unrealized opportunity that brands have in paid social media. We’re also particularly bullish on Snap based on the data we see coming in from advertisers. Working with the Snap team to help retailers realize the potential here is really exciting.”

To find out more, reach out to Fospha or your Snapchat account manager for more details.

Top of Funnel Marketing 

Top-of-funnel marketing is about more than just creating buzz; it’s about laying a sustainable foundation for growth. Imagine it as the first chapter of an engaging novel, where the story begins, intrigue is created, and the relationship with the reader—or in this case, the customer—starts to form.  

Historically, due to the difficulty in tracking and measuring the impact of these top-of-funnel activities, brands have gravitated towards bottom-of-funnel advertising, where results are more tangible, like direct sales and conversions. However, this approach often overlooks a critical aspect of customer acquisition and brand building.  

According to a Fospha report, brands that consistently invest in top-of-funnel activities for a minimum of 10 months are likely to see reduced customer acquisition costs and a more robust Return on Ad Spend (ROAS). Specifically, the report reveals that brands prioritizing long-term brand awareness strategies can improve their ROAS by 42% and decrease acquisition costs by 35%, in comparison to brands that concentrate exclusively on conversion-focused activities. 

The Challenges of Current Measurement Practices 

The digital advertising landscape has evolved significantly over the past five years, growing more complex and demanding advanced measurement techniques.  

Traditional pixel- and cookie-based methods, which have been the mainstay of most brands, are losing their effectiveness due to regulatory changes like GDPR, CCPA, and iOS 14.5, which prioritise consumer privacy over technological efficacy. This has led to a significant reduction in visibility, especially in the early stages of the customer journey. Consequently, marketing attribution models that do not account for top-of-funnel activities may overestimate the effectiveness of lower-funnel activities. 

Fospha x TikTok 

On Monday 8 Jan 2024, TikTok introduced Fospha as one of the measurement partners. This partnership represents a significant development in the intricate world of digital marketing, highlighting the importance of not solely relying on bottom-of-funnel metrics for brands aiming to achieve sustainable growth and broad market reach. 

Fospha’s solution empowers brands to measure their paid media spend across platforms like TikTok in a data-driven way that aligns with profitability. This means that brands can now gain insights into the impact of their top-of-funnel activities, optimize their strategies accordingly, and scale their efforts without sacrificing their bottom line. 

Case Study 

Let’s take a closer look at The Essence Vault, a fragrance brand that faced the common dilemma of digital expansion. By embracing TikTok’s dynamic platform and partnering with Fospha, they saw a 20% increase in revenue and a 7% improvement in ROAS, illustrating the power of a data-driven, top-of-funnel approach. 

Conclusion 

TikTok has exploded in popularity, emerging as a significant alternative ad channel. The platform has shown strong returns, outperforming other growing platforms like YouTube. Top-of-funnel marketing is more than just an initial handshake with potential customers; it’s an indispensable part of a brand’s growth strategy in today’s complex advertising ecosystem. With strategic tools and partnerships like Fospha and TikTok, brands can confidently navigate this landscape, ensuring that every stage of the marketing funnel is optimised for success. As we look towards the future of digital advertising, it’s clear that understanding and leveraging top-of-funnel marketing is not just a strategy, but a necessity for sustainable growth and success. 

For further information on this partnership, visit Fospha’s blog and TikTok for Business Blog. 

30-second summary:

• Good page speed and user experience help your site stand out in search results
• The Interaction to Next Paint metric is replacing First Input Delay
• You can improve make your site respond faster to user input by reducing CPU processing times

The Core Web Vitals are a set of metrics that Google has defined to measure how good a website’s user experience is. They first became a ranking signal in 2021.

While the metric definitions have been tweaked over time, the introduction of the Interaction to Next Paint metric is the biggest change since the launch of the Core Web Vitals initiative.

What is Interaction to Next Paint (INP)?

Interaction to Next Paint is a metric that evaluates how quickly your website responds to user interaction. It measures how much time elapses between the user input, like a button click, and the next time the page content refreshes (the “next paint”).

To rank better in Google this interaction delay should be less than 200 milliseconds. This ensures that the website feels responsive to users.

How are the Core Web Vitals changing?

Google has announced that Interaction to Next Paint will become one of the three Core Web Vitals metrics in March 2024. At that point a website that responds to user input too slowly could do worse in search result rankings.

INP will replace the current First Input Delay (FID) metric. While FID also measures responsiveness, it is more limited as it only looks at the first user interaction. It also only measures the delay until the input event starts being handled, rather than waiting until the user can see the result.

Currently only 64.9% of mobile websites do well on the Interaction to Next Paint metric and it will be harder to get a good INP score than a good First Input Delay score.

How can I measure the Interaction to Next Paint metric on my website?

Run a website speed test to see how fast your website loads and how quickly it responds to user input.

Open the “Web Vitals” tab once your test is complete. You can see the Interaction to Next Paint metric at the bottom of the page.

In this case only 38% of users have a good INP experience.

How can I optimize Interaction to Next Paint?

Interaction delays happen when the browser needs to perform a lot of CPU processing before it can update the page. This can happen for two reasons:

• Ongoing background tasks prevent the user input from being handled
• Handling the user input itself is taking a lot of time

Background tasks often happen during the initial page load, but can happen later on as well. They are often caused by third party code embedded on the website.

Responding to a user interaction can require a lot of processing. If that can’t be optimized you can consider showing a spinner to provide visual feedback until the processing task is complete.

Running JavaScript code is the most common type of processing, but complex visual updates can also take a long time.

Use Chrome DevTools to analyze performance

The Chrome DevTools performance profiler shows what tasks are taking a long time and should be optimized. Start a recording, click on an element on the page, and then click on the longest bars in the visualization.

This allows you to identify whether the code comes from a third party or from your own website. You can also dive deeper to see how the task can be sped up.

Check the Total Blocking Time metric to identify background tasks

The Total Blocking Time metric tracks how often there are background CPU tasks that could block other code from running. If the user interacts with the page while a task is already in progress then the browser first completes that task before handling the input event.

You can use tools like Google Lighthouse to see how this metric can be optimized.

If processing-heavy tasks on your website are part of your core website code you’ll need to work with your development team to optimize these. For third parties you can review whether the script is still needed, or contact customer support of the vendor to see if it’s possible to optimize the code.

Monitor Interaction to Next Paint

Want to keep track of how you’re doing on INP and other Core Web Vitals? DebugBear can keep track of your website speed and help you optimize it.

Start a free 14-day trial today and deliver a better user experience.

Conclusion

The Interaction to Next Paint metric represents the biggest change to Google’s Core Web Vitals since they were originally announced. INP addresses the deficiencies of the previous First Input Delay metric and provides a better representation of how users experience a website.

Check how your website does on the Interaction to Next Paint metric before the ranking change is rolled out in 2024. That way you’ll have plenty of time to identify optimizations and make your website faster.

Try DebugBear with a free 14-day trial.

30-second summary:

• Content managers who want to assess their on-page performance can feel lost at sea due to numerous SEO signals and their perceptions
• This problem gets bigger and highly complex for industries with niche semantics
• The scenarios they present to the content planning process are highly specific, with unique lexicons and semantic relationships
• Sr. SEO Strategist at Brainlabs, Zach Wales, uses findings from a rigorous competitive analysis to shed light on how to evaluate your on-page game

Industries with niche terminology, like scientific or medical ecommerce brands, present a layer of complexity to SEO. The scenarios they present to the content planning process are highly specific, with unique lexicons and semantic relationships. 

SEO has many layers to begin with, from technical to content. They all aim to optimize for numerous search engine ranking signals, some of which are moving targets. 

So how does one approach on-page SEO in this challenging space? We recently had the privilege of conducting a lengthy competitive analysis for a client in one of these industries. 

What we walked away with was a repeatable process for on-page analysis in a complicated semantic space. 

The challenge: Turning findings into action

At the outset of any analysis, it’s important to define the challenge. In the most general sense, ours was to turn findings into meaningful on-page actions — with priorities. 

And we would do this by comparing the keyword ranking performance of our client’s domain to that of its five chosen competitors.

Specifically, we needed to identify areas of the client’s website content that were losing to competitors in keyword rankings. And to prioritize things, we needed to show where those losses were having the greatest impact on our client’s potential for search traffic.

Adding to the complexity were two additional sub-challenges:

1. Volume of keyword data. When people think of “niche markets,” the implication is usually a small number of keywords with low monthly search volumes (MSV). Scientific industries are not so. They are “niche” in the sense that their semantics are not accessible to all—including keyword research tools—but their depth & breadth of keyword potential is vast.
2. Our client already dominated the market. At first glance, using keyword gap analysis tools, there were no product categories where our client wasn’t dominating the market. Yet they were incurring traffic losses from these five competitors from a seemingly random, spread-out number of cases. Taken together incrementally, these losses had significant impacts on their web traffic. 

If the needle-in-a-haystack analogy comes to mind, you see where this is going. 

To put the details to our challenge, we had to:

• Identify where those incremental effects of keyword rank loss were being felt the most — knowing this would guide our prioritization;
• Map those keyword trends to their respective stage of the marketing funnel (from informational top-of-funnel to the transactional bottom-of-funnel) 
• Rule out off-page factors like backlink equity, Core Web Vitals & page speed metrics, in order to…
• Isolate cases where competitor pages ranked higher than our client’s on the merits of their on-page techniques, and finally
• Identify what those successful on-page techniques were, in hopes that our client could adapt its content to a winning on-page formula.   

How to spot trends in a sea of data

When the data sets you’re working with are large and no apparent trends stand out, it’s not because they don’t exist. It only means you have to adjust the way you look at the data.

As a disclaimer, we’re not purporting that our approach is the only approach. It was one that made sense in response to another challenge at hand, which, again, is one that’s common to this industry: The intent measures of SEO tools like Semrush and Ahrefs — “Informational,” “Navigational,” “Commercial” and “Transactional,” or some combination thereof — are not very reliable. 

Our approach to spotting these trends in a sea of data went like this:

Step 1. Break it down to short-tail vs. long tail

Numbers don’t lie. Absent reliable intent data, we cut the dataset in half based on MSV ranges: Keywords with MSVs above 200 and those equal to/below 200. We even graphed these out, and indeed, it returned a classic short/long-tail curve.

This gave us a proxy for funnel mapping: Short-tail keywords, defined as high-MSV & broad focus, could be mostly associated with the upper funnel. This made long-tail keywords, being less searched but more specifically focused, a proxy for the lower funnel. 

Doing this also helped us manage the million-plus keyword dataset our tools generated for the client and its five competitor websites. Even if you perform the export hack of downloading data in batches, neither Google Drive nor your device’s RAM want anything to do with that much data.

Step 2. Establish a list of keyword-operative root words

The “keyword-operative root word” is the term we gave to root words that are common to many or all of the keywords under a certain topic or content type. For example, “dna” is a common root word to most of the keywords about DNA lab products, which our client and its competitors sell. And “protocols” is a root word for many keywords that exist in upper-funnel, informational content.

We established this list by placing our short- and long-tail data (exported from Semrush’s Keyword Gap analysis tool) into two spreadsheets, where we were able to view the shared keyword rankings of our client and the five competitors. We equipped these spreadsheets with data filters and formulas that scored each keyword with a competitive value, relative to the six web domains analyzed.  

Separately, we took a list of our client’s product categories and brainstormed all possibilities for keyword-operative root words. Finally, we filtered the data for each root word and noted trends, such as the number of keywords that a website ranked for on Google page 1, and the sum of their MSVs. 

Finally, we applied a calculation that incorporated average position, MSV, and industry click-through rates to quantify the significance of a trend. So if a competitor appeared to have a keyword ranking edge over our client in a certain subset of keywords, we could place a numerical value on that edge. 

Step 3. Identify content templates

If one of your objectives is to map keyword trends to the marketing funnel, then it’s critical to understand the role of page templates. Why? 

Page speed performance is a known ranking signal that should be considered. And ecommerce websites often have content templates that reflect each stage of the funnel. 

In this case, all six competitors conveniently had distinct templates for top-, middle- and bottom-funnel content:

• Top-funnel templates: Text-heavy, informational content in what was commonly called “Learning Resources” or something similar;
• Middle-funnel templates: Also text-heavy, informational content about a product category, with links to products and visual content like diagrams and videos — the Product Landing Page (PLP), essentially;
• Bottom-funnel templates: Transactional, Product Detail Pages (PDP) with concise, conversion-oriented text and purchasing calls-to-action.

Step 4. Map keyword trends to the funnel

After cross-examining the root terms (Step 2), keyword ranking trends began to emerge. Now we just had to map them to their respective funnel stage.

Having identified content templates, and having the data divided by short- & long-tail made this a quicker process. Our primary focus was on trends where competitor webpages were outranking our client’s site. 

Identifying content templates brought the added value of seeing where competitors, for example, outranked our client on a certain keyword because their winning webpage was built in a content-rich, optimized PLP, while our client’s lower-ranking page was a PDP.

Step 5. Rule out the off-page ranking factors

Since our goal was to identify & analyze on-page techniques, we had to rule out off-page factors like link equity and page speed. We sought cases where one page outranked another on a shared keyword, in spite of having inferior link equity, page speed scores, etc. 

For all of Google’s developments in processing semantics (e.g., BERT, the Helpful Content Update) there are still cases where a page with thin text content outranks another page that has lengthier, optimized text content — by virtue of link equity. 

To rule these factors out, we assigned an “SEO scorecard” to each webpage under investigation. The scorecard tallied the number of rank-signal-worthy attributes the page had in its SEO favor. This included things like Semrush’s page authority score, the number of internal vs. external inlinks, the presence and types of Schema markup, and Core Web Vitals stats.

The scorecards also included on-page factors, like the number of headers & subheaders (H1, H2, H3…), use of keywords in alt-tags, meta titles & their character counts, and even page word count. This helped give a high-level sense of on-page performance before diving into the content itself. 

Our findings

When comparing the SEO scorecards of our client’s pages to its competitors, we only chose cases where the losing scorecard (in off-page factors) was the keyword ranking winner. Here are a few of the standout findings.

Adding H3 tags to products names really works

This month, OrangeValley’s Koen Leemans published a Semrush article, titled, SEO Split Test Result: Adding H3 Tags to Products Names on Ecommerce Category Pages. We found this study especially well-timed, as it validated what we saw in this competitive analysis.

To those versed in on-page SEO, placing keywords in <h3> HTML format (or any level of <h…> for that matter) is a wise move. Google crawls this text before it gets to the paragraph copy. It’s a known ranking signal. 

When it comes to SEO-informed content planning, ecommerce clients have a tendency — coming from the best of intentions — to forsake the product name in pursuit of the perfect on-page recipe for a specific non-brand keyword. The value of the product name becomes a blind spot because the brand assumes it will outrank others on its own product names.

It’s somewhere in this thought process that an editor may, for example, decide to list product names on a PLP as bolded <p> copy, rather than as a <h3> or <h4>. This, apparently, is a missed opportunity. 

More to this point, we found that this on-page tactic performed even better when the <h>-tagged product name was linked (index, follow) to its corresponding PDP, AND accompanied with a sentence description beneath the product name. 

This is in contrast to the product landing page (PLP) which has ample supporting page copy, and only lists its products as hyperlinked names with no descriptive text. 

Word count probably matters, <h> count very likely matters

In the ecommerce space, it’s not uncommon to find PLPs that have not been visited by the content fairy. A storyless grid of images and product names. 

Yet, in every case where two PLPs of this variety went toe-to-toe over the same keyword, the sheer number of <h> tags seemed to be the only on-page factor that ranked one PLP above its competitors’ PLPs, which themselves had higher link equity. 

The takeaway here is that if you know you won’t have time to touch up your PLPs with landing copy, you should at least set all product names to <h> tags that are hyperlinked, and increase the number of them (e.g., set the page to load 6 rows of products instead of 4).  

And word count? Although Google’s John Mueller confirmed that word count is not a ranking factor for the search algorithm, this topic is debated. We cannot venture anything conclusive about word count from our competitive analyses. What we can say is that it’s a component of our finding that…

Defining the entire topic with your content wins

Backlinko’s Brian Dean ventured and proved the radical notion that you can optimize a single webpage to rank for not the usual 2 or 3 target keywords, but hundreds of them. That is if your copy encompasses everything about the topic that unites those hundreds of keywords. 

That practice may work in long-form content marketing but is a little less applicable in ecommerce settings. The alternative to this is to create a body of pages that are all interlinked deliberately and logically (from a UX standpoint) and that cover every aspect of the topic at hand.

This content should address the questions that people have at each stage of the awareness-to-purchase cycle (i.e., the funnel). It should define niche terminology and spell out acronyms. It should be accessible.

In one stand-out case from our analysis, a competitor page held position 1 for a lucrative keyword, while our client’s site and that of the other competitors couldn’t even muster a page 1 ranking. All six websites were addressing the keyword head-on, arguably, in all the right ways. And they had superior link equity.

What did the winner have that the rest did not? It happened that in this lone instance, its product was being marketed to a high-school teacher/administrator audience, rather than a PhD-level, corporate, governmental or university scientist. By this virtue alone, their marketing copy was far more layman-accessible, and, apparently, Google approved too.

The takeaway is not to dumb-down the necessary jargon of a technical industry. But it highlights the need to tell every part of the story within a topic vertical. 

Conclusion: Findings-to-action

There is a common emphasis among SEO bloggers who specialize in biotech & scientific industries on taking a top-down, topical takeover approach to content planning. 

I came across these posts after completing this competitive analysis for our client. This topic-takeover emphasis was validating because the “Findings-To-Action” section of our study prescribed something similar:

Map topics to the funnel. Prior to keyword research, map broad topics & subtopics to their respective places in the informational & consumer funnel. Within each topic vertical, identify:

• Questions-to-ask & problems-to-solve at each funnel stage
• Keyword opportunities that roll up to those respective stages
• How many pages should be planned to rank for those keywords
• The website templates that best accommodate this content
• The header & internal linking strategy between those pages

Unlike more common-language industries, the need to appeal to two audiences is especially pronounced in scientific industries. One is the AI-driven audience of search engine bots that scour this complex semantic terrain for symmetry of clues and meaning. The other is human, of course, but with a mind that has already mastered this symmetry and is highly capable of discerning it. 

To make the most efficient use of time and user experience, content planning and delivery need to be highly organized. The age-old marketing funnel concept works especially well as an organizing model. The rest is the rigor of applying this full-topic-coverage, content approach.

Zach Wales is Sr. SEO Strategist at Brainlabs.

Subscribe to the Search Engine Watch newsletter for insights on SEO, the search landscape, search marketing, digital marketing, leadership, podcasts, and more.

Join the conversation with us on LinkedIn and Twitter.

30-second summary:

• Bounce rate is the percentage of single-page visits or visits in which the person left your site from the entrance (landing) page
• This metric helps measure visit quality and relevance
• Exit rate is a metric that identifies the number of exits from your site, and, as with entrances, it will always be equal to the number of visits when applied over your entire website
• Use this metric in combination with particular content pages in order to determine the number of times that particular page was the last one viewed by visitors
• Pages that fail to meet visitor expectations, don’t provide clear navigation, talk about features rather than benefits, and content that’s not actionable all increase bounce rate

Google Analytics provides valuable intelligence into how visitors find, interact with and leave your website. This intelligence is central to improving both user experience and the profitability of your website. Google Analytics provides many useful metrics that help you do this and two of the most useful are the bounce rate and exit rate.

The difference between a bounce and an exit can be confusing, especially if you are new to analytics. The goal of this article, then, is to demystify the two and explain why they are important. It also acts as a guide to interpreting bounce and exit data and how to lower them in order to improve the performance of your website and increase conversions.

Making an entrance that counts

Before you can understand and calculate bounce rate you need to know a little about entrance pages, also referred to as landing pages and entry pages. Google defines an entrance page as:

Entrances

This metric identifies the number of entrances to your site. It will always be equal to the number of visits when applied over your entire website. Thus, this metric is most useful when combined with particular content pages, at which point, it will indicate the number of times a particular page served as an entrance to your site.

In short, an entrance page is the first page a visitor lands on when visiting a website. Entrances are, as we will see, a key factor in calculating bounce rate.

How to view your entrances?

In Google Analytics, you can easily view your entrances by following these simple steps:

1. Go to “Behavior,” under “Reports”
   
2. Click on “Site Content”
   
3. Click on “All Pages”
   
4. View your “Entrances”
   

Entrances are particularly helpful since they can show you which pages are bringing the most visits to your site. They can also tell you the opposite and help you identify the weakest pages with lower bounce rates.

Well, what is a bounce?

A bounce is a single-page visit. A bounce occurs when a visitor enters and exits a website viewing no other pages other than the entrance page.

And, what is bounce rate?

If, for example, 100 visitors enter your site via Page “A” and 20 of them leave without clicking through to any other page, page “A” would have a bounce rate of 20 percent.

The above figure shows site-wide averages.

Some of the reports Google Analytics generates will give site-wide averages. The screen grab above has been taken from the ‘Top Content’ report which can be found by clicking the Content tab in your Google Analytics dashboard.

The first thing you might notice is that when you add the average bounce rate and the average exit rate together the result is greater than 100 percent. If bounce rate and exit rate are measures of how many people leave your site, how can the total be greater than 100 percent. The answer is that it can’t.

You might be fooled into thinking that bounce rate is calculated as a percentage of Pageviews. This is a logical thought since it is figured in the report. However, when added together, bounces and exits would again be greater than the total Pageviews.

Bounce rate is not based on the number of visitors or the number of page views it’s based on entrances.

Why do people bounce?

People bounce because of many reasons the key to reducing your bounce rates lies in identifying and addressing the most common ones:

1. When pages don’t meet expectations

Let’s say, for example, that you are looking for a new air fryer. So you Google “buy air fryers free shipping”. You see an ad that says “air fryers With Free Shipping”. So you click on it. But when you click on the ad, instead of a landing page about different air fryers, you’re on the site’s homepage. What are you going to do? Bounce back to Google and make a new research to find a page that is 100% about air fryers.

2. When design is ugly

Having an ugly design can also lead users to bounce back. People largely judge websites first, based on design, and second on the content.

3. When the page gives users what they’re looking for

Yes. Not all bounces are “bad”. A bounce can be, in fact, a sign that your page gave users exactly what they were looking for.

For example, I have been looking personally over the last few days for a low-carb chicken soup recipe and I landed on this recipe page. This landing page had everything I needed to make the recipe: ingredients, detailed instructions, and pictures. So, as soon as I got my soup to simmer over medium-low heat, I closed the page.

Despite the fact that this single-page session is “technically” a bounce, it is not because that website suffered a bad UX or an ugly design. It’s just because I got what I needed.

Identifying pages with high bounce rates

Notice the figure below that shows sitewide entrances and bounces.

To get at the real numbers that contribute to bounce rate you need to dig a little deeper. The screen grab above has been taken from the ‘Top Landing Pages’ report which can also be found by clicking the Content tab in your Google Analytics dashboard.

As you work your way down the report you can also view bounce rates for individual pages.

The above figure shows the bounce rate at a page level.

The ‘Top Landing Pages’ report helps identify pages with high bounce rates that might require further investigation.

You can clearly see from Figure three how the bounce rate is calculated for a single page: (283 bounces / 303 entrances) * 100 = 93.39939939934% which analytics has rounded up to 93.40%. As interesting as this is, it tells us nothing about what is driving the bounce rate and what steps to take if any are required to lower it.

Bounce rate through poor user experience

Pages that fail to meet visitor expectations, don’t provide clear navigation, talk about features rather than benefits, and show content that is not actionable – all increase bounce rate. Not all visitors on your site are using desktop machines with ultra-fast connections and will abandon your site if a page takes too long to download. If you have been over-zealously linking to your site, links from pages that are not closely related can also increase the bounce rate. These are all things you can test for and fix to a degree.

Missing timestamps and the pages time forgot

Google Analytics reports the time visitors spend on pages by comparing timestamps. When a visitor lands on a page a timestamp is created which records the precise time they arrived.
If a visitor arrives at page “A” at 13.45 and clicks through and lands on page “B” at 13.47 two timestamps will be created. By subtracting the time the visitor lands on page “A” from the time they land on page “B” you arrive at the time spent on page “A”:

13.47 – 13.45 = 2 minutes spent on page “A”.

If at 13.50 the visitor leaves your site completely no timestamp is created and there is no way to tell how long the visitor spent on page “B”.

Why was no timestamp created? If the page was outside the scope of your analytics account, on another domain for example, the timestamp can’t be accessed by your analytics account. Therefore, the time spent on that page can’t be determined for that page view.

Similarly, the time spent on a page by visitor who enters a site and bounces without visiting any other page cannot be measured either.

Cookies, sessions, and timeouts

Google Analytics uses cookies to track the activity of visitors to your pages and report those activities back to their server. Cookies enable Google to distinguish the activities of each visitor individually and track sequential page visits made by the same user during their time (session) on your website. This information is then reported back to you when you log into your Google Analytics account.

Every bounce or exit is the result of a session timeout. In Google Analytics, a session will timeout after 30 minutes of browser inactivity. If a visitor navigates to another website, the session will still continue for a maximum of 30 minutes before registering a bounce or exit. As long as the visitor returns before the session times out and clicks through to another page of your website, it will not be considered as either a bounce or an exit.

• Each and every visit to your site culminates in a session timeout
• A session that times out after a single page view is classed as a bounce
• A session that times out after multiple page views are classed as an exit

Have a look at the tabs open in your browser right now – how many have been open for more than 29 minutes without any activity? Despite the page still staying open in your browser, some of the sessions associated with individual pages might have already timed out causing an exit or a bounce. Also closing your browser, disconnecting from the internet, or hitting the back button will all cause a session to time out which will likely be recorded as a bounce or an exit in someone’s Analytics.

Jacob McMillen is a copywriter, marketing blogger, and inbound marketing consultant.

Subscribe to the Search Engine Watch newsletter for insights on SEO, the search landscape, search marketing, digital marketing, leadership, podcasts, and more.

Join the conversation with us on LinkedIn and Twitter.

30-second summary:

• In the wake of the helpful content, Google Trends can be a strong gateway into search trends
• How do you spot a trend and differentiate it from a fad to justify resource investment?
• Hands-on tips to unearth Google Trends and apply them to your ecommerce SEO strategy

A successful digital marketing strategy grows through exploiting online visibility that results in conversion. Organic traffic and SEO generate the most leads in a digital marketing strategy, according to 61 percent of marketers using B2B initiatives.

Statistics for 2022 capture the situation as they show that a search engine is the point of departure for 68 percent of online activity. The internet offers plenty of advice on building a digital marketing strategy. Still, we cut through the chase and focus on how you can harness the power of an SEO strategy and keyword research to grow your business this year and beyond.

The role of Google Trends in enhancing your SEO strategy

If you exploit its capacity, Google Trends can be a game changer for your SEO strategy. Consider the following steps to exploit this tool to develop your digital marketing strategy:

1. Monitor trends

Google Trends is a free tool that scours the internet, collects data on search behavior, and helps you capitalize on popular trends when developing a marketing strategy. It collects information from platforms such as YouTube, Google Images, Google News, Twitter, and Google Shopping on which web users engage.

The analytics from Google Trends looks at the total search volume over a specific period. In addition, it identifies how often users looked up a search query time on the Google search engine. Though said to be a reliable tool, it gives estimates of the levels given to the value of a keyword, ranging from 0 to 100. It establishes seasonal variations in a keyword.

A value of 100 on user intent means the keyword is a high-interest, while zero does not mean that no one showed interest but that the interest level was shallow. For example, if you search the term “swimwear”, you will notice it has more searches during summer than in winter. If you track such analytics, you can judge the relevance levels of your niche to users and know when to jump on and off a trend.

2. Google Trends unearths new keywords

When you have a website, keywords are the pointers that show search engines what you have on your website. Keyword research shows you what your potential customers might be looking for and the estimated size of the audience with that search intent.

Try the following steps:

• Identify the main idea with which your potential customers associate the product or service your business offers, such as cashmere scarves. Avoid using adjectives.
• Narrow down on the product or service specifics by anticipating a unique aspect of your niche that would send users to your website. For example, cashmere scarves from Italy.
• At this point, you can add a link from a website to your search for better results.
• Include brand names of your products or well-known names in the industry to improve product association but do not include an unknown brand name in your search.
• Try different keyword phrases on the topic in different variations, such as “Italian cashmere scarves”, “designer Italian cashmere scarves”, and “affordable Italian cashmere scarves”. Use keywords related to the topic to narrow down the results.
• Considering there are over six billion worldwide searches daily, you should use tools like SEMrush to identify keywords that rank on a page and include related keywords for comparison to other viable keywords.

Beware, though, some new search terms could be popular but just fads that later disappear, making your content redundant.

Understand the difference between a trend and a fad

Here’s a quick look to help you discern what is a trend and what is not, further giving you stronger clarity on whether to invest time and resources in content creation.

A trend is –

• A general development, situational change, or a shift in the way people are behaving
• Can be traced to a starting point in time
• Evolve gradually
• Have a broader influence on culture and consumer behavior

A fad is –

• A very popular style or activity that can be compared to a “one-hit wonder”
• Can not be traced into a starting point as fads blow up on scenes out of nowhere
• Fade away as fast as they show up
• Does not have a substantial impact on consumer behavior

3. Research your niche

Even as you search for the best keywords to boost your SEO strategy, Google Trends ensures you do not miss any relevant topics in your niche. Your niche should provide value to remain relevant.

The variances between the dips and increases on charts generated by Google trends show the following at a glance:

• Seasonal changes in prices
• Seasonal changes in demand
• The stability of a niche depends on the sustained search volumes over a given period
• Whether the niche is still a viable business idea

The metrics from that search guide you in making data-driven decisions for your brand and exploit your niche because it will enable you to:

• Identify target regions
• Determine the viability of your niche
• Know the relevant terms to search
• Make decisions using real-time data
• Optimize your campaign
• Know if you have loyal customers who can build a community

4. Track the latest popular searches

When your business dealings center on a dynamic niche, Google Trends helps you stay abreast of changes. People’s needs keep evolving, and to stay ahead, you must get real-time results on their search engine queries and act accordingly.

Invest in that research to adjust your marketing tactics to address the new concerns that arise in the market due to emerging issues.

Businesses that modify their strategy to emerging, real-time needs thrive while the rest that don’t naturally see a drop in returns.

5. Compare keywords

Google Trends searches accumulated data from people’s search history in Google and the search terms used most in those searches. The Google Trends landing page has a search bar tailored for search terms. On this bar, you can type up to five keywords you wish to compare, separating them with a comma.

The search avails much when focused on related topics and shows the less obvious needs of customers. When analytics terms the results on a term as rising, it means it had the most considerable volume in growth. Breakout is a percentage that shows the search query volume exploded to over 5000%.

6. Optimize for video and ecommerce

Videos on YouTube offer another avenue for studying the market scene besides web results. Through videos, Google Trends can unearth the video topics fueling trends. You will also know if it is time for you to create video content for ecommerce and the relevant tags you should include for optimization.

You can also use the tool to follow up on the success of your video. Consider that 88 percent of people say that watching a video on a brand convinced them to buy their product or service. While 0ver 70 percent would rather watch a short video on a brand than read text about it.

7. Target local audience

It’s no longer a hassle to find geo-specific data and evaluate the popularity of a search item by region. You will reliably establish the region with the highest demand for your product or services.

There are different ways of conducting this search. One is by typing the name of what your business offers into the search space and then scrolling to the map section on the same page to determine locality.

The second way is to use search filters to compare keywords and identify different regions where web users showed interest in your products or services. Effective campaigns should have geographical relevance.

8. Google Trends for analyzing competitors

Google Trends not only guides you on what your potential customers use the internet to seek from your industry. It also gives you insights into what your competitors have been up to, for example, it shows the search queries trending for your competition, now and within the past year.

You can use the tool to narrow down your search into seasons to see any variance in their market presence. For instance, you can see if there were any changes in pricing, such as seasonal offers and supply during different times of the year. Such findings can help you strategize how to promote your brand depending on your competitor’s business tactics.

9. Plan your yearly calendar

In the end, you must create a search marketing plan with time-specific events. The yearly calendar will guide you in planning and creating schedules for seasonal events according to the needs of your customers. This calendar is a dynamic tool subject to review and adjustment not only to create goals but also to track them to completion.

It takes into account all the above-discussed steps and integrates them into an ecommerce marketing strategy for both web-based establishments and brick-and-mortar businesses.

Make Google Trends work for your campaign

Google Trends is a great tool to provide valuable insights into your digital marketing and content strategy. Use this knowledge to plan for content, measure the most optimal times of the year, and understand your audience.

Eric Ritter is the Founder & President of Digital Neighbor. He can be found on Twitter @EricRitter.

Subscribe to the Search Engine Watch newsletter for insights on SEO, the search landscape, search marketing, digital marketing, leadership, podcasts, and more.

Join the conversation with us on LinkedIn and Twitter.