Google News is Google’s free news aggregation website. It allows users to browse news articles from a diverse range of news websites in a single interface. Users can click through from Google News to any article that interests them.

Publishers benefit from having their content included in Google News as it can drive traffic to their website directly from Google News but also from regular search results. Google will include articles from Google News in regular search results if they deem the article to be relevant to the user’s search query.

 A search for “Greece” returns 3 time sensitive articles from Google News at the top of the SERP

When determining what articles to display in regular search results, Google will consider factors such as the freshness of the content, whether it offers a unique perspective on the news item, its relevance to the search query, and the location of the publisher as well as other factors.

Google News Publisher Center

What is it?

Google News Publisher Center is a free tool offered by Google to publishers of news websites to in the first instance facilitate them to request inclusion of their content in Google News. Furthermore, the tool enables news publishers to provide more accurate information to Google about their news content with a view to gaining greater exposure on the search engine. For more on this, see the relevant Google literature here.

How the Google News Publisher Center Works

To use the Google News Publisher Center, you must first verify ownership of your news source using Google Webmaster Tools. The Publisher Center will then list all the news sources that you own, and you can update section or source information if either is outdated.

Preparing for Submission – Technical Guidelines

In order to appear in Google News, publishers must request inclusion of their website within the Google News Publisher Center. However, before making the inclusion request, there are a number of guidelines with which publishers should be familiar. Google News uses a computer algorithm to automatically crawl news sites. To help Google determine which web pages are actually articles, your site should follow Google’sTechnical Guidelines.

• Article URLs

To make sure that the Google News bot only crawl news articles, make sure your URLs are unique with at least 3 digits, and are permanent.

www.domain.com/category/sports/sachin-creats-history-12.hmtl  is not a valid URL, but www.domain.com/category/sports/sachin-creats-history-121232.html  or, www.domain.com/category/sports/sachin-creats-history-546.html is valid URLs for inclusion in Google News.

Some other examples of acceptable URLs are listed below (Numbers Highlighted in Red):

http://www.rte.ie/sport/rugby/six-nations/2013/0314/376604-ireland-set-to-name-team-for-italy-at-lunchtime/
http://www.reuters.com/article/2013/03/14/us-eu-summit-idUSBRE92D0MK20130314

However, if you are using News Sitemaps, this rule can be waived. We will discuss News Sitemaps later in this post but a live example for this is www.guardian.co.uk/ . They are not using the unique three digit structure (date doesn’t count) in their URLs, for example: http://www.guardian.co.uk/media/2013/mar/14/leveson-talks-break-differences-parties There is no uniquethree digit in the URL, but as they are using news sitemap, they are listed in Google News. Here is the news sitemap for the website: http://www.guardian.co.uk/newssitemap.xml .

• Main Body of Article Should be in HTML

Page content should be easily accessible by Google crawlers and the main text(body) should not be embedded in JavaScript or non crawlable scripts; the pages should be in html. In order to provide the best user experience and accuracy of news, the articles’ headlines and publication time should be easily identifiable to the automated crawler; below is a snapshot for the same:

• Permanent Section URLs

A section URL represents a section/category page of a news website which will list all news articles related to the particular category. For example, for sports news, the URL of the section/category could be www.domain.com/category/sports, which will list articles related to sports. Your section URLs should not be changing frequently and Google has clearly mentioned that if this happens, they would not be able to include the website in Google news (more info. read here). If after your site has been accepted into Google News, your main news sections change, update Google records of your section URLs within the Google News Publisher Center.

• Languages and Encoding

Your website should display articles/content in a single language. If you want to display content in multiple languages on the same page (URL), Google’s crawlers will find it difficult to crawl content and thus, your content will not rank well. If you offer content in different languages, you need to submit your website for each language version of the website. Also, Unicode Transformation Format format of the webpage should be UTF-8.

Tip: To check the UTF version of the website look for the below tag in the source of the webpage:

<meta http-equiv=”Content-Type” content=”text/html; charset=utf-8″>

• Article Links

Googlebot-News is best able to crawl HTML links and is unable to crawl image links or links embedded in JavaScript. Make sure that your articles on your section pages only have HTML links.

• Article Formatting

Google’s crawler is only able to include HTML articles. This means they cannot crawl PDFs or other non-HTML formats.

• Robots.txt or Meta Tags

Your content/pages/articles should be accessible easily; i.e robots Meta tag or robots.txt should not be blocking any page or URL which you want to rank in Google’s search results. This recommendation is not limited to a news website; it is applicable to any website trying to rank on Google.

• User-Friendly

Websites should load quickly and use URL redirects rarely and avoid behavior intended to trick users.

• Proper use of Meta Tags

Use keywords tag and standout tag correctly.

• Redirects To Different Domains

Your content must reside on the same domain, i.e. redirects to different domain upon clicking the story title will not be followed by Google’s crawlers; this is the reason why news aggregator websites cannot be listed in Google News. That being said, you can place redirects on the same domain/sub-domain. For example in case any URL has been changed, you can update Google within the Google News Publisher Center.

• Understanding Your Website Subscription Model

See: https://support.google.com/news/publisher/answer/40543?hl=en
There are certain news websites which will ask for the subscription/signup before users can read the actual articles, and as per Google’s general guidelines (not limited to news), any content hidden behind login forms or Paywall, is not crawlable and thus, Google will not include the content in search results. For subscription/registration sites, Google offers three approaches as explained below. Before you submit your website in Google News Publisher Center, you should know which model your website is employing and the implications of same.

 1.  First Click Free

As the name suggests, the first click from Google News will be free, i.e. users will be able to read the entire article without signing up and subscribing to the website. Thus, both users and news publishers will benefit. Publishers get new readers and readers get to access one article free of charge. Sounds great but if the user has to register in order to access any further article, how is Google going to access that content?

The basic idea is that your site must allow referrals coming from any Google domain or sub domain to hop over your subscription page. There are a lot of different URLs they could come from, so include any top-level domain matching http://*.google.*

This might look like “Cloaking” as website content will be served in accordance with user-agent detection but Google has allowed publishers to freely practice this.

Google on “First Click Free” :

In order to participate in “First Click Free” program, you need to follow below guidelines:

A user coming from the domain [*.google.*] must be able to see a minimum of 5 articles per day. This practice is termed as “metering” the user as when they clicked on more than 5 news items of a particular website listed in Google News, then the meter for freely accessible news items on that website gets exhausted for that user. Further, if websites meter access on a weekly or monthly basis, then also publishers are bound to show a minimum of 5 articles per day to users. If a website fails to fulfill this condition, then Google will consider it as a subscription website.

The page displayed to users who visited the article from Google must be identical to the content that is shown to the Googlebot, i.e. you should show the complete article content to the users when they follow a link from Google.

Your Robots.txt/ Meta tags should allow Googlebot to access all the articles.

Practical Example of “First Click Free”: Wall Street Journal is the best suited example for this, see below snapshot:

After following the link on “Google News”, readers are allowed to browse 4 other articles (5 in total) and then, they need to subscribe to the website in order to read any further.

Additional Info: “First Click Free” was originated from Google News, but now you can use this for general web results as well. Read Google’s official guidelines on using “First Click Free” for web results here.

2.  Subscription Websites: Snippet Only

If publishers are not comfortable with the “First Click Free” option, and the user has to subscribe or pay in order to read the news, Google will display the “Subscription” tag next to the publication name which will guide the user that this site will ask for the signup/subscription in order to access all (or most) of the articles, see below snapshot for the same:

If a publisher chooses to go with this option, they need to display a snippet of the article which should have at least 80 words and should include a brief summary of the article. Since Google does not permit cloaking, i.e showing Googlebot a full version of the article while showing users the snippet of the article with subscription details, Google will crawl and display your content based on the article snippet provided. Though Google further says that you can cloak for Googlebot-News, i.e you can show Google News the full article, but you cannot cloak for Googlebot.

If you currently cloak for Googlebot-news but not for Googlebot, you do not need to make any changes; Google News crawls with Googlebot and automatically uses the 80-word snippet.

If you cloak for Googlebot-News, Google News will be able to access your content.

If you cloak for Googlebot, Google News and Web Search will be able to access your content.

Our recommendation is not to cloak, neither for Googlebot, nor for Googlebot-News.

Thus you should not cloak for “Googlebot” and Google also warns publishers that if you are using cloaking for Googlebot, which will show the full version of your article to Googlebot, while showing users the snippet of the article with subscription requirement, your site may be subject to Google Webmaster penalties. Please review Webmaster Guidelines to learn about best practices.

3. Robots.txt

Lastly, you can use your robots.txt to prevent Google crawling and indexing your subscription only content. You can place freely available content in one section and subscription only content in another and disallow the section which you don’t want to be crawled. Google explained the usage of Robots.txt file here.

Google News Sitemap

Google highly recommends that you submit a Google News Sitemap through a Webmaster Tools account. By creating and submitting a Google news sitemap, you help Google News bot to discover and crawl your site’s news articles. News sitemaps differ from normal XML sitemaps and thus sitemap generators cannot be used to generate a news sitemap.

In addition to the normal properties of sitemap files, Google News Sitemaps allow publishers to describe the types of content they publish, along with specifying levels of access for individual articles. News sitemaps contain some additional information like:

<news:genres> : This will define the access level. For example, if the article is subscription only or requires registration. Omitting this tag in sitemap for any article means that the full article is accessible to every user for at least 30 days.

<news:publication_date>: This tag will define the publication date of the article.

<news:keywords>: This tag will help you in classifying the articles. Browse list of Google’s suggested keywords here.

Visit this page for more information on news sitemap structure. Keep the below in mind while generating a news sitemap:

News Sitemap should contain only URLs of articles published in the last two days.

Update the News Sitemap continually with fresh articles as they’re published. Google News crawls News Sitemaps as often as it crawls the rest of your site.

A News Sitemap can contain no more than 1,000 URLs. If you want to include more URLs, consider breaking these URLs into multiple Sitemaps, and use a sitemap index file to manage them.

Do not create a new News Sitemap each time you publish new articles on your website. Instead, update the current sitemap with the new article URLs.

Here is an example of a News Sitemap entry using News-specific tags:

After creating the News sitemap, upload it to the highest-level directory that contains the news articles. Please see this page for further instructions on submitting your sitemap.

• Multimedia Content

Google is currently unable to include audio files or multimedia content; however, they can sometimes crawl supplementary text on pages with this type of content and do include some videos from YouTube. Below is a snapshot for video results in Google News:

While Google crawlers can crawl YouTube videos embedded within the news articles, Google wants publishers to submit videos by creating a YouTube Channel and then sharing the same with Google news. As articles and text based submissions need to abide by rules and regulations, your video content should follow some guidelines before submitting the YouTube Channel in Google News. Make sure that you are not violating any of the guidelines of Google.

Steps for getting your video content included

Set-up a YouTube channel

Once you set up a YouTube channel, upload your news videos in it as soon as you have them ready. Provide a descriptive title followed by a short description of the videos. You may want to familiarize yourself with other video optimization strategies and review the resources available at the YouTube’s Creator Playbook.

Let the Google team know

Once you’ve created a YouTube channel, let Google know by reporting an update. Add the URL of your YouTube channel under the section Your publication’s YouTube channel or FeedBurner RSS feed. Make sure you also include your site’s URL, name, id, etc. in this form. The submissions will be reviewed and the Google team will follow up after that. Videos will not be crawled if the website is not already included in Google News.

Join the YouTube Partner Program

Google encourages Google News providers with YouTube channels to apply to the YouTube partner program so that they can get many more benefits out of their video. More details:
https://support.google.com/youtube/answer/72851

If Content Needs to be Removed/Updated

If at any point, the content needs to be edited/removed then Google needs to be updated of the same. To report an update go here and to request some video to be removed, go here.

Once the above issues have been understood and actioned, you are now in a position to submit your site to Google News Publisher Center.

Optimizing Individual Articles / Getting Your Journalists SEO Aware

In order to rank well on Google News, there is no clear set of rules or factors to rank but definitely there are some general guidelines like:

• Freshness of content
• Diversity of content
• Rich textual content
• Originality of content

Of course, when it comes to news, original content and freshness plays an important role in ranking. There are no human editors selecting the news articles or managing the ranking of articles, so all you can do is to make sure that your news website adheres to Google’s guidelines. Some basic on-page optimization techniques like title tags, image alt tags, keyword meta-tags and the basic structure of the news articles do play a vital role. Let’s discuss these one by one.

Title Tags

Make sure the article’s title is in the <title> tag. This tag should be optimized just like you would do for general websites. You can include the category in the title tag along with the brand name.

Example:

<title>Uber drivers are employees not contractors, California rules | Technology | The Guardian</title>

However, if possible, try to keep the title to 70 characters or less as if this is exceeded, Google will truncate the end of the title when displaying in regular search results as below.

 The Guardian’s title in purple above is truncated at the end as it has exceeded 70 characters.

Meta description

Search engines like Google often use Meta description as the snippet in their search results pages. Get your journalists to create good and unique descriptions for every news article, as the people who read them will be more likely to click through to your news site. Duplicate description tags (using the same description tags for a number of pages on a website) will negatively affect SEO results and must be avoided.

Example:

<meta name=”description” content=”Uber to appeal California Labor Commission ruling that it is ‘involved in every aspect of the operation’”/>

Heading Tags

Including important keywords in H tags will increase the likelihood of ranking for these keywords.

Keyword Tags

news_keywords meta tag only work for news publishers that are sources in Google News. This tag lets publishers add the most relevant and specific keywords to their news articles. Only 10 keywords for an individual news entry are allowed and equal weightage would be given to all the 10 keywords irrespective of the order in which they have been placed in meta tag.

Syntax: <meta name=”news_keywords” content=”Farming News, Irish Farmers, Farmers”>

Apart from this, make sure that your News Sitemap includes <news:keywords> tag with every news article.

Image Alt Attribute

Search engines do not crawl images themselves but they understand all about the image (what it represents) with the help of the alt attribute. We can use the relevant keywords in the alt attribute without making it look unnatural.

Syntax: <img src=”http://www.example.co.uk/images/7c242-300×180.jpeg ” alt=”Greece’s Yanis”/>

Article URLs

Make sure that the article URL includes those keywords or the post title and category. This is something which does helps a lot, even with general websites. As mentioned previously, you need to have at least three digits in the article URL.

Social Sharing Buttons

To increase the virality of the content, it is important to provide social sharing functionality on all the news articles on the website. This will let readers share the news articles on variety of social channels that they use, which will ultimately be helpful in driving referral traffic to the website. From user’s point of view, it is recommended to place social sharing buttons both on the top and bottom of the article.

Open Graph Meta Tags

Open Graph tags will not only help your articles to be an object on Facebook’s Graph, it will also help you add some additional meta data which will help crawlers to further understand your article’s content, publication date/time. WordPress offers a fantastic plugin for the same and major news publishers like Gaurdian.co.uk is using this plugin in order to implement Facebook open graph Meta tags. If your news website is not built on WordPress, look for similar plugin/extensions for your CMS (Content Management System) and if no luck then take the help of your web developer in adding them manually.

Twitter Cards

Twitter Cards let publishers attach rich photos, videos and media experience to their Tweets which help in driving traffic to their website. Like in below tweet posted by Guardian, it can be seen that along with 140 characters of regular text there is an image embedded with it. This is because they have enabled Twitter cards on their website. For integrating Twitter cards with your CMS (Content Management System) follow Twitter’s guidelines which are explained here.

Author Information

As Google news looks for original and real content, publishers should add author bylines to each article. Separate pages can also be created on the website to display biography, profile image, social media accounts of each author.

Example: On ‘The Washington Post’ news website there is a dedicated page for almost all the authors. This will let readers to follow (can even contact) their favorite authors who write news in the niche they are interested in.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/people/mark-berman

http://www.washingtonpost.com/people/todd-c-frankel

Publication Date and Time

As mentioned above, you need to make sure that news articles are tagged with the date and time of the publication. This will help Google’s crawler to identify the latest news articles on your website. While there are structured metadata standards that allow publishers to associate a specific date and time with a web page or news story, this will help Google to understand the date associated with the publication. Schema.org example:

<a itemprop=”publisher” href=”http://www.guardian.co.uk/” >guardian.co.uk</a>,
<time itemprop=”datePublished” datetime=”2013-03-22T08:48GMT” pubdate>Friday 22 March 2013 08.48 GMT</time>

The best practice is to show the publication time and date near author information at the top of the article. Here, the publication date and time are visible to users and search engine crawlers as per below snapshot:

If you’ve created a Google News Sitemap, the sitemap entry for article is required to have a <publication_date> tag.

Breadcrumbs and Categories

Usage of breadcrumbs will make sure that the categorization is proper. You can also use semantic markup to markup your breadcrumbs. Make sure that the news categories are easily accessible and your news articles should reside under the relevant categories. This will not only help users to navigate through your website, but it will help Google crawlers to categories your news articles properly. See below snapshot for the same:

Highlight Best of Your Work

If you think that you just cracked some breaking news or something which is outstanding, you can highlight that using a tag called “standout” tag. The “standout” tag is meant to give publishers a new way to signal their best content to Google.

Google says“If you put the tag in the HTML header of one of your articles, Google News may show the article with a ‘Featured’ label on the Google News homepage and News Search results”.

The syntax for this tag is as follows:

<link rel=”standout” href=“http://www.example.com/scoop_article_2.html” />

Or, you could use a meta tag:

<meta name=”standout” content=”http://www.example.com/scoop_article_2.html”/>

Exploring News Semantic Markup

Our aim is to provide best information to Google so that our news articles can be crawled easily. Use semantic markup wherever possible; there is a dedicated Microdata structuring for News Publishers which you can use for every article you publish. Google may use the news rich snippet markup in “In the News”.

News Article markup properties:

1. headline (required):Main headline of the news article
2. image (required):Image should be .jpg, .png, or. gif format and size should be at least 160×90 pixels and at most 1920×1080 pixels.
3. datePublished (required): Date and time the news article was first published, in  ISO 8601 format.
4. dateModified: Date and time on which the news article was most recently verified, in  ISO 8601 format.
5. description: Short description of the news article (approx 80 words)
6. articleBody: The actual body of the article

7. alternativeHeadline: Secondary headline of the news article

Sample code below:

URL Redirects

Avoid unnecessary redirects; although, Google News can follow redirects, use redirects only when there is no other option left. Read more guidelines on URL redirects in Google News here.

Keyword Selection and Research

Home & Category Pages:

Choosing keywords for home and category pages is relatively straight forward. You can utilize the Google Keyword tool to research the highest demand keywords eg for your sports category page, you will want to rank for “sports news” while your political news category will be optimized to rank for “political news”.

Article Pages:

When deciding what keywords to try to rank individual articles for, you typically will not be able to rely on the Google keyword tool as this shows the historic demand for a keyword on Google. For example, if Justin Bieber is charged with a DUI offence, there at the time you are publishing the article will have been no historic demand for keywords like “Justin Bieber DUI.” So, journalists need to pre-empt what people will search for. So for example, if there is a large bank robbery in Washington, you may want to consider optimizing your article for keywords like “Washington bank robbery” – the best approach here is to put yourself in the user’s shoes and ask if I was looking to read about this story, what keywords would I search for? This approach will typically ensure that you optimize for the correct keywords.

Google News For Mobile and Tablet Devices

Responsive Design

If your news website is responsive and is already included in Google News, then Google will automatically make it visible in mobile and tablet devices. In simple words, there is nothing that needs to be done.

Separate sites for Mobile and Desktop

If you have a separate website for mobile and desktop then use user-agent detection to direct users on mobile and tablet devices to your separate mobile site, typically at m.newswebsite.com so that they get the best possible experience of reading your content.

As we have covered quite a bit above, we thought it may be helpful to publish a checklist to help news websites optimize their websites.

General Checks

• Has a keyword analysis been done for the home page and category pages?

Preparing for Google News Submission / Site Structural Checks:

• Have I ensured that section URLs (eg for sport, business, fashion etc) are separate permanent URLs i.e. not dynamic?
• Have I ensured that the article URLs are permanent and include a unique number containing at least 3 digits?
• If section/category URLs have been changed recently, have I ensured to place 301 redirect and then reported an update in Google news publisher center for the same?
• Have I ensured that articles and sections are easily accessible and are not blocked by robots.txt?
• Is there a system in place to ensure that date & time of publishing is correctly marked up on all news items of the website?
• Have I confirmed the nature of the website’s Paywall i.e. free, subscription, first click free, metered etc?
• If the website is a Subscription/Registration website, have I ensured to follow Google’s instructions?
• If the website is using First Click Free method, have I liaised with the developer of the website to ensure that the website is adhering to metering guidelines?
• If the website is a strict subscription website, have I ensured that the news article’s summary (at least 80 words) is accessible by search engines?
• Have I ensured that News sitemap(s) are in place as per the guidelines outlined by Google and that a system is in place to ensure real time maintenance of this sitemap?
• Have I ensured that all the videos are uploaded at YouTube and YouTube Channel URL has been submitted in Google News for the website?
• Have I checked if the Unicode Transformation Format on the news website is UTF-8?
• Have I ensured that a system is in place to ensure that content unsuitable for Google news is excluded from the news sitemap eg job listings?
• Is a system in place to facilitate the journalists to add Open Graph tags to their articles?
• Is a system in place to facilitate the journalists to add Twitter Cards to their articles?
• Is a system in place to facilitate journalists to add the standout meta tag on news articles?
• Is a system in place to facilitate journalists to add news keywords meta tag on news articles?
• Have I used semantic markup on all news entries?
• Does the site make use of breadcrumbs and have these been marked up appropriately?
• Have I ensured that all the images on specific news items have alt attribute on it?
• Have I submitted and verified the website In Google Webmasters tool?
• Have I submitted the website in Google News Publisher Center?

Google News for Mobile and Tablet Devices

• If there is a separate mobile website, have I checked that the mobile version of the website is indexed in Google News?
• If there is a separate mobile website, have I checked that user-agent detection is in place to direct users on mobile and tablet devices to the separate mobile site, typically at m.examplenewswebsite.com?

Tracking and Analytics:

• Have I ensured that Google Analytics is in place?
• Have I ensured that Google Analytics tracking code is automatically placed on each news article?

Miscellaneous Checks:

• Are social sharing buttons available at the end of each article for (Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter and Google+)
• Have all target pages received a download speed score of 90 or more in Google Page Download speed checker for both desktop and mobile? – If not, has a web developer been consulted to fix errors.

DPFOC Content Published on Discover Northern Ireland Website

As you know, we’re constantly trying to evolve the quality and range of content that we are producing for ourselves and for our clients. With pretty much every company now engaging in some form of content marketing, being heard and getting traction with publishers is an increasing challenge. Recently, we have started to generate interactive timelines and have seen a great response from publishers. For example, in anticipation of the upcoming Irish Open, we created a timeline charting the history of this iconic event on the golfing calendar. We were delighted to have this published by the Discover Northern Ireland website and you can see it here. This again shows that publishers will publish high quality content if given to them in the right way at the right time.

We Need Your Help – Would Your Company use LinkedIn InMail?

We have been experimenting with LinkedIn InMails lately. Basically, an InMail is a paid solution that allows you to send an email (InMail) directly to the inbox of people who you want to reach on LinkedIn. For example, a product based company may wish to specifically target buyers to try to get them to list their product(s). InMails are more frequently used in the recruitment industry for head hunting. They are quite expensive to send and the amount that you can send each month is limited so it really is only for companies who want to reach specific individuals. So we were wondering would any of our clients have any use for InMails? If so, let us know and we can get them set up for you.

Back to Basics with Video Content:

We were delighted to receive such a positive response from our clients when we asked them if they had any video content with which we could do some outreach. However, many went on to send us through video adverts! Remember, when doing outreach, you have to add value to the publisher’s site. You must give them something their readers will love. Reaching out with an advert is not going to work! Our informative (not promotional!!) video on how to prepare for the April 21st algorithm update has been widely published with the latest link from this PR 5 site. So, remember if you want it to be published, you MUST ADD VALUE.

Twitter Remarketing

Most of our clients are remarketing on Google’s Display network, a lesser amount are doing so on Facebook and almost none are remarketing on Twitter. Don’t miss out on Twitter retargeting as you want to remain as visible as possible to your target market throughout their sales cycle and Twitter offers a great way to do just that. Contact us to discuss further.

Taboola is a content recommendation or content discovery platform that we decided to try out recently from the side of the advertiser. Without realising it, it is likely that you have come across Taboola already as many well known online publications use it such as The Huffington Post, The Lad Bible, The Journal.ie and many others worldwide.

We had already found Outbrain (who offer practically the same service as Taboola but has different publishing partners such as The New York Post and The Irish Independent) but after getting in touch with them, we were informed that they don’t offer services to companies in Ireland unless you have a minimum budget spend of around $5000. Then we sourced Taboola who we realised would host a campaign for us using a more realistic budget for an SME.

Scientific Approach is Key

In DPFOC our research and focus, when not actively managing campaigns, is always fixed on trying to generate new ways to increase lead generation for our clients and therefore their revenue. We are always open to new ways of achieving this but we believe there should be major emphasis put on testing out methods before accepting any marketing blurb that you so often hear.

In the case of Taboola and Outbrain, being quite honest, we were sceptical from the outset as the space you pay for is not an ‘obvious’ advert but more designed to look like another article as an add-on to the one that the user has just read. This means that there is largely no buying intent by the user at the stage they click on the title.This is in direct comparison to an obvious ad on Facebook for example with a specific creative telling you to ‘click here to save money on your life insurance’ or similar. For these types of campaigns, we have achieved and continue to achieve success in terms of acceptable cost per lead and resultant conversions.

While many in the area of Internet marketing now scoff at the success of paid display advertising and regularly predict its demise, we are continuing believers in it. Of course the only way that you can ‘safely’ carry out any paid advertising online is by close monitoring and that is why we call our approach scientific. Knowing where your leads and traffic are coming from will ensure that you don’t unnecessarily waste any marketing budget where it is not working. Of course certain traditional paid display options won’t work for all campaigns but testing and attribution is paramount to discovering the fundamental answer…otherwise you may as well throw your marketing budget out the window and see where it carries you.

Testing Taboola for a Mass Market B2C Client

In terms of us trying out Taboola, we did so for a mass market B2C company and assigned a budget of €200 in our tentative approach. The basic result was that we got plenty of clicks (500+ see below) but ZERO conversions.

Conclusions

Eventhough this foray into the world of content recommendation and discovery platforms was not a success for us, we are glad that we tried it out in order to rule it out also in effect. While it was ‘nice’ to see content from our client on worldwide publications like The Huffington Post and while this might have hit branding goals should we want to achieve them, the campaign was not successful. Simply, the results don’t lie and with zero conversions, it would be remiss of us to advise our client to allocate more budget into this.

Perhaps the only way Taboola or Outbrain would work is by pay per click arbitrage whereby an advertiser would ‘purchase’ the traffic from Taboola and then resell the space on their page for a higher price. The success of pay per click arbitrage is based upon the idea that the purchaser can resell the traffic gathered for more than the original price of the original pay per click services however this is virtually impossible.

It will be interesting to see if there is longevity in the whole area of the content discovery and recommendation business. It is our belief that there won’t be as ultimately in order to survive as a medium, it will need to deliver cost effective leads and/or revenue for companies and we don’t see that happening.

As of early 2014, there are approximately 200 million Instagram subscribers (Facebook has over 1.2 billion). In a 2013 MRBI survey it was reported that Ireland has a 15% Instagram user rate (2013 MRBI – sample size: 1000 adults aged 15+). On a worldwide basis, it is reported that over 90% of the 200 million people on Instagram are under the age of 35, which is a stand-out figure surely making it an attractive platform for many fashion, entertainment, and media brands focused on the 18 to 34-year-old age bracket.

Is Instagram Different to the Other Social Networks?

So what makes Instagram different from the other social networks that currently exist? It is almost entirely photo based and this definitely lends itself well to making products (and people) look fantastic. The Instagram layout presents your products with an editorial quality and it allows followers to browse through content in an organised, well-presented way.

In what many see as another advantage in comparison to Twitter for example, there is no limit to the number of characters you can use in your captions/comments. This allows for unique and powerful product descriptions and calls to action to be included in the Instagram text that accompanies the pretty, filtered picture.

As Instagram is mobile-focused, you can only create an account on a mobile / tablet device. You can however view or log in to an account on desktop. There is also an option to install a third party plug-in such as ‘Bluestacks’ that does allow you to create an account on desktop which might be of use if using the service on a commercial basis.

Best Practice for Instagram Marketing

Marketers have realised for a long time the power of images to motivate and engage people. The advent of the different social media platforms has further facilitated this. Instagram has emerged as an effective marketing tool because companies can quickly build brand recognition and consumer loyalty through an ongoing stream of photos that help personalise their brand and create a unique identity.

Tips for Instagram Success in Business

1. Promote your goods and services. Post creative snapshots of your company’s products and services and avoid boring stock photos or non creative images. For a company that sells dresses, post filtered shots of your products in various guises – varying them from appearing on a rail for example to on models / customers and use different interesting backgrounds be they indoor or outdoor.

2. Host photo competitions. Photo competitions can be a fun, free way to attract, interact with and convert potential customers and to increase your following. Ask your Instagram followers to submit personal photos of your products (you could ask them to include your @ handle in the post so you are alerted to it but you could also incorporate an agreed hashtag for the competition. Hashtags on Instagram work exactly as they do on Twitter) and then post the best ones on your website blog or extend it through to your other social profiles. There is no official ‘Retweet’ or ‘Repost’ function on Instagram but you can use a Third Party App for this such as ‘Regram’. To keep followers coming back day after day, you could launch a ‘photo-of-the-day’ campaign. Invite your followers to submit captions for photos you post or ask them to answer trivia questions about your pictures and products. Pick daily or weekly winners and reward them with prizes.

3. Create images that feature promotional codes. Promoting exclusive discount and coupon codes for new products and services within a single Instagram photo is a fast, low-cost way to attract fans and boost sales. Clothing retailer Topshop (@topshop) is quite adept at this method, using Twitter and Facebook to drive consumers to Instagram images that reveal “secret” discount codes and sneak peeks at new store locations. This gives an air of exclusivity to the account also which customers love. Remember to hashtag your special-offer photos with a related hashtag such as #promocode.

4. Go behind-the-scenes. Show your customers what happens at your company by posting snapshots of employees as they work, for example putting orders together or if it is a fashion brand, perhaps behind the scenes shots of a photo shoot with models.

5. Use hashtags strategically. This can connect your brand to what is trending in broader communities of potential customers. So for example if you are a watch retailer, you could post a photo of one of your products and include the hashtag #fashion and it may allow you to break into potential new customers. Unlike Twitter where overuse of hashtags is both frowned upon and constrained by character limit, Instagram allows up to 30 per post. However research does seem to suggest that 5 hashtags works best in terms of interaction. Webstagram is a useful resource to find out what the most popular hashtags are of the moment ie hashtags you can join with your content.

6. Create a brand personality. Instagram opens up opportunities to showcase a brand’s personality in a few ways; it can act as a live stream of events (a product launch for example), as well as giving a ‘sneak peek’ at the behind the scenes of new season collection. For a watch retailer you could, for example record a short video of the upcoming new collection from a manufacturer by flicking through the manufacturer’s catalogue in an Instagram video. This engages consumers in new ways, creating a more personal relationship with followers.

7. Show followers how to ‘use’ your products. If the product has a function you can promote (appliances, for example), leverage it through the video function of the Instagram app. It is important to extend your brand beyond what you are selling as well. It is all about being creative; eg if you sell cookware, post a recipe and incorporate food into your Instagram photos. If you are selling fashion or jewellery, showcase photos on how to wear and style the pieces. As an example for a dress retailer, you could suggest shoe options for a particular outfit. Subtlety is key – it is all about engaging in users’ dialogue and showcasing a product in a unique, organic way that creates intrigue.

8. Make it ‘easy’ for followers to buy. Include your contact details ie website in your bio and consider including it as a rule across all posts (remember no text limit constraints). Include product codes in the caption for each image. Clothing retailer River Island (@riverisland) implements this well. They actually use the ‘location’ section of the Instagram post to include said product codes (see red arrow on below image).This makes it easier for the potential customer to buy the product online (or even offline – you could phone the store with the product code).

Instagram Marketing

Instagram is a good marketing opportunity for certain brands but it definitely requires substantial time and effort in order to build a community. For specific brand types in the fashion / jewellery / certain auto sectors (B2C in general) it is practically a necessity to have a presence there.

There is still huge growth in this social network as younger users continue to adopt to it worldwide and there are definite opportunities to be had on Instagram in getting a brand/product noticed and as a result build a loyal customer base, drive traffic to a website etc. As with any company investment into building a presence on a social platform, it is vital that the return on investment is tracked and measured to ensure it is a worthwhile exercise. Analysing traffic through your Google Analytics account will show whether your investment in this platform is driving traffic and ultimately sales.