Rand Fishkin, Wizard of Moz | @randfish | rand@moz.com
The Measure of a
Marketer’s Worth

Rand’s Fitbit Story

I Have Degenerative Disc
Disease

Three Things Really Help Lessen My Daily Pain
#1: Walking #2: Back Exercises #3: Losing Weight

IAssumed I WasAlready Doing Plenty Of Them
I didn’t realize how much
opportunity I had to improve
here and positively impact my
health.

My First Few Days with Fitbit,
I Realized I Wasn’t Nearly asActive as I Thought
Oh crap...

I Became Obsessed with Hitting My Targets Fast:
That’s better.

TrackingAll These Have
Made Me:
Healthier
Happier
In Less Pain

I’ve Had These Goals For Years
Tracking WORK, Not Just Progress, Made the Difference

Work

Progress

In Analytics,
We Assume…

We Know the Right Inputs
+
More Citations
More Links
= #1!

We Know What Work Matters vs. Doesn’t
Don’t Bother Do It Every Day
Blog Post CreationManual Link Outreach
Tweaking Facebook Ads New Facebook Posts
Asking for Yelp Reviews Follow Instagram Accounts

Focusing on Outcome Metrics vs. Inputs Will Bring Success
This is a great
report, but it tells
me nothing about
the work that went
into improving
rankings.

What If We’re Wrong?

Goals of Analytics
3

1) Reporting (aka measuring success & failure)

2) Diagnosing (aka finding what caused change)

3) Generating Targets (aka uncovering which
inputs are required to produce successful outcomes)
Via Moz & Hubspot’s 2015 Publishing Frequency Experiment

We’re good at #1 and #2
We rarely talk about #3…

The Challenge With
Generating Targets

Uncovering What Works is Hard
These elements might
be well correlated with
sites that tend to rank
well, but that doesn’t
mean they’re the best
investments your site can
make?
Via Moz’s 2015 Google Ranking Factors

The Process of
Experimentation, Failure,
& Discovery is Rarely
Embraced by Managers
or Clients.
Via Rand’s Art of Product Marketing Presentation

We Need to Know What Works to Create Success
Via Groove’s Blog

Rather Than Just Measuring
the Output of Our Various Tasks
Via Moz’s 1Metric Content Tracking System

I think this may be the greatest
analytics challenge facing
marketers today.

It’s Not Just
Software

It’s Not Just Numbers

It’s Not JustAbout Up-and-to-the-Right Graphs
Via Majestic’s Backlink History

It’s About Finding…
the Work that Creates Improvement

It’s About Finding…
Effective Targets that Impact
the Right Metrics

The Story of
Ikaria

What’s So Special
About Ikaria?

Via NYTimes Magazine’s Piece on Ikaria

Diet

Exercise

Sleep

Rich Social
Lives

The World’s Five Blue Zones Have These in Common:
Via National Geographic

Translating these
longevity-promoting
activities into measurable
targets creates analytics
that improve lifespan.
Via Fitbit’s Blog

Resting heart rate is a strong predictor of health &
longevity. This is the work that correlates.
Via Cardiogr.am’s Blog

These lines show me the
daily goal for WORK, not
just a goal for results.

This is what’s missing from our
current approach to marketing
analytics.

We ignore the inputs that create
those results.
We measure the results.

Our Job:
Find the Right Targets

What are the everyday actions that
consistently improve your
marketing performance?

Ongoing investments to
experiment with (& measure) in the
near future.7

#1: Bolster Internal Linking for SEO
Identify important
keywords and pages that
don’t yet rank well
Via Rand’s
Moz Analytics Account

Use a query like this to
identify relevant pages
for internal linking

If it’s a broadly important page
across the site, you can use a
query like this to ID good pages
for internal links.

Add in-content, relevant,
useful links from those pages
to the target page.

In our experiments, and
based on the research of
others, these tactics still
work!
Via Shaun Anderson on Hobo Web

#2: Create New Content Targeting Long Tail KWs
Identify keywords with
low volume, low
difficulty, and high
opportunity, for some
long tail content
creation.

Just a little content curation and a
tap of the publish button, and, if
you have a relevant, reasonably
established site, you can rank.

#3: Convert Mentions to Equity-Passing Links
Set up alerts for your brand
names, and you’ll see lots of
sites that talk about you, but fail
to link, costing you traffic and
rankings.
Via Fresh Web Explorer

You don’t necessarily need to
pay for a tool; Google’s
temporal search will let you
find these too.

You can manually edit the
query string (the “tbs”
parameter) to get as
granular as you want with
Google’s timing.

When you find a mention lacking a link, leave a comment, email
the author, or use Twitter to send a ping.

Helps readers of the piece,
and helps Moz too!

#4: Test New Titles & Headlines On Ranking Pages
Via Distilled’s Blog
When there’s lots of
pages using a standard
template of keyword
use, small changes can
have a big impact.

Identify sections of the site
that use any templated
language format in
Titles/Headlines

Craft a keyword list of
potential alternatives or
additions to compare
volume metrics

Test alterations on a
sizable section of the
relevant pages to
determine effectiveness

#5: Vary Social SharingAutomation & Scheduling
Via AppsWithoutCode Blog
Automating & scheduling a few more social updates
than you currently do can have big rewards.

Via AppsWithoutCode Blog
Choose some of your
best stuff to share.
Craft unique,
compelling updates
Bump up your
current sharing level

Tami Brehse ran a
process just like this,
and experienced
dramatic gains in social
following and referral
traffic
Via Tami Brehse’s Tweet Automation Post on Inbound.org

Moz had great success
testing and refining our
social sharing across
channels to find the
right balance of
quantity, diversity, and
repetition

#6:Add Related Topics to Your KW-Targeted Pages
This page looks nice, but
totally lacks the terms &
phrases needed for Google to
think it’s relevant to the
keywords I’m targeting 

Uncover the terms/phrases most
commonly used on the pages that
do rank well for a search term, and
you’ve got a great starting point.
Via Related Topics Feature in Moz Analytics

#7: Contact Non-Converting Folks in YourAudience & Use
Their Feedback to Improve
This might be the worst landing page
I’ve ever designed. Converts ~0.11%
of visitors (and those folks already
clicked on “pricing,” suggesting
they’re interested!)

I dropped a line to folks
who’d signed in to use
the tool for free, looked at
the pricing page, but
didn’t buy

They all said variations of the same thing – they needed to try
before they’d buy. So we added a free trial CTA.

We saw dramatic, rapid
improvement. So now I’m
going through all the other
feedback to see what we
else we can fix and tweak.

Every Tactic Can Be Broken Down Into:
The Work The Metrics The Goal(s)
Put up two Facebook
posts/week
Fix any broken links
Pitch a guest contribution
1X/month
Participate in three
discussion threads/week
FB shares, new
page likes, traffic
Traffic increase
Acceptance of post,
traffic driven
Traffic from
discussion site
Grow reach on &
through Facebook
Direct+search bump
Visibility to new
audience, traffic
Brand awareness,
branded search

The Classic Way
to Do Analytics:

Set Metrics to Monitor

Create Targets
Traffic will go up 30%
this year!
Or I will jump on all of
you!

Do Work You Think Will Reach Those Goals
OK…. I’ll buy some ads I guess.
You guys… blog… or something.

Measure Improvement vs. Loss
Not good enough!

A Different Way
to Do Analytics:

Set Both Work Items & Metrics to Monitor
For the next 12 weeks,
2 Facebook posts a week.

Uncover What Work Moves Which Metrics
Crap.
That didn’t work. Let’s try
something different.

Measure the work against
*work* targets, not just metrics
goals
That’s 177 broken links fixed. Just 81 left. You
can do this, Mortimer. Breathe.

Double Down on Work that Improves
the Metrics
You CareAbout Most
Oh damn! Those weekly discussion thread
contributions are totally working!

Improve Your
*Time to GoalAchievement*
I’m an unstoppable marketing force!
Come at me, bro!

Some Tools
Can Help:

Google’s Calendar’s New
“Goals”:
Via GoogleBlog

Strides
Via Stridesapp.com

Nozbe
Via Nozbe.com

SomeAlternatives:
Via Slant.co

Let’s Experiment

Let’s Find Our
10,000 Steps

Let’s Measure Both Metric
Goals and
the Work
that Improves Them.

Rand Fishkin, Wizard of Moz | @randfish | rand@moz.com
Questions Welcome!