If you’re a marketing manager of a post-secondary education institution (or a PPC agency working on its behalf), then you already know that universities SEO services Miami, colleges and similar organizations present specific challenges (and opportunities) for online advertisers SEO Services Miami.
I don’t know where we go from here, but I fear more sites will test the algorithmic waters and add those popups back. And it’s hard to blame them.Over the years, my advertising agency has had the pleasure of working with a number of these institutions, and we’ve learned (sometimes the hard way!) some important lessons SEO Services Miami.
This is in response to Google mislabeling pages as not mobile-friendly over the past 24- hours in the mobile search results. Even AMP pages were labeled as not being mobile-friendly. John Mueller said that “this is a bug on our side” and Google is working on fixing it. Here are a few dos and don’ts of running PPC advertising for the education vertical market SEO Services Miami: So, we have a situation where an algorithm that should impact URLs employing mobile popups is not living up to expectations, and a marketing tactic that drives conversion was removed from many sites.
1. Do advertise year-round
At most universities and colleges SEO Services Miami, admission activity peaks and falls at predictable times of the year. Accordingly, most educational institutions bump up Instead, your goal is to start a conversation and develop a relationship. Direct the student to relevant information. Give him or her the opportunity to engage with your school and learn more about your programs SEO Services Miami their online advertising when application deadlines grow near. And that makes sense SEO company Miami.
Below, I’ll cover the impact, the non-impact, the natural side effects of a preannounced Google algorithm update, examples of popups and interstitials, and other interesting notes. So join me on a ride through mobile popup land. But that doesn’t mean SEO company Miami you should shutter your advertising during less busy periods, for several reasons:
- Lead time. The lead time for acquiring new students is long, and students can start researching their options at any time of year SEO company Miami My research took me across many sites, both large and small, across many categories and locations. It was fascinating to see which sites raised the white flag and stopped using popups or interstitials and which ones stood their ground and kept them. It was also eye-opening to analyze the various ways websites employed popups and interstitials in this new world (if they kept them). It was enlightening, to say the least. Therefore, you want your online advertising to be active year-round, whether it’s a month to application deadline, six months SEO company Miami or more.
- Differences between undergraduate and graduate programs. Building on the prior point, we’ve seen some differences in application activity between undergraduate and graduate programs SEO company Miami. Undergraduate programs seem to follow more regular ebbs and flows for example, many publishers removed mobile popups and interstitials as January 10, 2017, approached. They simply didn’t want to get hit or test the algorithmic waters. I saw this a lot as I was collecting sites that were employing mobile popups., while graduate programs are less SEO company Miami predictable.
- Branding and remarketing. For the purposes of branding and remarketing, it’s never wise to completely drop SEO services Miami off the radar by pausing these types of PPC campaigns entirely In this respect, the education vertical is much like B2B marketing. The sales process is long and multi-faceted, and the goal is to build trust, prove expertise and provide information — not to make an immediate sale. If you do, it can be a steep climb to get back to where you were SEO service Miami.
2. Do bid on brand
Some clients still resist bidding on brand terms because they think SEO will take care of brand marketing for them.
Of course, SEO is important for brand marketing. But it’s not a complete solution. Bidding on brand terms not only gives you SEO service Miami greater control over your messaging, but it also allows you to precisely control location targeting and landing pages.
Further, even if you choose not to bid on your brand, there’s no guarantee your competitors won’t SEO services Miami As a result, competitor ads could display above your organic listings.
Given that brand clicks are usually cheaper than non-branded clicks (often substantially), bidding on brand for SEO services Miami universities and colleges is a no-brainer.
3. Do use sitelinks wisely
When you have clearly professional SEO Miami defined degrees and programs (e.g., B.A. in Economics, M.A. of Commerce, B.A. in Communications), it’s tempting to use these degree and program titles in professional SEO Miami sitelinks.
Unfortunately, this approach isn’t very helpful to your audience professional SEO Miami.
Think about the above ad professional SEO Miami. If a student is searching for “B.A. in Communications,” then how likely are they to be interested in degrees on January 12, I noticed what I believed were the first signs of impact, and I wrote a post to document my findings. My plan was to keep adding findings to that post as I came across more and more impact.
Well, that didn’t turn out very well. After some initial movement, there seemed to be very little impact (if any at all) political science SEO company New York, business admin, operations management or accounting and finance? Not very, I suspect SEO company New York.
Well, that didn’t turn out very well. After some initial movement, there seemed to be very little impact (if any at all) political science SEO company New York, business admin, operations management or accounting and finance? Not very, I suspect SEO company New York.
As you can see, these sitelinks are much more relevant to students searching for communications.
These sitelinks SEO services New York are all directly relevant to the “BA in Communications” search. They direct the student to information about internships, open houses, the industry and more info SEO services New York.
4. Do bid on the ‘wrong’ terms
Most prospective university and SEO services New York college students don’t know exactly what degree or program they “should” be searching for. They may know the area in which they want to focus, but they have no idea whether it’s a bachelor’s degree, masters degree, arts program, science program, specialization within a broader program or something else entirely.
Consequently, you might need to use the “wrong” keywords to lead students in the right direction. So you might bid on “creative writing,” even if “creative” isn’t in the title of your writing program. Or you might use “marketing communications degree,” even if the title of your degree is “marketing” and “marketing communications” is a sub-specialization professional SEO New York.
As of today, I’m still not seeing widespread impact. Again, many of the URLs across the domains I’m tracking are ranking exactly where they did prior to the rollout of the mobile popup algorithm. Therefore, I’m officially calling the mobile popup algorithm a dud. Sure, that can change if Google strengthens the algorithm or refines it, but for now, it’s not doing very much. You have to give yourself the latitude to get creative with keywords, while being careful to not mislead via your ad message Professional SEO New York.
5. Don’t put buildings in display ads
When you have a beautiful tree-lined campus, historic (or iconic) buildings and flashy, high-tech research centers, it’s tempting to feature these images in your display ads. But no matter professional SEO New York how gorgeous the image, we find we get better results by as a result, we saw a 17 percent lift in conversions!
At the end of the day, people relate to people more than professional SEO New York buildings.
6. Don’t leave landing pages unfocused
For some reason, it’s easier to get excited about pre-click ad components (e.g., copy, offers, keywords) than post-click components (e.g., landing pages). But for a successful PPC campaign, you need both.
Perhaps that’s why it’s not uncommon to SEO company New York see poorly designed landing pages in the education vertical.
As you can see, this page has multiple calls to action and lots of distractions.
(I’ll let you in on a secret. In fact, this isn’t a landing page at all. It’s a web page. A web page our client had to use while waiting for their landing pages to be developed. If you’re in the industry, you’ll know how this can happen!)
This landing page has all the hallmarks of a good landing page. It’s clear, concise, contains a relevant image and a simple path to conversion. Most importantly, it also contains one call to action.
7. Don’t run the same campaign everywhere
Most universities have clear data about where they draw their students from. For example, one of our university clients is located in New York, and most of their students come from the Tri-State Area. They draw a lower number of students from nearby surrounding states, and the remaining are widely spread across the US.
Therefore, we run the bulk of our campaigns in the Tri-State Area and expand to other states and regions as supported by the school’s data. But in each case, we carefully adapt our messaging. Because, as you might expect, messaging that works in the Tri-State Area may not work as well in California, for example.
8. Don’t build your program around student application submissions
It’s tempting to make application submissions the focus of your PPC campaigns. This is understandable — after all, applications are the end goal.
But no student is going to be persuaded to fill out an application by a single PPC ad.
Final thoughts
Keep these dos and don’ts in mind the next time you pick up a PPC account in the education vertical. You may avoid some of the lessons of the school of hard knocks.
Google has confirmed that they have temporarily disabled the ‘not mobile-friendly’ label in the mobile search results due to a bug. John Mueller of Google said that Google has turned “the label off for now” but it “should be ok soon.”
It’s not often that Google announces an algorithm update in advance. But when they do, not only can webmasters prepare for that update, we can also track its rollout once Google pulls the trigger. That provides a rare opportunity to gauge the impact of the algorithm update and determine what its effects are.
That’s exactly what I’ve been doing since January 10, 2017.
In August of 2016, Google announced that they would be rolling out an update on January 10, 2017, that could impact URLs employing intrusive mobile popups or interstitials. For example, if a URL presented an interstitial that covered a substantial part of the content, then that URL could be demoted in the mobile search results. The web as a whole cheered, as many users were extremely frustrated by aggressive mobile popups.
So, as January approached, many SEOs, webmasters and business owners wondered what the actual impact would be. Would there be mass casualties, minor bumps in the algorithmic road or something in between? Based on Google’s announcement, you would think that sites employing intrusive popups or interstitials would have gotten smoked by the algorithm. That would make sense, but when you’re dealing in an algorithmic world, the devil is in the details.
Preparing for the mobile popup algorithm
As the rollout neared, I had many questions. Would the update actually work? How extreme would it be? Would there be loopholes? How would it impact branded versus non-branded queries? Would large-scale sites be impacted as much as smaller sites? And so on and so forth.
That’s why I prepared for the update by collecting as many sites using mobile popups or interstitials as possible. My goal was to benchmark those sites and then gauge the impact as the mobile popup algorithm rolled out. I’m now tracking close to 70 domains on my mobile popup list — and those sites are across verticals, including news publishers, entertainment, sports, e-commerce retailers, bloggers, music and more.
Starting on January 10, I began checking my list twice per day to see which sites were still breaking the rules and which ones weren’t. And for the ones breaking the new Google mobile popup law, how much negative impact would they see? Would they see any impact at all?
My travels along the popup algorithm trail
And of course, I was able to see many different types of ads and interstitials, including benign newsletter signups, aggressive ads that take over your screen, autoplay video in popups, broken ads in popups, and even malware and malicious downloads from ads in popups. There were times I felt like I needed battle armor while visiting some sites.
January 10, 2017: The rollout begins
When the rollout began, I was excited to check my list and determine if there was any impact. As you can guess, there wasn’t much to report on the first day. The algorithm had to fully roll out, so I began checking my list twice per day to gauge the impact. And as I was checking the mobile SERPs, I ended up finding even more sites using mobile popups and interstitials. So my list was naturally growing as time went on.
I kept updating my post with disclaimers about the lack of impact I was seeing. I was floored. I thought for sure the domains I was tracking would see some movement, but I was wrong. I checked twice per day, only to see many of the URLs from those domains ranking exactly where they did prior to the rollout.
Examples of popups and interstitials still in use
You might be wondering what I’m seeing when checking sites. Well, I’ve seen it all since January 10: newsletter signups, popups on scroll, delayed popups, multi-ad interstitials, autoplay video, broken popups, malware, malicious downloads, multiple popups on one page, and so on.
Without revealing the sites, here is a potpourri of popups and interstitials I have come across during my travels. These are all from URLs that currently rank highly for competitive keywords — and ranked there before the algorithm update rolled out. Also, the desktop and mobile rankings are equivalent. In other words, I’m not seeing a drop in the mobile SERPs when compared to desktop, which would happen if the mobile popup algorithm were impacting rankings.
I’ll see you on the other side. That’s where I’ll cover the true impact of the mobile popup algorithm — and it might not be what you’re thinking.
The true impact of the mobile popup algorithm
Well, the true impact has nothing to do with mobile rankings being impacted, a slide in mobile traffic or anything related to SEO. Instead, it has everything to do with the reaction of publishers to the news that the algorithm was going to roll out.
This also included sites removing the popups after January 10. Not every company knew about the algorithm update, so some were late to the game. My guess is that the algorithm got on their radar based on news of the rollout, so those publishers had a knee-jerk reaction and simply removed their popups without gauging the actual impact. They basically trusted that the mobile popup algorithm was working without evidence of it actually working.
And I get that. If you’re not neck-deep in SEO, you might not be familiar with the gray area of algorithms, and you might not know that some algorithm updates simply don’t work as expected. For those people, they just knew it was rolling out, that it could potentially negatively impact their rankings and traffic, and they pulled the popups and interstitials from their sites.
But like I said earlier, the devil is in the details. Again, I’m not seeing any widespread impact from the mobile popup algorithm as I write this post.
High risk, high reward: Will Google turn up the dial?
And here’s the rub. The publishers I mentioned earlier that stood their ground and refused to remove their mobile popups and interstitials have braved the mighty tsunami that never arrived. They stood on the beach facing a powerful surge of water that would surely suck the mobile life out of their sites… and nothing happened.
But that’s for now.
Google can absolutely turn up the dial and strengthen the mobile popup algorithm at any time. And if they do, then those sites using mobile popups or interstitials could get smoked. But that’s a big could.
Now, I’m not saying mobile popups are a good thing. I actually can’t stand most of them, and users overall hate them. That should be enough to rid them from the web, but they do work conversion-wise (unfortunately). So, based on what I explained in this post, I’ll provide some closing points below.
Key points
- Although there hasn’t been widespread impact yet, Google can turn up the dial at any time. I know many people are still hoping that happens; and if it does, sites using mobile popups or interstitials can get hit. Remember, high risk, high reward.
- Publishers are still figuring out ways to push the envelope with mobile popups in order to determine which formats and techniques will get hit and which ones won’t. But based on my research, there’s very little negative impact overall so far. I recommend watching my initial post for more updates.
- Never simply take Google’s word for it. Track and test updates for yourself. I’m glad I decided to gather close to 70 sites using mobile popups and interstitials. That enabled me to test how strong the algorithm was and if it was doing what it was supposed to do.
- Mobile popups and interstitials are horrible user experience-wise, but they perform well conversion-wise. Based on the lack of impact from the mobile popup algorithm, I fear we will see more sites testing the waters and adding them back. It pains me to say that… but the lack of impact is clear.
Summary: The waiting continues
When January 10 arrived, I was eager to gauge the impact of the mobile popup algorithm. But what I wasn’t prepared for was to see very little happen. And that’s exactly what occurred while checking many sites still using mobile popups and interstitials.
Moving forward, keep an eye on my Twitter feed and my original findings post. I will keep checking my list, and checking it twice, in order to see if the mobile popup algorithm is being naughty or nice.
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