What Boom Have Been Reading May 2018 Edition

With holiday season fast approaching, we’ve been working hard to remain at the top of our game here at Boom. We’ve also announced the date for our mid-summer Drink Digital shindig – so if you fancy getting your geek on with some of the biggest names in the industry and a nice cold beverage or two, come and join us!

As is standard for us Boom folk, we’ve been doing a lot of reading over the last month and being the good digital marketing Samaritans that we are, we’ve compiled a list for your viewing pleasure. Oh and GDPR. ‘Nuff said on that.

How Much Is Too Much? Faceted Navigation And SEO

by Eric Enge (@stonetemple) A short but useful explanation of how faceted navigation (think filter options) can create a huge number of unnecessary pages and thus present page quality and crawl budget issues for search engines. It’s something we’ve grappled with a lot at Boom and led to us developing our own SEO framework for WooCommerce.

Google AdWords New Responsive Ads Can Show 3 Headlines

by Ginny Marvin (@ginnymarvin) Worth noting and seeing if you can get in on the beta if you use AdWords – Google is rolling out yet more machine learning around ad creation, providing a way to run multivariate tests where the machine chooses which combinations of headlines and descriptions to use.

Your reward for being a guinea pig is that your ads can show up to three headlines and up to two 90 character descriptions (rather than a single 80 character description in normal text ads). Naturally, I’m sure this has nothing to do with wanting to make ads even bigger and get a greater share of search clicks at the expense of organic results…

The 10 Seo Ranking Factors We Know To Be True

by Kevin Indig (@Kevin_Indig) A great breakdown with information to back up the claims – often calling on presentations and papers from Google themselves. Think of it as a little priority checklist.

Running An Agency

by Julian Shapiro (@Shapiro) A great post that covers many of the things that plague people who run an agency – from revenue volatility to work inefficiency. We also got round to re-designing our lorem ipsum tool (thanks Pete) and announcing the next Drink Digital (you should sign up here because Barry Adams is coming to speak).

If you want to bookmark a couple of things then Ryte put together this digital marketing wiki and ContentKing launched their academy.

To help me through the GDPR madness this month I have been mainly reading things that take the michael out of the whole situation. Making light of big tasks always helps them seem more surmountable!

Mr Scruff explains GDPR by Mr Scruff (@mrscruff1)

XKCD’s Privacy Policy by XKCD

A round up of chuckle-worthy GDPR memes and tweets by the Greg Evans

GDPR meltdown: A bunch of U.S. news sites are down in Europe by by Isobel Hamilton (@hamilbug)

Can’t be non-GDPR compliant if there’s no website to visit.

Should Information be Data-Rich or Content Rich

by Michael Andrews (@storyneedle) Michael published this article towards the end of 2017, but I’ve only just stumbled across it now. We’re always trying to strike the balance between data-rich and content-rich content. Michael shares his observations on both styles of information, the limits of each, and how to decide what to publish.

BuzzStream Data: The Outperforming Outreach Tactics We Learned From Analyzing 12,000 Campaigns

by Stephen Panico A useful read with key insights for anyone looking to improve their outreach. The section, in particular, discussing fake personalisation and alternative approaches that I imagine will help a lot of marketers increase their response rate. 

GDPR: 15 (good & bad) examples of repermissioning emails & campaigns

by Ben Davis @herrhuld It was the dreaded month of GDPR, so here’s a round up of some of the best and worst emails from early adopters. I certainly found it useful seeing what everyone else was up to.

How to Earn Google Featured Snippets for Mobile: Large-scale Study

by A.J. Ghergich (@SEO) An analysis of 10 million mobile keywords and 1.3 million featured snippets, they weren’t kidding when they said large scale study. Some nice summaries in this article however, and definitely worth a read.

How Will GDPR Affect Your Content Marketing Efforts?

by Lacy Boggs (@Blogspiration42) Yes, it’s another GDPR article (sorry,not sorry). But if your’re a content marketer and wondering how all of this will affect day to day running and use of media lists, you should definitely check this out.

We Must Use AI to Excel in the Next Frontier of PR

by Solomon Radley (@Solomon Radley) Ever thought about Artificial Intelligence impacting the PR industry? Me neither.

While AI and PR are rarely ever mentioned together,we can’t ignore that the tech industry is one we should watch very closely. This article gives great insight into just how the industry might be shaped in the future by the innovations of the tech sector, and why we should be embracing it.

Find Your Wow – Or Risk Being Ignored

by Tyler Lessard (@tylerlessard) In digital marketing, it’s important to put yourself out there if you want to make an impression. So… be a unicorn, find your wow and let your weird light shine! (Such wisdom!)

6 Google Analytics Tips for Business Insight Way Beyond Traffic

by Dan Shewan Having recently started to delve a little deeper into the abyss that is Google Analytics, I came across this post from Dan and it stuck with me. A great read, simple and comprehensive with tips and tricks that can actually be put into practice. If you’re new to Analytics too, these tips are a great place to start on your journey of data exploration.

Thoughts and Musings About Making Things for the Web

by Matthew Inman/The Oatmeal (@Oatmeal) Making fun and engaging content for the web isn’t easy. Matthew’s comic sums up the creative (and occasionally destructive) process wonderfully. I found myself nodding a lot at his pain. But it’s true: I have the best job in the world.

I Just Deleted Your Outreach Email Without Reading. And NO, I Don’t Feel Sorry

by Tim Soulo (@timsoulo) This month, I really enjoyed reading Tim Soulo’s article on what constitutes good outreach. I have been started on the path of learning about outreach and was given a bunch of articles and resources to read. This one stood out to me as it was well-written, well-presented and filled with real-life examples. I wasn’t too sure if I would enjoy doing outreach, but this article gave me faith that there is a knack to it and it clearly highlights common pitfalls and mistakes. I’ve still got a lot to learn but this seemed comprehensive and thorough.

Don’t Make Me Think: Revisited

by Steve Krug (@skrug) I’ve also been making my way through this book by usability guru, Steve Krug. This revisited edition includes updated examples and a new chapter about mobile. It’s extremely readable, easy to follow and has been very successful. It’s illustrated throughout, which contributes to how easily it reads, and Krug articulates his points in an enjoyable way. Almost everything he talks about seems obvious to me, because it is (by his own admission), but reading about it in his words really makes the point stick. In other words, I felt like I already knew what he was talking about, but the book helped me to really understand it. Great read.

A Tour of the Gutenberg Editor for WordPress

by Rachel McCollin (@rachelmcwrites) Gutenberg. If you’re in any way associated with the world of WordPress, you’ve probably heard a lot of hype, and possibly a fair bit of skepticism over WordPress’ new editor. It’s set to grace us with its presence in the next major release of WordPress (5.0).

What you may not have seen is how the editor is going to function (now that it’s pretty much finished). Well, now’s your chance, Yyou can take a look for yourself in this article by the great people over at WPMUDEV.

WordPress 4.9.6 Update Guide

by Jonathan Desrosiers (@desrosj)  WordPress core contributor Jonathan Desrosiers posted a useful breakdown of resources which are now available in WordPress 4.9.6. These will help you become acquainted with the new core data privacy tools, mostly in relation to GDPR. This developer guide highlights integration of the newly available functions to plugin authors, such as: suggestion text for the site privacy policy, personal data export, data eraser, privacy options, hooks and much more.

After GDPR, Here Come the Unintended Consequences

by Barry Levine (@xBarryLevine) If you’ve not heard of GDPR this month, where have you been? The new European General Data Protection Regulation came in on 25th May, resulting in marketers everywhere clamouring to update their privacy policies, mailing lists and customer preferences. There has been all sorts of confusion, and dire predictions over what’s going to happen, but here are some of the “hidden waves” that experts predict may hit businesses in the coming months.

Co-op CMO on launching her own ad consultancy after losing faith in the agency model

by Jennifer Faull (@JenFaull) This came into my feed and I read half of it, then got a bit bored. Although you can get the gist from the first half. This big boss lady from the Co-Op got tired of having to hire advertising agencies and stick with them for an agreed period of time, as they couldn’t come up with fresh ideas after the initial pitch. So she’s started her own advertising agency which does things a little differently.

Negative Impact of Third-Party Cookie Rejection

by Webtrends Analytics

Cookies And Consent: How GDPR Impacts Online Tracking

by Amy Onorato The first link might be old, but the information has certainly never been so relevant.

Logging in to some of my client accounts after a few days away and forgetting about the GDPR implementation, almost lead to a heart attack. Drops in conversions (and thus increase in cost per conversion) that I couldn’t quite explain straight away… Then I remembered… May 25th… Implementation of cookie consent mechanisms…

Obviously, if the visitors reject cookies, you can’t track their actions on the website and this is not good news for reporting. There might be some “consolidation” needed to check if the numbers of conversions shown in Analytics and Adwords match what client’s receive on their side.