Title Tags SEO: When to Include Your Brand and/or Boilerplate

Posted by Cyrus-Shepard

If your websites are like most, they include a fair amount of extra "stuff" in the title tags: things like your brand name or repeating boilerplate text that appears across multiple pages.

Should you include these elements in your titles automatically?

To be fair, most sites do.

Alternatively, could it help your SEO to actually include less information in your titles? (Or at least in specific circumstances?)

We know from a handful of studies that titles of a certain length tend to perform better. A now-famous study from the engineers at Etsy showed how shorter titles performed better than longer ones. SEOs speculate that this could be because shorter titles can have more focused relevancy (by focusing on core keywords), might earn higher click-through rates, or some other reason we can't imagine.

When choosing which part of a title to shorten, brand names and boilerplate text are obvious choices. But how do you determine if this is something you should consider for your own SEO?

Here's an example of a brand's site name at the end of every title:

We've all seen sites like this. Heck, most of us do this on our own sites. The question is, does having our brand/site name at the end of every title actually help, or hurt?

But first, we also have to consider other types of boilerplate.

What is boilerplate? Boilerplate simply means standardized, non-unique pieces of text that are used over and over again. This often includes things like categories, product categories, author tags, and taglines.

In this example below, the boilerplate text on every title includes "Tomatoes - Vegetable Seeds - Shop."

Sometimes boilerplate material can become quite long. The comic book review site Major Spoilers (awesome name!) often includes the same 65-character boilerplate on many pages:

"Major Spoilers – Comic Book Reviews, News, Previews, and Podcasts"

Of course, at this length, it's so long that Google truncates every single title:

The problems that boilerplate can cause your SEO are threefold:

1. Relevancy: Unnecessary words can make your title less relevant, both to search engines and users. For search engines, this could mean lower rankings. For users, this could result in fewer clicks.
2. Uniqueness: Titles that share the same repeating text, and only vary from one another by a word or two, aren't very unique. While this isn't necessarily a problem, it goes against most SEO best practices, where uniqueness is key.
3. Length: Boilerplate means you have less room to display other words in your title, and Google will often cut these off if they go beyond a certain length.

Experiment #1: Remove category from title

We decided to run a couple of boilerplate experiments here at Moz, to see if we could increase our rankings and traffic by removing some of the repeating parts of our titles.

We started with our Whiteboard Friday blog posts. Every time Moz publishes a new Whiteboard Friday, we traditionally include "Whiteboard Friday" in the title.

What would happen if we removed this from the titles?

Using an A/B split test methodology — where we rolled the test out on 50% of the titles and used the other 50% as a control — we saw an amazing 20% uplift from this experiment.

This chart represents the cumulative impact of the test on organic traffic. The central blue line is the best estimate of how the variant pages, with the change applied, performed compared to how we would have expected without any changes applied. The blue shaded region represents our 95% confidence interval: there is a 95% probability that the actual outcome is somewhere in this region. If this region is wholly above or below the horizontal axis, that represents a statistically significant test.

Honestly, the results surprised us. Whiteboard Friday is a popular brand (so we thought) but removing this boilerplate from our titles produced a significant uplift in traffic to those pages.

At this point, we got cocky…

Experiment #2: Remove brand from title

If removing the category name from Whiteboard Friday posts produced such a significant uplift, what if we removed our brand name from all titles?

For this A/B experiment, we did exactly that—removing the word "Moz" from 50% of our titles and measuring the results.

Crazy, right? If it worked by removing "Whiteboard Friday" would we see the same uplift by removing "Moz?"

Sadly, Google had other plans:

While this A/B test never reached full statistical significance, we actually saw a 4% decline in traffic by removing our brand from our title tags.

Boo!

So why did this test not produce the same gains? To be honest, I've removed the brand name from other site's titles and seen as much as a 20% uplift.

It turns out that whether or not removing brand/boilerplate will be beneficial to your SEO depends on a few key factors, which you can gauge in advance.

How to know if removing boilerplate may succeed

Over 10 years of experience and literally millions of title tags, I've found that there are basically four factors that influence whether or not removing boilerplate from your titles might be beneficial:

1. Brand Strength: Popular brand names in titles almost always perform better than unknown brands, even when people aren't searching for your brand specifically. Amazon's brand recognition, for example, likely gives a significant boost to including "Amazon" in every title, even when people aren't specifically searching Amazon. Less recognizable brands, however, don't always get the same boost, and can actually lead to fewer visits based on relevancy, length, and clickability (described next.)
2. Relevancy: Are your boilerplate/brand keywords relevant to what your users search for? For example, if you're site is about television repair, then boilerplate titles that say "Brad's TV Repair" are going to be much more relevant than boilerplate that simply say "Brads." (We'll explore a way to determine your boilerplate's brand strength and relevancy in the next section.)
3. Length: In general, long boilerplate has the potential to do more harm than short boilerplate/brand words. Long boilerplate can dilute the relevance of your titles. So if you include "Buy Brad's TVs, Television Repair, High Definition Servicing, Audio and Visual Equipment for Sale in Houston Texas and Surrounding Areas" - you may want to rethink your boilerplate.
4. Clickability: Sometimes, boilerplate can make your titles more clickable, even if they aren't terribly relevant. Words like "Sale", "Solved", "Free", "2020", "New", and many others can lead to an increase in click-through rates (CTR.) Sometimes you can't tell until you test, but in many cases even adding clickable elements to your boilerplate can lead to significant gains.

Simple technique for determining your brand strength and boilerplate relevancy

This simple technique will also show why removing "Whiteboard Friday" led to an increase in traffic while removing "Moz" from titles did not.

Here's what you want to do: for each piece of boilerplate, determine the number of URLs on your site that rank/receive traffic for those keywords.

For this, we'll use Google Search Console.

Simply enter your boilerplate/brand as a query filter (you may need to break it into chunks for longer boilerplate) and see how many URLs receive traffic for queries that include that keyword.

When we filter for keywords that contain our "moz" brand name, we find thousands of ranking URLs.

People are searching for things like:

• Moz DA Checker
• Moz Pro
• Moz SEO
• Moz Blog
• Etc., etc.

As our brand name is part of so many queries and leads to visits across thousands of pages, this tells us that "Moz" is a very strong brand, and we'd likely be smart to include it as part of our title tags.

"Moz" is also very short at only 3 characters, which doesn't hurt either.

So what happens when we try this same technique with "Whiteboard Friday" — the boilerplate that led to a 20% uplift when we removed it? We see a very different result:

In this case, almost all the traffic for "Whiteboard Friday" search terms goes to only one or two pages.

For most Whiteboard Friday posts, the term is simply irrelevant. It's not what people are searching for, and the brand isn't strong enough to produce additional uplift.

Also, at 17 characters long, this boilerplate added significant length to each of our titles, in addition to possibly diluting the relevancy for what the posts were ranking for.

Final thoughts + bonus free title tag webinar

These tips can't tell you definitively whether you should or shouldn't include boilerplate or brand in your title tags, but they should give you a pretty good idea of when you should test things out.

Remember: Always test and evaluate before making any SEO change permanent. At least know the impact of the change you are making.

Also, please don't be under the impression that you should always remove boilerplate from your titles. In some instances, actually adding boilerplate can produce an uplift, particularly when the boilerplate is:

1. Recognizable: For example a strong brand
2. Relevant: The right keywords
3. Clickable: Encourages a high CTR
4. Succinct: Not overly long

---

If you found value in the tips, and want to learn even more ways to optimize your title tags, we've made available a free webinar for you: SEO Master Class: Advanced Title Tag Optimization (For Any Site).

If you've got 40 minutes, it's definitely worth a watch.

Watch Free Webinar

Best of luck with your SEO!

Sign up for The Moz Top 10, a semimonthly mailer updating you on the top ten hottest pieces of SEO news, tips, and rad links uncovered by the Moz team. Think of it as your exclusive digest of stuff you don't have time to hunt down but want to read!

Title Tags SEO: When to Include Your Brand and/or Boilerplate

Posted by Cyrus-Shepard

If your websites are like most, they include a fair amount of extra "stuff" in the title tags: things like your brand name or repeating boilerplate text that appears across multiple pages.

Should you include these elements in your titles automatically?

To be fair, most sites do.

Alternatively, could it help your SEO to actually include less information in your titles? (Or at least in specific circumstances?)

We know from a handful of studies that titles of a certain length tend to perform better. A now-famous study from the engineers at Etsy showed how shorter titles performed better than longer ones. SEOs speculate that this could be because shorter titles can have more focused relevancy (by focusing on core keywords), might earn higher click-through rates, or some other reason we can't imagine.

When choosing which part of a title to shorten, brand names and boilerplate text are obvious choices. But how do you determine if this is something you should consider for your own SEO?

Here's an example of a brand's site name at the end of every title:

We've all seen sites like this. Heck, most of us do this on our own sites. The question is, does having our brand/site name at the end of every title actually help, or hurt?

But first, we also have to consider other types of boilerplate.

What is boilerplate? Boilerplate simply means standardized, non-unique pieces of text that are used over and over again. This often includes things like categories, product categories, author tags, and taglines.

In this example below, the boilerplate text on every title includes "Tomatoes - Vegetable Seeds - Shop."

Sometimes boilerplate material can become quite long. The comic book review site Major Spoilers (awesome name!) often includes the same 65-character boilerplate on many pages:

"Major Spoilers – Comic Book Reviews, News, Previews, and Podcasts"

Of course, at this length, it's so long that Google truncates every single title:

The problems that boilerplate can cause your SEO are threefold:

1. Relevancy: Unnecessary words can make your title less relevant, both to search engines and users. For search engines, this could mean lower rankings. For users, this could result in fewer clicks.
2. Uniqueness: Titles that share the same repeating text, and only vary from one another by a word or two, aren't very unique. While this isn't necessarily a problem, it goes against most SEO best practices, where uniqueness is key.
3. Length: Boilerplate means you have less room to display other words in your title, and Google will often cut these off if they go beyond a certain length.

Experiment #1: Remove category from title

We decided to run a couple of boilerplate experiments here at Moz, to see if we could increase our rankings and traffic by removing some of the repeating parts of our titles.

We started with our Whiteboard Friday blog posts. Every time Moz publishes a new Whiteboard Friday, we traditionally include "Whiteboard Friday" in the title.

What would happen if we removed this from the titles?

Using an A/B split test methodology — where we rolled the test out on 50% of the titles and used the other 50% as a control — we saw an amazing 20% uplift from this experiment.

This chart represents the cumulative impact of the test on organic traffic. The central blue line is the best estimate of how the variant pages, with the change applied, performed compared to how we would have expected without any changes applied. The blue shaded region represents our 95% confidence interval: there is a 95% probability that the actual outcome is somewhere in this region. If this region is wholly above or below the horizontal axis, that represents a statistically significant test.

Honestly, the results surprised us. Whiteboard Friday is a popular brand (so we thought) but removing this boilerplate from our titles produced a significant uplift in traffic to those pages.

At this point, we got cocky…

Experiment #2: Remove brand from title

If removing the category name from Whiteboard Friday posts produced such a significant uplift, what if we removed our brand name from all titles?

For this A/B experiment, we did exactly that—removing the word "Moz" from 50% of our titles and measuring the results.

Crazy, right? If it worked by removing "Whiteboard Friday" would we see the same uplift by removing "Moz?"

Sadly, Google had other plans:

While this A/B test never reached full statistical significance, we actually saw a 4% decline in traffic by removing our brand from our title tags.

Boo!

So why did this test not produce the same gains? To be honest, I've removed the brand name from other site's titles and seen as much as a 20% uplift.

It turns out that whether or not removing brand/boilerplate will be beneficial to your SEO depends on a few key factors, which you can gauge in advance.

How to know if removing boilerplate may succeed

Over 10 years of experience and literally millions of title tags, I've found that there are basically four factors that influence whether or not removing boilerplate from your titles might be beneficial:

1. Brand Strength: Popular brand names in titles almost always perform better than unknown brands, even when people aren't searching for your brand specifically. Amazon's brand recognition, for example, likely gives a significant boost to including "Amazon" in every title, even when people aren't specifically searching Amazon. Less recognizable brands, however, don't always get the same boost, and can actually lead to fewer visits based on relevancy, length, and clickability (described next.)
2. Relevancy: Are your boilerplate/brand keywords relevant to what your users search for? For example, if you're site is about television repair, then boilerplate titles that say "Brad's TV Repair" are going to be much more relevant than boilerplate that simply say "Brads." (We'll explore a way to determine your boilerplate's brand strength and relevancy in the next section.)
3. Length: In general, long boilerplate has the potential to do more harm than short boilerplate/brand words. Long boilerplate can dilute the relevance of your titles. So if you include "Buy Brad's TVs, Television Repair, High Definition Servicing, Audio and Visual Equipment for Sale in Houston Texas and Surrounding Areas" - you may want to rethink your boilerplate.
4. Clickability: Sometimes, boilerplate can make your titles more clickable, even if they aren't terribly relevant. Words like "Sale", "Solved", "Free", "2020", "New", and many others can lead to an increase in click-through rates (CTR.) Sometimes you can't tell until you test, but in many cases even adding clickable elements to your boilerplate can lead to significant gains.

Simple technique for determining your brand strength and boilerplate relevancy

This simple technique will also show why removing "Whiteboard Friday" led to an increase in traffic while removing "Moz" from titles did not.

Here's what you want to do: for each piece of boilerplate, determine the number of URLs on your site that rank/receive traffic for those keywords.

For this, we'll use Google Search Console.

Simply enter your boilerplate/brand as a query filter (you may need to break it into chunks for longer boilerplate) and see how many URLs receive traffic for queries that include that keyword.

When we filter for keywords that contain our "moz" brand name, we find thousands of ranking URLs.

People are searching for things like:

• Moz DA Checker
• Moz Pro
• Moz SEO
• Moz Blog
• Etc., etc.

As our brand name is part of so many queries and leads to visits across thousands of pages, this tells us that "Moz" is a very strong brand, and we'd likely be smart to include it as part of our title tags.

"Moz" is also very short at only 3 characters, which doesn't hurt either.

So what happens when we try this same technique with "Whiteboard Friday" — the boilerplate that led to a 20% uplift when we removed it? We see a very different result:

In this case, almost all the traffic for "Whiteboard Friday" search terms goes to only one or two pages.

For most Whiteboard Friday posts, the term is simply irrelevant. It's not what people are searching for, and the brand isn't strong enough to produce additional uplift.

Also, at 17 characters long, this boilerplate added significant length to each of our titles, in addition to possibly diluting the relevancy for what the posts were ranking for.

Final thoughts + bonus free title tag webinar

These tips can't tell you definitively whether you should or shouldn't include boilerplate or brand in your title tags, but they should give you a pretty good idea of when you should test things out.

Remember: Always test and evaluate before making any SEO change permanent. At least know the impact of the change you are making.

Also, please don't be under the impression that you should always remove boilerplate from your titles. In some instances, actually adding boilerplate can produce an uplift, particularly when the boilerplate is:

1. Recognizable: For example a strong brand
2. Relevant: The right keywords
3. Clickable: Encourages a high CTR
4. Succinct: Not overly long

---

If you found value in the tips, and want to learn even more ways to optimize your title tags, we've made available a free webinar for you: SEO Master Class: Advanced Title Tag Optimization (For Any Site).

If you've got 40 minutes, it's definitely worth a watch.

Watch Free Webinar

Best of luck with your SEO!

Sign up for The Moz Top 10, a semimonthly mailer updating you on the top ten hottest pieces of SEO news, tips, and rad links uncovered by the Moz team. Think of it as your exclusive digest of stuff you don't have time to hunt down but want to read!

Google Ads Mistakes to Avoid — Best of Whiteboard Friday

Posted by DiTomaso

Contrary to popular belief, SEO and PPC aren't at opposite ends of the spectrum. There are plenty of ways the two search disciplines can work together for benefits all around, especially when it comes to optimizing your Google Ads. In this informative Whiteboard Friday episode from last Spring, MozCon speaker and Kick Point President Dana DiTomaso explains how you can harness the power of both SEO and PPC for a better Google experience overall.

Click on the whiteboard image above to open a high-resolution version in a new tab!

Video Transcription

Hey, Moz readers. My name is Dana DiTomaso, and I'm President and partner at Kick Point. We're a digital marketing agency way up in the frozen wilds of Edmonton, Alberta. Today I'm going be talking to you about PPC, and I know you're thinking, "This is an SEO blog. What are you doing here talking about PPC?"

But one of my resolutions for 2019 is to bring together SEO and PPC people, because SEO can learn a lot from PPC, and yes, PPC, you also can learn a lot from SEO. I know PPC people are like, "We just do paid. It's so great." But trust me, both can work together. In our agency, we do both SEO and PPC, and we work with a lot of companies who have one person, sometimes two and they're doing everything.

One of the things we try to do is help them run better Ads campaigns. Here I have tips on things that we see all the time, when we start working with a new Ads account, that we end up fixing, and hopefully I can pass this on to you so you can fix it before you have to call an agency to come and fix it for you. One of the things is this is actually a much longer piece than what I can present on this whiteboard. There's only so much room.

There is actually a blog post on our website, which you can find here. Please check that out and that will have the full nine tips. But I'm just going to break it down to a few today.

1. Too many keywords

First thing, too many keywords. We see this a lot where people, in Google it says make sure to put together keywords that have the same sort of theme.

But your theme can be really specific, or it can be kind of vague. This is an example, a real example that we got, where the keyword examples were all lawyer themes, so "defense lawyer," "criminal lawyer,""dui lawyer," "assault lawyer," "sexual assault lawyer." Technically, they all have the same theme of "lawyer,"but that's way too vague for it to be all in one single ad group, because what kind of ad are you going to show?

"We are lawyers. Call us." It's not specific enough. Take for example "dui lawyer,"which I know is a really very competitive niche, and then you can do [dui lawyer], [dui lawyer seattle], and then "dui lawyer" and +dui+lawyer+seattle spelled out a little bit differently. I'll talk about that in a second. By taking this one thing and then breaking it down into a much more specific ad group, you can really have much more control.

This is a consistent theme in all the tips I talk about is much more control over where you're spending your money, what keywords you're spending it on, what your ads are, having a much better landing page to ad match, which is also really important. It just makes your ad life so much easier when you've got it in all of those ad groups. I know it might seem intimidating. It's like, "Well, I have three ad groups now.If I follow your tips, I'm going to have 40."

But at the same time, it's way easier to manage 40 well organized groups than it is to manage 3 really badly organized groups. Keep that in mind.

2. Picking the right match type

The next thing is picking the right match type. You can see here I've got this bracket stuff and this phrase stuff and these plus signs. There are really four match types.

Broad match

There's broad match, which is terrible and don't ever use it. Broad match is just you writing out the keyword, and then Google just displays it for whatever it feels like is relevant to that particular search. For example, we've seen examples where it's like a catering company and they'll have "catering" as a keyword, and they're showing up for all sorts of phrases in catering where they can't provide catering, so searching for a venue that only does in-house catering. Or they're spending money on a catering conference or just totally irrelevant stuff. Do not use broad match.

Broad match modifier (BMM)

The upgrade from that is what's called broad match modifier or BMM, and that's where these plus signs come in. This is really the words dui, lawyer, and seattle in any order, but they all have to exist and other things can exist around that. It could be, "I need a DUI lawyer in Seattle." "I live in Seattle. I need a DUI lawyer." That would also work for that particular keyword.

Phrase match

The next type is phrase, and that's in the quotes. This "dui lawyer" is the example here, and then you can have anything before it or you can have anything after it, but you can't have something in between it. It couldn't be "dui who is really great at being a lawyer" for example. Weak example, but you get the idea. You can't just shove stuff in the middle of a phrase match.

Exact match

Then exact match is what's in the brackets here, and that is just those words and nothing else. If I have [dui lawyer], this keyword, if I didn't have [dui lawyer seattle], this keyword would not trigger if somebody searches [dui lawyer seattle]. That's as specific as possible. You really want to try that for your most competitive keywords.

This is the really expensive stuff, because you do not want to waste one single penny on anything that is irrelevant to that particular search. This is your head on, it's really expensive every click. I've got to make sure I'm getting the most money possible for those clicks. That's where you really want to use exact match.

3. Only one ad per group

Next, tips. The next thing is what we see is a lot of people who have only one ad per group.

Have at least 3 ads per group

This is not a tip. This is a criticism up here. The thing is that maybe, again, you think it's easy for management, but it's really hard to see what's going to work, because if you're not always testing, how are you going to know if you could do better? Make sure to have at least three ads per group.

Add emotional triggers into your ad copy

Then look at your ad copy. We see a lot of just generic like, "We are the best lawyers. Call us." There's nothing there that says I need to call these people. Really think about how you can add those emotional triggers into your copy. Talk to your client or your team, if you work in-house, and find out what are the things that people say when they call. What are the things where they say, "Wow, you really helped me with this" or, "I was feeling like this and then you came in and I just felt so much better."

That can really help to spice up your ads. We don't want to get too fancy with this, but we certainly want to make something that's going to help you stand out. Really add those emotional triggers into your ad copy.

Make sure to have a call to action

Then the next thing is making sure to have a call to action, which seems basic because you think it's an ad. If you click it, that's the call to action. But sometimes people on the Internet, they're not necessarily thinking. You just want to say, "You know what? Just call me or email me or we're open 24 hours."

Just be really specific on what you want the person to do when they look at the ad. Just spell it out for them. I know it seems silly. Just tell them. Just tell them what you want them to do. That's all you need to do.

Use extensions!

Then make sure you add in all of the extensions. In Google Ads, if you're not super familiar with the platform, there's a section called Extensions. These are things like when the address shows up under an ad, or you've got those little links that come up, or you've got somebody saying we're open 24 hours, for example. There are all sorts of different extensions that you can use. Just put in all the extensions that you possibly can for every single one of your groups.

Then they won't all trigger all at the same time, but at least they're there and it's possible that they could trigger. If they do, that's give your ad more real estate versus your competition, which is really great on mobile because ads take up a lot of space at the top of a mobile search. You want to make sure to shove your competition as far as you possibly can down that search so you own as much of that property as you possibly can. One thing that I do see people doing incorrectly with extensions, though, is setting extensions at say the campaign level, and then you have different ad groups that cover different themes.

Going back to this example over here, with the different types of lawyers, let's say you had an extension that talks specifically about DUI law, but then it was triggering on say sexual assault law. You don't want that to happen. Make sure you have really fine-tuned control over your different extensions so you're showing the right extension with the right type of keyword and the right type of ad. The other thing that we see a lot is where people have location extensions and they're showing all the location extensions where they should not be showing all the location extensions.

You've got an ad group for, say, Seattle, and it's talking about this new home development that you have, and because you just loaded in all of your location extensions, suddenly you're showing extensions for something in say San Francisco. It's just because you haven't filtered properly. Really double-check to make sure that you've got your filter set up properly for your location extensions and that you're showing the right location extension for the right ad.

I know that Google says, "We'll pick the locations closest to the client." But you don't know where that person is searching right there. They could be in San Francisco at that moment and searching for new home builds in Seattle, because maybe they're thinking about moving from San Francisco to Seattle. You don't want them to see the stuff that's there. You want them to see the stuff that's at the place where they're intending to be. Really make sure you control that.

4. Keep display and search separate

Last, but not least, keep display and search separate.

By default, Google so helpfully says, "We'll just show your ads everywhere. It's totally cool. This is what we want everyone to do." Don't do that. This is what makes Google money. It does not make you money. The reason why is because display network, which is where you're going to a website and then you see an ad, and search network, when you type in the stuff and you see an ad, are two totally different beasts.

Avoid showing text ads on the display network for greater campaign control

It's really a different type of experience. To be honest, if you take your search campaigns, which are text-based ads, and now you're showing them on websites, you're showing a boring text ad on a website that already has like 50 blinky things and click here. They're probably not seeing us and maybe they have an ad blocker installed. But if they are, certainly your text ad, which is kind of boring and not intended for that medium, is not going to be the thing that stands out.

Really you're just wasting your money because you'll end up with lower relevancy, less clicks, and then Google thinks that your group is bad. Then you'll end up paying more because Google thinks your group is bad. It really gives you that extra control by saying, "This is the search campaign. It's only on search. This is the display campaign. It's only on display." Keep the two of them totally separate. Then you have lots of control over the search ads being for search and the display ads being for display.

Don't mix those two up. Make sure to uncheck that by default. Definitely there are more tips on our blog here. But I hope that this will help you get started. SEOs, if you've never done a PPC campaign in your life, I recommend just setting one up. Put 50 bucks behind that thing. Just try it out, because I think what will really help you is understanding more of how people search, because as we get less and less keyword data from the different tools that we use to figure out what the heck are people googling when they try to search for our business, ads give you some of that data back.

That's where ads can be a really great ally in trying to get better SEO results. I hope you found this enjoyable. Thanks so much.

Video transcription by Speechpad.com

---

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Google Ads Mistakes to Avoid — Best of Whiteboard Friday

Posted by DiTomaso

Contrary to popular belief, SEO and PPC aren't at opposite ends of the spectrum. There are plenty of ways the two search disciplines can work together for benefits all around, especially when it comes to optimizing your Google Ads. In this informative Whiteboard Friday episode from last Spring, MozCon speaker and Kick Point President Dana DiTomaso explains how you can harness the power of both SEO and PPC for a better Google experience overall.

Click on the whiteboard image above to open a high-resolution version in a new tab!

Video Transcription

Hey, Moz readers. My name is Dana DiTomaso, and I'm President and partner at Kick Point. We're a digital marketing agency way up in the frozen wilds of Edmonton, Alberta. Today I'm going be talking to you about PPC, and I know you're thinking, "This is an SEO blog. What are you doing here talking about PPC?"

But one of my resolutions for 2019 is to bring together SEO and PPC people, because SEO can learn a lot from PPC, and yes, PPC, you also can learn a lot from SEO. I know PPC people are like, "We just do paid. It's so great." But trust me, both can work together. In our agency, we do both SEO and PPC, and we work with a lot of companies who have one person, sometimes two and they're doing everything.

One of the things we try to do is help them run better Ads campaigns. Here I have tips on things that we see all the time, when we start working with a new Ads account, that we end up fixing, and hopefully I can pass this on to you so you can fix it before you have to call an agency to come and fix it for you. One of the things is this is actually a much longer piece than what I can present on this whiteboard. There's only so much room.

There is actually a blog post on our website, which you can find here. Please check that out and that will have the full nine tips. But I'm just going to break it down to a few today.

1. Too many keywords

First thing, too many keywords. We see this a lot where people, in Google it says make sure to put together keywords that have the same sort of theme.

But your theme can be really specific, or it can be kind of vague. This is an example, a real example that we got, where the keyword examples were all lawyer themes, so "defense lawyer," "criminal lawyer,""dui lawyer," "assault lawyer," "sexual assault lawyer." Technically, they all have the same theme of "lawyer,"but that's way too vague for it to be all in one single ad group, because what kind of ad are you going to show?

"We are lawyers. Call us." It's not specific enough. Take for example "dui lawyer,"which I know is a really very competitive niche, and then you can do [dui lawyer], [dui lawyer seattle], and then "dui lawyer" and +dui+lawyer+seattle spelled out a little bit differently. I'll talk about that in a second. By taking this one thing and then breaking it down into a much more specific ad group, you can really have much more control.

This is a consistent theme in all the tips I talk about is much more control over where you're spending your money, what keywords you're spending it on, what your ads are, having a much better landing page to ad match, which is also really important. It just makes your ad life so much easier when you've got it in all of those ad groups. I know it might seem intimidating. It's like, "Well, I have three ad groups now.If I follow your tips, I'm going to have 40."

But at the same time, it's way easier to manage 40 well organized groups than it is to manage 3 really badly organized groups. Keep that in mind.

2. Picking the right match type

The next thing is picking the right match type. You can see here I've got this bracket stuff and this phrase stuff and these plus signs. There are really four match types.

Broad match

There's broad match, which is terrible and don't ever use it. Broad match is just you writing out the keyword, and then Google just displays it for whatever it feels like is relevant to that particular search. For example, we've seen examples where it's like a catering company and they'll have "catering" as a keyword, and they're showing up for all sorts of phrases in catering where they can't provide catering, so searching for a venue that only does in-house catering. Or they're spending money on a catering conference or just totally irrelevant stuff. Do not use broad match.

Broad match modifier (BMM)

The upgrade from that is what's called broad match modifier or BMM, and that's where these plus signs come in. This is really the words dui, lawyer, and seattle in any order, but they all have to exist and other things can exist around that. It could be, "I need a DUI lawyer in Seattle." "I live in Seattle. I need a DUI lawyer." That would also work for that particular keyword.

Phrase match

The next type is phrase, and that's in the quotes. This "dui lawyer" is the example here, and then you can have anything before it or you can have anything after it, but you can't have something in between it. It couldn't be "dui who is really great at being a lawyer" for example. Weak example, but you get the idea. You can't just shove stuff in the middle of a phrase match.

Exact match

Then exact match is what's in the brackets here, and that is just those words and nothing else. If I have [dui lawyer], this keyword, if I didn't have [dui lawyer seattle], this keyword would not trigger if somebody searches [dui lawyer seattle]. That's as specific as possible. You really want to try that for your most competitive keywords.

This is the really expensive stuff, because you do not want to waste one single penny on anything that is irrelevant to that particular search. This is your head on, it's really expensive every click. I've got to make sure I'm getting the most money possible for those clicks. That's where you really want to use exact match.

3. Only one ad per group

Next, tips. The next thing is what we see is a lot of people who have only one ad per group.

Have at least 3 ads per group

This is not a tip. This is a criticism up here. The thing is that maybe, again, you think it's easy for management, but it's really hard to see what's going to work, because if you're not always testing, how are you going to know if you could do better? Make sure to have at least three ads per group.

Add emotional triggers into your ad copy

Then look at your ad copy. We see a lot of just generic like, "We are the best lawyers. Call us." There's nothing there that says I need to call these people. Really think about how you can add those emotional triggers into your copy. Talk to your client or your team, if you work in-house, and find out what are the things that people say when they call. What are the things where they say, "Wow, you really helped me with this" or, "I was feeling like this and then you came in and I just felt so much better."

That can really help to spice up your ads. We don't want to get too fancy with this, but we certainly want to make something that's going to help you stand out. Really add those emotional triggers into your ad copy.

Make sure to have a call to action

Then the next thing is making sure to have a call to action, which seems basic because you think it's an ad. If you click it, that's the call to action. But sometimes people on the Internet, they're not necessarily thinking. You just want to say, "You know what? Just call me or email me or we're open 24 hours."

Just be really specific on what you want the person to do when they look at the ad. Just spell it out for them. I know it seems silly. Just tell them. Just tell them what you want them to do. That's all you need to do.

Use extensions!

Then make sure you add in all of the extensions. In Google Ads, if you're not super familiar with the platform, there's a section called Extensions. These are things like when the address shows up under an ad, or you've got those little links that come up, or you've got somebody saying we're open 24 hours, for example. There are all sorts of different extensions that you can use. Just put in all the extensions that you possibly can for every single one of your groups.

Then they won't all trigger all at the same time, but at least they're there and it's possible that they could trigger. If they do, that's give your ad more real estate versus your competition, which is really great on mobile because ads take up a lot of space at the top of a mobile search. You want to make sure to shove your competition as far as you possibly can down that search so you own as much of that property as you possibly can. One thing that I do see people doing incorrectly with extensions, though, is setting extensions at say the campaign level, and then you have different ad groups that cover different themes.

Going back to this example over here, with the different types of lawyers, let's say you had an extension that talks specifically about DUI law, but then it was triggering on say sexual assault law. You don't want that to happen. Make sure you have really fine-tuned control over your different extensions so you're showing the right extension with the right type of keyword and the right type of ad. The other thing that we see a lot is where people have location extensions and they're showing all the location extensions where they should not be showing all the location extensions.

You've got an ad group for, say, Seattle, and it's talking about this new home development that you have, and because you just loaded in all of your location extensions, suddenly you're showing extensions for something in say San Francisco. It's just because you haven't filtered properly. Really double-check to make sure that you've got your filter set up properly for your location extensions and that you're showing the right location extension for the right ad.

I know that Google says, "We'll pick the locations closest to the client." But you don't know where that person is searching right there. They could be in San Francisco at that moment and searching for new home builds in Seattle, because maybe they're thinking about moving from San Francisco to Seattle. You don't want them to see the stuff that's there. You want them to see the stuff that's at the place where they're intending to be. Really make sure you control that.

4. Keep display and search separate

Last, but not least, keep display and search separate.

By default, Google so helpfully says, "We'll just show your ads everywhere. It's totally cool. This is what we want everyone to do." Don't do that. This is what makes Google money. It does not make you money. The reason why is because display network, which is where you're going to a website and then you see an ad, and search network, when you type in the stuff and you see an ad, are two totally different beasts.

Avoid showing text ads on the display network for greater campaign control

It's really a different type of experience. To be honest, if you take your search campaigns, which are text-based ads, and now you're showing them on websites, you're showing a boring text ad on a website that already has like 50 blinky things and click here. They're probably not seeing us and maybe they have an ad blocker installed. But if they are, certainly your text ad, which is kind of boring and not intended for that medium, is not going to be the thing that stands out.

Really you're just wasting your money because you'll end up with lower relevancy, less clicks, and then Google thinks that your group is bad. Then you'll end up paying more because Google thinks your group is bad. It really gives you that extra control by saying, "This is the search campaign. It's only on search. This is the display campaign. It's only on display." Keep the two of them totally separate. Then you have lots of control over the search ads being for search and the display ads being for display.

Don't mix those two up. Make sure to uncheck that by default. Definitely there are more tips on our blog here. But I hope that this will help you get started. SEOs, if you've never done a PPC campaign in your life, I recommend just setting one up. Put 50 bucks behind that thing. Just try it out, because I think what will really help you is understanding more of how people search, because as we get less and less keyword data from the different tools that we use to figure out what the heck are people googling when they try to search for our business, ads give you some of that data back.

That's where ads can be a really great ally in trying to get better SEO results. I hope you found this enjoyable. Thanks so much.

Video transcription by Speechpad.com

---

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Reporting on Ranking Changes with STAT’s Google Data Studio Connectors

Posted by ipfister

Since Moz released the new Google Data Studio Connectors for STAT, you might be wondering how to best implement them for your reporting strategy. My colleagues at Path Interactive and I absolutely love how granular you can get with your reports in STAT, and finally having the ability to cleanly and effectively pull those reports into Data Studio (the tool we use for our own reporting) is a godsend.

While the Historical Keyword Rankings connector reports on rank over time, it may not be as obvious how to report on rank change over time. In this post, I'll give you step-by-step guidance on how to report on rank change — as well as a couple other filtering and reporting tips — while using the connectors within Google Data Studio.

If you aren't a STAT user yet but you want to know how it might fit into your SEO toolkit, you can take a tour of the product. Click on the button below to set one up!

Learn More About STAT

Connecting your data source

Before you begin, you need to identify a few things to set up the connector: your STAT Keyword API Key, the Project ID, and your Site ID. If you don’t already know how to identify these via the STAT API, you can head over to STAT’s documentation here to learn more. After you’ve identified these, it’s time to connect your data source. 

We’re going to be doing something a little out of the ordinary here, but stay with me — you’ll see why in just a second!

For this step, we'll be connecting two instances of the same source. Because our goal is to compare rank change over time, we’ll use the same source twice to identify those deltas.

When setting up your connector, be sure to name the source something that you’ll easily recognize:

In my case, I usually go with something simple such as “[client name] STAT Keyword Connector.” When this is complete, repeat the step above, but name it something different, e.g. “[client name] STAT Keyword Connector 2.”

Finally, make sure the metrics you plan on comparing have unique names for each connector. To do so, go into your data source. Click on the metric’s name so that you can rename it, and then rename it something unique. For this case we'll be doing it for “Google Base Rank,” since we're comparing ranks, but it can also be done for “Google Rank,” if we wanted to compare that. Again, I like to just keep it simple: for the first data source call it “Google Base Rank 1,” and then for the second data source call it “Google Base Rank 2.” When all is said and done, it should look something like this:

Building your table and blending data

Now we’ll start to get a bit more technical. Blending the data of the two connectors lets you compare two instances of rankings against each other. Your final result will produce a table showing the ranks of two given dates, as well as their rank change. The five-step process will look like this:

1. Blend data of keyword connectors one and two
2. Add in your common metrics for the two sources (keyword at the minimum, but you can also add in location, device, market, and search volume)
3. Add in the metric you'd like reported (Google base rank and/or Google rank)
4. Set date range
5. Apply “No Null” filter

1. Blend data of keyword connectors one and two

The first step here is to blend the two connectors so that you can compare two instances of ranks against each other. 

First, you need to create a new report, or go into a report that's already set up. Next, select your data source. Here you'll select the first instance of the source that you set up earlier (if you’re starting on a fresh report, it'll ask you to add a data source immediately). Once selected, click on “Blend Data” underneath the data source on the right hand side of Google Data Studio, seen here:

This will bring you to the Blend Data source tool. From here you select to add another data source, being your second instance of the connector.

2. Add in your common metrics

Once you've chosen to blend both connectors, you need to set your metrics. Towards the top, you’ll see “Join keys.” This is in reference to what's going to be the same for both instances, so here at the minimum, you want to include “keyword.” Feel free to play around here with adding different metrics.

Note: We'll go over this later, but if you plan on having different graphs filtered by a certain tag or location, make sure to add these in here.

3. Add in the type of rank you want reported

After setting your metrics under “Join keys,” now select the metrics that will be unique for each date. Depending on what you want to compare, under “Metrics” you'll pick “Google Base Rank,” “Google Rank,” or both. You may also include “Date” here too if you'd like. Once done, click on “SUM” next to the metric name, and change this to “MIN.” You'll see why in just a moment.

At this point, your blended data should look something like this:

4. Set date range

Now you need to set the two date ranges you're comparing to each other. 

To do this, under the first connection, set your first date: Under “Date Range,” click on “Custom,” then click on the field to select your date. Here you might see that there's an option for two dates, but for this solution, we're using the same date for each connector.

In the end, it'll be something like “Connector 1” selected for the “start date” and “end date” as the first of the month, and for “Connector 2,” the “start date” and “end date” will be the last of the month. This is essentially pulling in the rank for the first instance as well as the second instance, so you can compare the two.

5. Set “No Null” filter

The last step in setting up your blended data is creating a “No Null” filter. When the keyword connector reports on ranks that your site is not ranking for, it will return as "null." To avoid flooding your data with fluff, you need to create a filter removing instances of "null."

First, click on “Add A Filter” below where you selected the date range. Next, towards the bottom, click on “Create A Filter.” Set the parameters of the filter as “Exclude” > “Google Base Rank 1 (2)” > “Is Null.” Be sure to name the filter something identifiable such as “No Null.” It should look like this:

Applying rank change to your report

Now you can create a new field that will report on the rank change by making a calculated field to find the difference of the two ranks. 

Under dimensions, select “Add Dimension,” and click on “Create Field.” You can name it “Rank Change,” but to create the field, start typing “Google Base Rank,” and you’ll see your instances from each connector come up. To make the calculated field, select your “Google Base Rank 1” and subtract it from “Google Base Rank 2,” so it should look something like this:

Hit apply, and now your rank change should be calculated!

There is also an additional way to get the same result, but with a few drawbacks, such as not being able to name the header, as well as not being able to filter or sort your rank change. The benefit to this approach is that it's easier to set up initially, as you don’t actually need to blend the data. However, not setting up the blended data will also forfeit having the initial rank visible. When in your edit view, set a custom date range that you're reporting on under “Default date range.” Here, you can then set a comparison date: if looking back a month, you can set this to the first. If you go with this option, it should look like this:

Head into the "Style" tab, where you can change the comparison to “Show Absolute Change” under “Metrics.” You can also change the colors of your positive and negative arrows to more accurately represent the movement (you can see from above that the “negative” change is a green arrow, this defaults to red).

Using filters

Applying filters to your data set can be extremely beneficial to making sense of your data! Using filters with the connector can help you segment out rankings for a particular location, or create charts that show rankings for a specific keyword group that you’ve set up using keyword tags. 

Take a look at this report I set up as an example. Within STAT, I created keyword tags to target locations determined by what zip code they were. Then, I was able to create a filter for each chart targeting that keyword tag:

Setting filters up is extremely simple. First, go into edit mode. Next, scroll down the side until you find “Filter.” Then under Filter > Table Filter, click on “Add a Filter.” This will bring you to the filter picker. Toward the bottom, click on “Create a Filter.” Here you can set the parameters for the filter you'd like to show.

Some of my other favorites include filtering to only show the top few pages (filters out non-relevant and high ranks), using the keyword tag filter like I showed before, and also filtering by location. But you don’t have to stop there! Adding in the additional dimensions available to you in the connector, you can use the filter to show things such as desktop vs. mobile or how your keyword ranking performance does in different markets.

Blending your Google Analytics, Google Search Console, and STAT data

One of my favorite uses for the connectors is the ability to blend the data with your Google Analytics and Google Search Console data. By blending this data together, you’re able to directly tie keyword rankings with different metrics, such as clicks or goal completions.

You’re probably a pro at blended data at this point, but just for reference, the data blended should look like this:

A few things to note: it’s important what order you put the connectors in. I’ve found that adding the STAT connector first works best (i.e. if you put Google Analytics first, you’ll get a report with the infamous "not found" keyword). Additionally, to pull in Search Console data in order to match with your other connectors, using “Query” will have the same effect as “Keyword.”

The result would look something like this, but feel free to edit the design how you wish!

Now you can go even further with this and match up URLs, but this will require some RegEx. 

You'll rename the “Google URL” field in STAT and “Landing Page” field in Google Search Console in order to match the URL structure convection within Google Analytics by taking out the domain portion of the URL. To do this, go into your data source for each STAT connector and Google Search Console, and click “Add A Field” in the top right.

Next, enter to following RegEx for the STAT connector:

REGEXP_REPLACE(Google URL, ".*[\\.]com", "")

And for Google Search console:

REGEXP_REPLACE(Landing Page, ".*[\\.]com", "")

Remember to name them something to differentiate from the default field. I use “Landing Page (no domain).”

When building a report, use these new fields for consistency across the URL structure so that, when you select them when blending data, they'll match. 

Use this method in the same way as above to get the desired results of pulling in data from across all three connectors to match up with each other! In the end you should be able to find what keyword ranks for what URL, as well as have many sessions or clicks that are brought in as well as goal completions, or any other combination.

Well there you have it! Hope this was helpful to you. If you have any other questions you can comment below or find me on Twitter @ianpfister. Happy reporting!

---

To help us serve you better, please consider taking the 2020 Moz Blog Reader Survey, which asks about who you are, what challenges you face, and what you'd like to see more of on the Moz Blog.

Take the Survey

Sign up for The Moz Top 10, a semimonthly mailer updating you on the top ten hottest pieces of SEO news, tips, and rad links uncovered by the Moz team. Think of it as your exclusive digest of stuff you don't have time to hunt down but want to read!

Reporting on Ranking Changes with STAT’s Google Data Studio Connectors

Posted by ipfister

Since Moz released the new Google Data Studio Connectors for STAT, you might be wondering how to best implement them for your reporting strategy. My colleagues at Path Interactive and I absolutely love how granular you can get with your reports in STAT, and finally having the ability to cleanly and effectively pull those reports into Data Studio (the tool we use for our own reporting) is a godsend.

While the Historical Keyword Rankings connector reports on rank over time, it may not be as obvious how to report on rank change over time. In this post, I'll give you step-by-step guidance on how to report on rank change — as well as a couple other filtering and reporting tips — while using the connectors within Google Data Studio.

If you aren't a STAT user yet but you want to know how it might fit into your SEO toolkit, you can take a tour of the product. Click on the button below to set one up!

Learn More About STAT

Connecting your data source

Before you begin, you need to identify a few things to set up the connector: your STAT Keyword API Key, the Project ID, and your Site ID. If you don’t already know how to identify these via the STAT API, you can head over to STAT’s documentation here to learn more. After you’ve identified these, it’s time to connect your data source. 

We’re going to be doing something a little out of the ordinary here, but stay with me — you’ll see why in just a second!

For this step, we'll be connecting two instances of the same source. Because our goal is to compare rank change over time, we’ll use the same source twice to identify those deltas.

When setting up your connector, be sure to name the source something that you’ll easily recognize:

In my case, I usually go with something simple such as “[client name] STAT Keyword Connector.” When this is complete, repeat the step above, but name it something different, e.g. “[client name] STAT Keyword Connector 2.”

Finally, make sure the metrics you plan on comparing have unique names for each connector. To do so, go into your data source. Click on the metric’s name so that you can rename it, and then rename it something unique. For this case we'll be doing it for “Google Base Rank,” since we're comparing ranks, but it can also be done for “Google Rank,” if we wanted to compare that. Again, I like to just keep it simple: for the first data source call it “Google Base Rank 1,” and then for the second data source call it “Google Base Rank 2.” When all is said and done, it should look something like this:

Building your table and blending data

Now we’ll start to get a bit more technical. Blending the data of the two connectors lets you compare two instances of rankings against each other. Your final result will produce a table showing the ranks of two given dates, as well as their rank change. The five-step process will look like this:

1. Blend data of keyword connectors one and two
2. Add in your common metrics for the two sources (keyword at the minimum, but you can also add in location, device, market, and search volume)
3. Add in the metric you'd like reported (Google base rank and/or Google rank)
4. Set date range
5. Apply “No Null” filter

1. Blend data of keyword connectors one and two

The first step here is to blend the two connectors so that you can compare two instances of ranks against each other. 

First, you need to create a new report, or go into a report that's already set up. Next, select your data source. Here you'll select the first instance of the source that you set up earlier (if you’re starting on a fresh report, it'll ask you to add a data source immediately). Once selected, click on “Blend Data” underneath the data source on the right hand side of Google Data Studio, seen here:

This will bring you to the Blend Data source tool. From here you select to add another data source, being your second instance of the connector.

2. Add in your common metrics

Once you've chosen to blend both connectors, you need to set your metrics. Towards the top, you’ll see “Join keys.” This is in reference to what's going to be the same for both instances, so here at the minimum, you want to include “keyword.” Feel free to play around here with adding different metrics.

Note: We'll go over this later, but if you plan on having different graphs filtered by a certain tag or location, make sure to add these in here.

3. Add in the type of rank you want reported

After setting your metrics under “Join keys,” now select the metrics that will be unique for each date. Depending on what you want to compare, under “Metrics” you'll pick “Google Base Rank,” “Google Rank,” or both. You may also include “Date” here too if you'd like. Once done, click on “SUM” next to the metric name, and change this to “MIN.” You'll see why in just a moment.

At this point, your blended data should look something like this:

4. Set date range

Now you need to set the two date ranges you're comparing to each other. 

To do this, under the first connection, set your first date: Under “Date Range,” click on “Custom,” then click on the field to select your date. Here you might see that there's an option for two dates, but for this solution, we're using the same date for each connector.

In the end, it'll be something like “Connector 1” selected for the “start date” and “end date” as the first of the month, and for “Connector 2,” the “start date” and “end date” will be the last of the month. This is essentially pulling in the rank for the first instance as well as the second instance, so you can compare the two.

5. Set “No Null” filter

The last step in setting up your blended data is creating a “No Null” filter. When the keyword connector reports on ranks that your site is not ranking for, it will return as "null." To avoid flooding your data with fluff, you need to create a filter removing instances of "null."

First, click on “Add A Filter” below where you selected the date range. Next, towards the bottom, click on “Create A Filter.” Set the parameters of the filter as “Exclude” > “Google Base Rank 1 (2)” > “Is Null.” Be sure to name the filter something identifiable such as “No Null.” It should look like this:

Applying rank change to your report

Now you can create a new field that will report on the rank change by making a calculated field to find the difference of the two ranks. 

Under dimensions, select “Add Dimension,” and click on “Create Field.” You can name it “Rank Change,” but to create the field, start typing “Google Base Rank,” and you’ll see your instances from each connector come up. To make the calculated field, select your “Google Base Rank 1” and subtract it from “Google Base Rank 2,” so it should look something like this:

Hit apply, and now your rank change should be calculated!

There is also an additional way to get the same result, but with a few drawbacks, such as not being able to name the header, as well as not being able to filter or sort your rank change. The benefit to this approach is that it's easier to set up initially, as you don’t actually need to blend the data. However, not setting up the blended data will also forfeit having the initial rank visible. When in your edit view, set a custom date range that you're reporting on under “Default date range.” Here, you can then set a comparison date: if looking back a month, you can set this to the first. If you go with this option, it should look like this:

Head into the "Style" tab, where you can change the comparison to “Show Absolute Change” under “Metrics.” You can also change the colors of your positive and negative arrows to more accurately represent the movement (you can see from above that the “negative” change is a green arrow, this defaults to red).

Using filters

Applying filters to your data set can be extremely beneficial to making sense of your data! Using filters with the connector can help you segment out rankings for a particular location, or create charts that show rankings for a specific keyword group that you’ve set up using keyword tags. 

Take a look at this report I set up as an example. Within STAT, I created keyword tags to target locations determined by what zip code they were. Then, I was able to create a filter for each chart targeting that keyword tag:

Setting filters up is extremely simple. First, go into edit mode. Next, scroll down the side until you find “Filter.” Then under Filter > Table Filter, click on “Add a Filter.” This will bring you to the filter picker. Toward the bottom, click on “Create a Filter.” Here you can set the parameters for the filter you'd like to show.

Some of my other favorites include filtering to only show the top few pages (filters out non-relevant and high ranks), using the keyword tag filter like I showed before, and also filtering by location. But you don’t have to stop there! Adding in the additional dimensions available to you in the connector, you can use the filter to show things such as desktop vs. mobile or how your keyword ranking performance does in different markets.

Blending your Google Analytics, Google Search Console, and STAT data

One of my favorite uses for the connectors is the ability to blend the data with your Google Analytics and Google Search Console data. By blending this data together, you’re able to directly tie keyword rankings with different metrics, such as clicks or goal completions.

You’re probably a pro at blended data at this point, but just for reference, the data blended should look like this:

A few things to note: it’s important what order you put the connectors in. I’ve found that adding the STAT connector first works best (i.e. if you put Google Analytics first, you’ll get a report with the infamous "not found" keyword). Additionally, to pull in Search Console data in order to match with your other connectors, using “Query” will have the same effect as “Keyword.”

The result would look something like this, but feel free to edit the design how you wish!

Now you can go even further with this and match up URLs, but this will require some RegEx. 

You'll rename the “Google URL” field in STAT and “Landing Page” field in Google Search Console in order to match the URL structure convection within Google Analytics by taking out the domain portion of the URL. To do this, go into your data source for each STAT connector and Google Search Console, and click “Add A Field” in the top right.

Next, enter to following RegEx for the STAT connector:

REGEXP_REPLACE(Google URL, ".*[\\.]com", "")

And for Google Search console:

REGEXP_REPLACE(Landing Page, ".*[\\.]com", "")

Remember to name them something to differentiate from the default field. I use “Landing Page (no domain).”

When building a report, use these new fields for consistency across the URL structure so that, when you select them when blending data, they'll match. 

Use this method in the same way as above to get the desired results of pulling in data from across all three connectors to match up with each other! In the end you should be able to find what keyword ranks for what URL, as well as have many sessions or clicks that are brought in as well as goal completions, or any other combination.

Well there you have it! Hope this was helpful to you. If you have any other questions you can comment below or find me on Twitter @ianpfister. Happy reporting!

---

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