Rand Fishkin's presentation from Searchlove & CTAConf on the missing metric marketers need -- the measure of work inputs that affect their goals. Also includes 7 tactics to potentially add to your work items in SEO, social, and CRO.

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

2. Rand’s Fitbit Story

3. I Have Degenerative Disc
Disease

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

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

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

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

8. TrackingAll These Have
Made Me:
Healthier
Happier
In Less Pain

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

10. Work

11. Progress

12. In Analytics,
We Assume…

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

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

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

16. What If We’re Wrong?

17. Goals of Analytics
3

18. 1) Reporting (aka measuring success & failure)

19. 2) Diagnosing (aka finding what caused change)

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

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

22. The Challenge With
Generating Targets

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

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

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

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

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

28. It’s Not Just
Software

29. It’s Not Just Numbers

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

31. It’s About Finding…
the Work that Creates Improvement

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

33. The Story of
Ikaria

34. What’s So Special
About Ikaria?

35. Via NYTimes Magazine’s Piece on Ikaria

36. Diet

37. Exercise

38. Sleep

39. Rich Social
Lives

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

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

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

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

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

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

46. Our Job:
Find the Right Targets

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

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

49. #1: Bolster Internal Linking for SEO
Identify important
keywords and pages that
don’t yet rank well
Via Rand’s
Moz Analytics Account

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

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

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

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

54. #2: Create New Content Targeting Long Tail KWs
Identify keywords with
low volume, low
difficulty, and high
opportunity, for some
long tail content
creation.

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

56. #3: Convert Mentions to Equity-Passing Links
Set up alerts for your brand
names, and you’ll see lots of
sites that talk about you, but fail
to link, costing you traffic and
rankings.
Via Fresh Web Explorer

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

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

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

60. Helps readers of the piece,
and helps Moz too!

61. #4: Test New Titles & Headlines On Ranking Pages
Via Distilled’s Blog
When there’s lots of
pages using a standard
template of keyword
use, small changes can
have a big impact.

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

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

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

65. #5: Vary Social SharingAutomation & Scheduling
Via AppsWithoutCode Blog
Automating & scheduling a few more social updates
than you currently do can have big rewards.

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

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

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

69. #6:Add Related Topics to Your KW-Targeted Pages
This page looks nice, but
totally lacks the terms &
phrases needed for Google to
think it’s relevant to the
keywords I’m targeting 

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

71. #7: Contact Non-Converting Folks in YourAudience & Use
Their Feedback to Improve
This might be the worst landing page
I’ve ever designed. Converts ~0.11%
of visitors (and those folks already
clicked on “pricing,” suggesting
they’re interested!)

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

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

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

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

76. The Classic Way
to Do Analytics:

77. Set Metrics to Monitor

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

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

80. Measure Improvement vs. Loss
Not good enough!

81. A Different Way
to Do Analytics:

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

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

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

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

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

87. Some Tools
Can Help:

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

89. Strides
Via Stridesapp.com

90. Nozbe
Via Nozbe.com

91. SomeAlternatives:
Via Slant.co

92. Let’s Experiment

93. Let’s Find Our
10,000 Steps

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

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