3XE Digital October 2017 - Our Key Take Home Points

3XE Digital is one of Ireland's leading conferences for marketing professionals, with regular events held throughout the year. Recently some of the Annertech team attended the 3XE Digital event in Croke Park, which this time focused on "Search Marketing". Here are their key take home points from the day.

1. Only 7 seconds to make a first impression

When it comes to first impressions online, every second counts. Google's advice is that a web page should not take more than 2 seconds to load, yet on average the page load speed is 6.06 seconds! According to Karen McHugh, Digital Strategist at Arekibo, you only have 7 seconds to make a good first impression with your users, and if over 6 seconds of that is spent waiting for the page to load, then you are severely limiting your ability to convert them towards your goals.

The performance benefits of a site was also raised by Alan Coleman of Wolfgang Digital. Alan said that of the sites they surveyed, they saw a 10% increase in conversions, simply by making the site faster by 0.37 seconds! Other interesting facts included:

• 47% of users expect a page to load in less than 2 seconds
• users are 40% more likely to abandon the site if it takes more than 3 seconds to load,
• and are 79% less likely to return to the site if it was slow.

Faced with those stats, maybe it's time you started thinking more seriously about your website's performance - can you afford not to?

2. Know your audience, do your research

Do you know who the target users are for your website? Do you know the types of users you want to attract? their job titles? who they work for? age profile? interests? The more you know about your audience and who they are, the better the chance you have of being able to speak their language. 

This was mentioned by a few different speakers. You need to know your audience in order to be effective at converting them towards your goal, and to do that, you need to do your research.

3. Set your goals

Assuming you've done your research and know who your target users are, you need to set goals. If you don't set some goals, then how are you to know whether your website or marketing campaign is successful?

Karen McHugh spoke on this item too, and advised against setting vanity goals, such as page views or time spent on a page. Instead focus on those that can be translated into real organisation objectives, such as 2% increase in sales of a particular product by the end of the quarter. Good goals are SMART:

• Specific
• Measurable
• Achievable
• Relevant
• Time-bound

4. Perform regular SEO audits

Your website's SEO should be regularly monitored and reviewed to ensure your efforts are not in vain. A SEO audit will show which content is working, and which content is not. Analyse the content that works, and if it fits in with the organisation's goals, then ensure that you keep it and promote it as necessary. For content that isn't delivering real results, either optimise it or remove it.

There were various tips and bits of advice offered by the speakers at 3XE, including:

• ensure you have a structured data markup for easier consumption by Google and other search engines
• if moving or removing content, ensure you have redirects set up to bring users to the new location
• in the case of users getting a "404: page not found" error, ensure the 404 page is user friendly and points them at related content or a search box so they can easily find what they came for
• leverage Google Analytics, heat mapping and other tools to analyse how well particular content is working - for example, how often a video is played/stopped/paused, number of shares, scroll tracking and so on.

5. Sites with more mobile page views, have higher revenues

As we all know mobile is becoming more and more predominant, with on average over 52% sessions now coming from mobile devices. However, how does this relate to online revenue? Alan Coleman, of Wolfgang Digital, had some more interesting stats to share with us here:

• Mobile devices account for 52% of sessions on average, but only 26% of revenue
• Desktop devices account for just 36% of sessions, but 61% of revenue

So while traffic from desktops has been steadily decreasing over recent years, online purchases tell a different story. 

One possible reason for this is that forms and checkouts have been historically difficult and frustrating to complete from a mobile phone. This means that there are probably a significant number of users who browse the website from a mobile device, but then switch to a desktop to complete the transaction. However, tools like Google Analytics are unable to track these users across multple devices.

Whatever the reason for the lower revenue figures for mobile devices, one thing has become apparent - sites that are mobile-friendly and have a higher number of mobile page views, also experience higher revenues.

6. Tools

Almost every speaker had their own recommendations and preferences for tools to make their lives easier and their work more effective. From Swydo (a reporting and monitoring tool for PPC campaigns and other analytics) to SiteImprove (for monitoring content quality) and ScreamingFrog (a SEO website crawler), there are a wealth of tools out there to help you on your SEO journey.

7. By 2020, 50% of search will come from voice

It used to be that everyone wanted their website to be on the first page of Google for their keywords. Now simply being on the first page isn't enough - everyone wants to be the highly coveted first result. This will become more and more important as voice search takes off, as it generally will just return the first result.

However, voice search is also different in how it behaves from a regular search. It will be more conversational in nature, with more questions being used rather than just a few keywords. Ensuring your content is optimised for those long-tail keyword phrases and that you are using structured data markup will become more important, as according to Louise James from BingAds Ireland, 50% of search will come from voice-driven devices by 2020. That's less than 3 years away!

To summarise

One thing is clear from this most recent 3XE Digital conference, search engine optimisation is still a major part of every marketing department, and is continuing to change and develop. With new technologies emerging, such as voice driven search and even virtual reality and 360 videos, it's important for your organisation to keep on top of these changes.

If you want to stay ahead of your competitors and not get left behind, if you are worried about the performance of your website, or if you want to optimise your content for your users and search engines alike, then why not have a chat with our team. Get in touch with us here.