What $5 Per Day Will Buy You on Facebook Ads

If you want get your posts seen on Facebook, one of the most common bits of wisdom you’ll hear is this:

Pay for reach with Facebook ads. 

Paid advertising on Facebook seems to be one of the most immediate ways to impact the reach of your content. Though it’s not without its questions. How well does it work? What kind of engagement do you get?

And what can you expect for your hard-earned money?

We’ve been testing Facebook ads a bit with Buffer’s Facebook strategy, looking to see exactly what’s possible on a small budget. I’m happy to share our findings with you. Here’s what we found $5 per day will buy you on Facebook Ads.

What $5 Per Day Will Buy You on Facebook

I’d love to jump right to our findings here, then get into the specifics below. We tried three different types of Facebook Ads, each designed with a different objective in mind.

Here are our results: 

• Page Likes – $0.57 per like
• Clicks to the Buffer for Business landing page – $4.01 per click
• Boosted post – $6.35 per additional 1,000 people reached

When we view this in terms of how much $5 per day will buy you, these are the numbers:

• Page Likes – 9 likes per day
• Clicks to the Buffer homepage – 1 per day
• Boosted post – 787 new people reached

How does this jive with your experience on Facebook Ads? 

I’ll be happy to share the specifics of what we tried and how we tried it (and how you can test this for yourself, too.)

One final thought before moving ahead, it might be useful to see how our experience compares to Facebook Ads benchmarks overall. Matthew Kammerer shared an overview of social media advertising in a guest post at the Buffer blog, including the following chart of helpful Facebook benchmarks.

Since we find ourselves in the technology space at Buffer, we can compare to the industry benchmarks in this chart.

Average clickthrough rate: 0.2%

Ours: 0.95%

Average cost per click: $0.20

Ours: $0.97

Average cost per 1,000 impressions: $0.38

Ours: $6.35

A lot of our experience here didn’t quite match up to the benchmarks, likely for a number of factors like this being my first dive into Facebook Ads (lots to learn!) and my not spending the time to truly optimize the campaigns.

Like all the experiments we run and share here, your mileage may vary. And we’d love to hear your experience and results!

How to Set Up a Facebook Ads Campaign

All of Facebook’s ad campaigns run through the Facebook Ads tool, which you can access via a direct link at facebook.com/ads, or by clicking “Manage Ads” in the drop-down menu on your Facebook account, or by clicking any of the CTAs on your Facebook page.

With Facebook, you have many different ways of approaching an ad campaign. These ways can typically fall within three categories of benefits:

• Interaction: Your ad and content right on the homepage allows users to interact with it like they do any other piece of social content.
• Reach: Expand your reach to new potential customers who can interact with your content by commenting, liking, favoriting, retweeting, etc.
• Followers: Brands also report a notable increase in followers through these social advertising options, since brand visibility increases significantly.

For small budgets, you’re likely to get the most bang for your buck with boosting reach. Moz found that $1 per day can grow you audience by 4,000 people (this didn’t quite match our experience, though it’s well worth trying).

Once you’re into the Ads manager, you can navigate with the menu on the left-hand side of the page. To get started with your first ad, click the green button in the top-right corner of the page.

When you click to create a Facebook Ad, you’ll go to a page where you choose the objective for your campaign. There are 10 options here for what you might want to achieve:

1. Boost your posts (more on this below)
2. Promote your page (more on this next)
3. Send people to your website (more on this below)
4. Increase conversions on your website
5. Get installs of your app
6. Increase engagement in your app
7. Reach people near your business
8. Raise attendance at your event
9. Get people to claim your offer
10. Get video views

I won’t get into the specifics of all these as we only tested the top three, but there are some really great resources out there—like this post from Noah Kagan—if you’re interested in learning more about Facebook Ads in their entirety.

How to Set Up a Campaign for Facebook Page Likes

1. Choose the second option from the Create an Ad list: Promote Your Page.

2. At the next screen, select the page you’d like to promote.

3. Choose who will be shown your ad.

The audience can be customized based on all the following demographics:

• Location, starting with a country, state, city, zip code, or address, and refining even further with a mile radius
• Age
• Gender
• Languages
• Interests – Facebook looks at a person’s interests, activity, the Pages they like, and closely related topics
• Behaviors – Things like purchase behavior and intent, as well as device usage
• Connections – Choose to show the ad to all people, just those connected to Buffer, or those not connected to Buffer

In addition, with the Connections setting, you can choose advanced targeting, which lets you include or exclude people who are connected to certain pages, apps, or events.

How we chose an audience for the Buffer ad

Facebook recommends narrowing your reach in a targeted way in order to maximize the impact of your ad. We went quite narrow with this experiment, choosing the following audience demographics:

• Location: United States
• Interests: Social media
• Excluded: People who already like Buffer
• Age: 18-65+
• Language: English (US)

This gave us an estimated reach of up to 3,200 people out of 14 million. The 3,200 people are how many we could expect to be online any given day and potentially see our ad.

4. Choose how much you want to spend.

5. Choose an image to create the ad.

You can pick from your library, search, or upload a new one. If you’re able to upload multiple images, you can create multiple ad variations that will run within your campaign, giving you a sort of A/B test to see what works best.

The recommended image size is 1,200 pixels wide by 444 pixels tall.

6. Write the text and the headline.

For the text, you get 90 characters to share a quick message that will appear above your image.

For the headline (which is hidden beneath an Advanced Options toggle), you can use an alternative to your page name, which is shown by default. Headlines can be 25 characters long.

How we wrote the text and headline

We left the page title the same (“Buffer”), although it’s possible we could have tried something like Buffer – Social Media or Buffer App.

For the text, we aimed for a descriptive headline that would help people understand what it is they’d be getting from us. Since we targeted people with an interest in social media, it also made sense to make the message match the audience.

The Best Tips and Tools for Sharing to Social Media

Here’s how the ad looked:

How to Set Up a Campaign for Boosted Posts

1. Choose the first option from the Create an Ad list: Boost Your Posts.

2. At the next screen, select the page you’d like to use. Then select the post you’d like to promote.

3. Choose who will be shown your ad.

You have the same options here as you did in the Page Likes campaign mentioned above.

How we chose an audience for the Buffer ad

For this experiment, we went with a quite targeted demographic: younger San Francisco people with an interest in technology.

• Location: A 50-mile radius from San Francisco
• Interests: Technology
• Excluded: People who already like Buffer
• Age: 21-40
• Language: English (US) and (UK)

This led to a great and targeted group of up to 2,800 people per day who might be served our ad.

4. Choose how much you want to spend.

5. Review your post.

In this section, you can see a preview of your post as it will appear in the News Feed on desktop and on mobile as well as in the right column of desktop screens. You can turn any of these views off so that the ad won’t be shown there.

How we chose what to display

Facebook offers some helpful views of what your ad might look like in various places. The three main spots:

1. The News Feed on desktop
2. The News Feed on mobile
3. The right column on desktop

When it came to boost this post, it seemed to us that the best placement was likely to be in the News Feed instead of the sidebar.

When the content moved to the sidebar, the headline was truncated and the description was truncated. The text itself was harder to see. Ultimately, it just wasn’t intended to be in the sidebar; it was meant for the News Feed.

How to Set Up a Campaign for Clicks to Your Website

1. Choose the third option from the Create an Ad list: Send people to your website.

2. At the next screen, type in the URL where you’d like to send traffic.

3. Choose who will be shown your ad.

How we chose an audience for the Buffer ad

For this ad, we went a slightly different route with our audience selection. We chose to target a specific audience—our MailChimp subscribers—using Facebook’s custom audiences.

To create a custom audience, we chose the option from the audience selection portion of our Facebook ad.

Here, you can choose to create the custom audience from a base of three options:

1. Customer list (like an email list, for instance)
2. Website traffic
3. App activity

We chose to use a customer list for our audience segment. We exported our subscribers from MailChimp and imported into Facebook. Our list of 39,000 names returned 23,900 Facebook users.

We then further segmented the list into specific demographics for location, age, and language. We didn’t quite feel the need to segment for interests since everyone of these folks seemed to be interested in Buffer just by subscribing!

4. Choose how much you want to spend.

5. Choose how you want the ad to look.

Depending on the visuals you’d like to associate with your ad, you can choose to either show one image with your ad or show a gallery of five images that people can scroll to view.

6. Connect your ad to a Facebook page.

This allows the ad to appear in the News Feed as if it came from a page, while the ad itself still goes to your chosen URL.

7. Write a headline.

You get 25 characters max.

8. Write description text.

You get 90 characters max.

9. Choose button text from Facebook’s list of options.

• Shop Now
• Book Now
• Learn More
• Sign Up
• Download

10. Add more text to the Advanced Settings for your link.

11. Choose where the ad will be placed.

In addition to the options above for News Feed and right column, this particular type of ad also includes an option for appearing on Facebook’s audience network, which includes third-party mobile apps.

How we chose what to display

We went with an ad for our Buffer for Business landing page, hoping to encourage any current Buffer newsletter subscribers to take a closer look at our business plan.

The ad itself, well, I’m sure I have lots of room for improvement here!

Reflecting back now, I can see that the headline lacks any information about what it is that Buffer does. There’s no benefit there for the user. The image is from PlaceIt, which does great stuff helping get screenshots and app images that look smooth.

If I were to do it again, I’d likely follow a lot of the advice here in Noah Kagan’s post about Facebook ads.

1. Headline: Give away something for free
2. Text: Social proof showing why the reader should care
3. News Feed Link Description: Give call to action for them to get benefit

For example:

Over to you

I feel like we’re quite early on with learning best practices for Facebook Ads at Buffer. I’d love to get any insight you have in this area and hear any tips you might be willing to share!

Overall, the cost of advertising on Facebook seems like it could be most helpful to us in terms of boosted posts as we were able to get more than 750 new people to check out our content for only $5.00.

What has been the best success you’ve found with Facebook Ads?

Image sources: IconFinder, Unsplash, Pablo

The post What $5 Per Day Will Buy You on Facebook Ads appeared first on Social.

Inverse Document Frequency and the Importance of Uniqueness

Posted by EricEnge

In my last column, I wrote about how to use term frequency analysis in evaluating your content vs. the competition's. Term frequency (TF) is only one part of the TF-IDF approach to information retrieval. The other part is inverse document frequency (IDF), which is what I plan to discuss today.

Today's post will use an explanation of how IDF works to show you the importance of creating content that has true uniqueness. There are reputation and visibility reasons for doing this, and it's great for users, but there are also SEO benefits.

If you wonder why I am focusing on TF-IDF, consider these words from a Google article from August 2014: "This is the idea of the famous TF-IDF, long used to index web pages." While the way that Google may apply these concepts is far more than the simple TF-IDF models I am discussing, we can still learn a lot from understanding the basics of how they work.

What is inverse document frequency?

In simple terms, it's a measure of the rareness of a term. Conceptually, we start by measuring document frequency. It's easiest to illustrate with an example, as follows:

In this example, we see that the word "a" appears in every document in the document set. What this tells us is that it provides no value in telling the documents apart. It's in everything.

Now look at the word "mobilegeddon." It appears in 1,000 of the documents, or one thousandth of one percent of them. Clearly, this phrase provides a great deal more differentiation for the documents that contain them.

Document frequency measures commonness, and we prefer to measure rareness. The classic way that this is done is with a formula that looks like this:

For each term we are looking at, we take the total number of documents in the document set and divide it by the number of documents containing our term. This gives us more of a measure of rareness. However, we don't want the resulting calculation to say that the word "mobilegeddon" is 1,000 times more important in distinguishing a document than the word "boat," as that is too big of a scaling factor.

This is the reason we take the Log Base 10 of the result, to dampen that calculation. For those of you who are not mathematicians, you can loosely think of the Log Base 10 of a number as being a count of the number of zeros - i.e., the Log Base 10 of 1,000,000 is 6, and the log base 10 of 1,000 is 3. So instead of saying that the word "mobilegeddon" is 1,000 times more important, this type of calculation suggests it's three times more important, which is more in line with what makes sense from a search engine perspective.

With this in mind, here are the IDF values for the terms we looked at before:

Now you can see that we are providing the highest score to the term that is the rarest.

What does the concept of IDF teach us?

Think about IDF as a measure of uniqueness. It helps search engines identify what it is that makes a given document special. This needs to be much more sophisticated than how often you use a given search term (e.g. keyword density).

Think of it this way: If you are one of 6.78 million web sites that comes up for the search query "super bowl 2015," you are dealing with a crowded playing field. Your chances of ranking for this term based on the quality of your content are pretty much zero.

Overall link authority and other signals will be the only way you can rank for a term that competitive. If you are a new site on the landscape, well, perhaps you should chase something else.

That leaves us with the question of what you should target. How about something unique? Even the addition of a simple word like "predictions"—changing our phrase to "super bowl 2015 predictions"—reduces this playing field to 17,800 results.

Clearly, this is dramatically less competitive already. Slicing into this further, the phrase "super bowl 2015 predictions and odds" returns only 26 pages in Google. See where this is going?

What IDF teaches us is the importance of uniqueness in the content we create. Yes, it will not pay nearly as much money to you as it would if you rank for the big head term, but if your business is a new entrant into a very crowded space, you are not going to rank for the big head term anyway

If you can pick out a smaller number of terms with much less competition and create content around those needs, you can start to rank for these terms and get money flowing into your business. This is because you are making your content more unique by using rarer combinations of terms (leveraging what IDF teaches us).

Summary

People who do keyword analysis are often wired to pursue the major head terms directly, simply based on the available keyword search volume. The result from this approach can, in fact, be pretty dismal.

Understanding how inverse document frequency works helps us understand the importance of standing out. Creating content that brings unique angles to the table is often a very potent way to get your SEO strategy kick-started.

Of course, the reasons for creating content that is highly differentiated and unique go far beyond SEO. This is good for your users, and it's good for your reputation, visibility, AND also 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!

The Power of Research: How We Grew The Canva Blog’s Traffic By 226.47%

What do you do when you start a blog?

Most people jump right in. They choose a theme, browse around for awesome plugins, set up Mailchimp and do all this other… stuff, before they sit down and think it through.

I’ve learned that when you do this, it’s easy to end up with a really pretty blog….with very few readers.

When I joined Canva a couple months ago,instead of writing a word or improving the blog’s design, I spent the first month simply building a strategy.

Today ...

The post The Power of Research: How We Grew The Canva Blog’s Traffic By 226.47% appeared first on Social.

You Finally Achieved Content Virality! Now What?

Posted by Isla_McKetta

If you've ever achieved the holy grail of content marketing success—true virality—you know the rush of endorphins as you watch the share count climb. You've smiled the enormous grin when one of your friends shares that piece on Facebook without any idea that you helped create it. Maybe you've even felt the skin-chilling prickle when Buzzfeed picks up your content.

Then you've undoubtedly experienced the heart-stopping numbness when the traffic finally stalls. Where did all the people go? Was it real? Can you do it again?

What happens next depends on which camp you fall into. Most people either

1. Squander that success in a haze of denial, or
2. Rush back to their desks to copy the thing that just went viral so they can replicate the success (only to find that the Internet is already over it).

But there is a third, better way—you can learn everything possible from this moment of greatness and turn it around to create something even more shareable next time. This third path is not easy, but it is the surest way to get you back on the road to virality. Here's how.

Celebrate your success

Duh. You were going to do this anyway, but take a moment (or a day) to fully enjoy all the tweets, traffic, and accolades. This will give you energy for the next step and you'll be all the more focused for the long road ahead.

Analyze what went right

Sometimes content marketing feels like throwing Velcro darts at the wall—you just don't know what's going to stick. But when something finally does stick, there are a lot of lessons to be learned about your audience and what might work in the future.

For example, take this post from Organic Gardening, "7 Secrets for a High-Yield Vegetable Garden." According to BuzzSumo, it has six times as many shares as the next most successful article from the same site.

In fact, when looking at content that contained the word "garden," the post had more than twice as many shares as the top post from Country Living, a magazine with about five times the circulation.

I think we can safely call this piece a runaway success. Now let's look at what made this article so much more viral than its top three friends.

Title

It's not too much of a stretch to say that "7 Secrets for a High-Yield Vegetable Garden" is a lot sexier title than "Gardener's April To-Do List," "Going with the Flow," and "Cauliflower with Peas."

Not only does the highly successful article contain one of those emotion words that get us all excited to click, the title actually fully describes what the article is about—passing what Ian Lurie calls the "blank sheet of paper" test. You'll note that the titles listed in BuzzSumo are actually more descriptive than those on the page—next time they might want to use the more descriptive titles on the page.

Format

The format of these four articles is pretty basic: text with at least one related image. In fact, the to-do list article could have gone a bit farther if someone had turned it into a downloadable checklist (or at least a checklist).

Sometimes, like when you've invested heavily in a flashy parallax scrolling piece, it's easy to surmise that form contributed heavily to the success of the content. But in this case, it's unlikely that the form of this article gave it a viral advantage.

Length

These four articles vary widely in length, but they conform to what you might expect from the types of articles that they are. "Go with the Flow" is more of an essay and should be longer, whereas to-do lists and recipes get less useful the longer they are.

7 Secrets	April To-Do	Going w/Flow	Cauliflower
1100+ words	800+ words	1700+ words	200+ words

I'd argue that "7 Secrets" is an exception here, in that it's more in-depth than it needs to be—in a good way. This could be one contributor to its success.

Topic

Not only is the "7 Secrets" title much more clickable, the viral article also hits on high-yield gardening—a high-interest topic. Having not seen the personas for this site, I'm not sure if Organic Gardening has identified gardeners with limited space or gardeners who are trying to sustain themselves entirely from their yards as targets, but this article would be interesting to both groups (which means more excited readers to share the content).

The to-do list article is practical and "Going with the Flow" (about water conservation) is newsworthy (although it would do a lot better if it mentioned the California drought in the intro). If you love cauliflower, perhaps you can tell me why that recipe is popular. But it's easy to see why none of these other three articles broke through the viral barrier.

Timeliness

From what I can tell, the original article is actually a couple of years old. It's just been hanging out waiting for the right moment. So goes content marketing. But the week that it went nuts on BuzzSumo was in late March—the very week I was mapping my own garden.

That said, it isn't the most timely of these four articles. The April to-do list is very timely (and this kind of evergreen content has the chance to get picked up again year after year) and, as mentioned, the article about water (despite being written in 2011) is on-trend with current events in California.

Again, you'll have to tell me if cauliflower is timeless, because I'm still not understanding the success of that recipe.

One caveat: There's some weirdness around the dating on this site (especially since the site re-branded in the middle of me writing this draft). If you dig into the publication date, it's April 1, 2015, a few days after March 29, 2015 (the date BuzzSumo called its publication date). And when I first started writing this article I think I found that the page was created about two years ago (though I can no longer verify that information).

Your lesson here is that if you do a site rebrand in the middle of assessing your content, your data will likely contain weirdness too.

Overall quality

This is where your spidey sense comes in, because overall quality is in many ways a combination of all the factors we just looked at along with the strength of the writing. But there's also that je ne sais quoi factor where you have to trust your gut (don't worry, spotting great content is easier than you think).

"7 Secrets" really is a better article for the Internet than the other three. It's easy to share, seems high-impact, and is a fast read. "Going with the Flow" is also a good article, especially with the storytelling angle, but the anecdotal lead-in followed by the intercontinental comparison of water management styles smacks of classic print journalism (requiring thoughtful rumination), which means it might be more appropriate or successful offline.

Influencer name dropping

Ego bait is a tried and true content marketing tactic. It's not used in this article, but that doesn't mean it isn't a good tool to keep on hand. If I wanted this article to go even more viral, I would have put names to the two experts they cite (and then reached out to tell those experts that I was quoting them).

The social angle

Looking at "7 Secrets" against the April to-do list, we can immediately spot a few reasons it was roughly three times more popular on the social network. It has an active and enticing image, the accompanying text is both inspirational and asks for engagement, and the article description is, well, descriptive.

Now, I don't have access to the internal Facebook analytics of this site, but if I did, I'd be looking hard at trends in what times of day and days of week they find the most engagement as well as whether there was any paid promotion to see what else can be learned.

High-profile sharers

As you can see, except for the magazine itself, very few people who shared this article on Twitter even have more than 1,000 followers. That might not be bad for you and me, but it's not going to cause a viral stampede.

If you find that more recognizable folks (or even those with a lot more followers) were part of your success, it might be time to build some relationships there. You can do that either by involving them in your content creation process in the future or by reaching out when you have something new to promote.

You don't have to wait until something goes viral to analyze what content is succeeding and why. Get some practice now (and help yourself on the road to virality):

Download this checklist as a template

Now that you understand what contributes to content virality, you're ready to try to capture that magic all over again.

Resist the urge to imitate

This sounds counter-intuitive, but the last thing you want to do after achieving content success is to run out and do exactly what you did last time. Why? Because the Internet craves novelty, and just like it's completely adorable when your friend's toddler sticks his tongue out at you for the first time, the second, third, and thirty-seventh times are increasingly less adorable (and notable).

Instead, use all that analysis you just did of what made the piece successful to remix those elements and try something new. In the case of the garden efficiency article we've been looking at, I'd follow up with a profile of three influential organic gardeners who have different ways of achieving efficiency in their gardens.

Enough about gardening already, what about some other topics like windows, water, and dessert.

• If "DIY Craft Projects using Old Vintage Windows Doors" earned you 428k shares, avoid writing "DIY Craft Projects Using Old Vintage Bannisters" and instead think more broadly with something like "10 Best Stores in the US to Find Vintage Windows for Your Project" or "Last Minute Summer Patio Projects for Upscale Freecyclers." The first plays with influencer marketing and the second explores a niche readership that has the potential to be very passionate about sharing your content.
• If you've recently had success with "Gray Whale Dies Bringing Us a Message - With Stomach Full of Plastic Trash" (226k+ shares), skip starting a series on dead animals that are portending the end of the earth. Instead try something like an infographic that shows how much the average American contributes to the gyre of plastic in the ocean that includes tips on how we can reduce our impact. That type of content would capitalize a little on the scare tactics of the first post plus the spirit that we're all responsible for the fate of the planet. It would also be a chance to test if posts that end with positive impacts are as shareable.
• Or if everyone loved your recipe for a ginormous Reese's Cup (21k+ shares), don't be tempted to write about chocolate peanut butter pie. Rather, consider creating a series on revamped recipes for childhood favorites like an upscale Nanaimo Bar or incorporating Jello into a trifle.

The exception

There are times when a piece of content you've created goes viral even though you feel like you only took the idea halfway. Playbuzz got some really good traction (1.6 million shares) with this post:

About a month later they followed up with this one which garnered 3.3 million shares:

They could have taken the idea even farther with "What Sci-Fi Novel…" and "What Horror Novel…" but those get weird fast and it's safe to say they found their peak audience the second time around by getting more general. So they stopped while they were ahead.

Build relationships

Viral success means that a whole lot of people just shared your content. It also means that you have a huge opportunity to connect with people who might remember who you are for the next five seconds.

Help them remember you for the foreseeable future by reaching out now and thanking them for sharing your stuff or engaging them in conversation. Ask what they'd like to see next time or respond to their questions. Be playful and friendly (if it suits your corporate voice) and get the writer to help you with the follow-up.

Use your success as brand leverage

There's no better time for PR outreach than immediately following a big viral content win. Who doesn't want to drop a line in an outreach email like "Our latest infographic has earned 452,000 shares on Pinterest (so far)." That number might feel like a fluke, but if you can get someone from a major media outlet interested in your next piece, your future looks bright.

Keep trying

Capturing the zeitgeist well enough to give a post viral success is not an easy thing. But have confidence that if you've done it before, you have what it takes to do it again. Keep making awesome stuff. And when you're tempted to get bummed because something doesn't quite find its audience, instead milk that learning experience for all it's worth.

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!

Collaboration Tools for Social Media Teams: You Don’t Have to Do It All Alone

Just the other day, peeking into the social media schedule here at Buffer, I noticed that it was full of wonderfully-worded, completely click-worthy, queued posts—posts that I spent zero time writing or adding.

Such is the beauty of collaborating together on social media sharing.

Taking a team approach to filling a queue or managing a social channel is a splendid way of saving time on social media.

You don’t have to do it all yourself.

Others have amazing ideas and content to share.

And of ...

The post Collaboration Tools for Social Media Teams: You Don’t Have to Do It All Alone appeared first on Social.

How Much Has Link Building Changed in Recent Years?

Posted by Paddy_Moogan

I get asked this question a lot. It's mainly asked by people who are considering buying my link building book and want to know whether it's still up to date. This is understandable given that the first edition was published in February 2013 and our industry has a deserved reputation for always changing.

I find myself giving the same answer, even though I've been asked it probably dozens of times in the last two years—"not that much". I don't think this is solely due to the book itself standing the test of time, although I'll happily take a bit of credit for that :) I think it's more a sign of our industry as a whole not changing as much as we'd like to think.

I started to question myself and if I was right and honestly, it's one of the reasons it has taken me over two years to release the second edition of the book.

So I posed this question to a group of friends not so long ago, some via email and some via a Facebook group. I was expecting to be called out by many of them because my position was that in reality, it hasn't actually changed that much. The thing is, many of them agreed and the conversations ended with a pretty long thread with lots of insights. In this post, I'd like to share some of them, share what my position is and talk about what actually has changed.

My personal view

Link building hasn't changed as much we think it has.

The core principles of link building haven't changed. The signals around link building have changed, but mainly around new machine learning developments that have indirectly affected what we do. One thing that has definitely changed is the mindset of SEOs (and now clients) towards link building.

I think the last big change to link building came in April 2012 when Penguin rolled out. This genuinely did change our industry and put to bed a few techniques that should never have worked so well in the first place.

Since then, we've seen some things change, but the core principles haven't changed if you want to build a business that will be around for years to come and not run the risk of being hit by a link related Google update. For me, these principles are quite simple:

• You need to deserve links - either an asset you create or your product
• You need to put this asset in front of a relevant audience who have the ability to share it
• You need consistency - one new asset every year is unlikely to cut it
• Anything that scales is at risk

For me, the move towards user data driving search results + machine learning has been the biggest change we've seen in recent years and it's still going.

Let's dive a bit deeper into all of this and I'll talk about how this relates to link building.

The typical mindset for building links has changed

I think that most SEOs are coming round to the idea that you can't get away with building low quality links any more, not if you want to build a sustainable, long-term business. Spammy link building still works in the short-term and I think it always will, but it's much harder than it used to be to sustain websites that are built on spam. The approach is more "churn and burn" and spammers are happy to churn through lots of domains and just make a small profit on each one before moving onto another.

For everyone else, it's all about the long-term and not putting client websites at risk.

This has led to many SEOs embracing different forms of link building and generally starting to use content as an asset when it comes to attracting links. A big part of me feels that it was actually Penguin in 2012 that drove the rise of content marketing amongst SEOs, but that's a post for another day…! For today though, this goes some way towards explain the trend we see below.

Slowly but surely, I'm seeing clients come to my company already knowing that low quality link building isn't what they want. It's taken a few years after Penguin for it to filter down to client / business owner level, but it's definitely happening. This is a good thing but unfortunately, the main reason for this is that most of them have been burnt in the past by SEO companies who have built low quality links without giving thought to building good quality ones too.

I have no doubt that it's this change in mindset which has led to trends like this:

The thing is, I don't think this was by choice.

Let's be honest. A lot of us used the kind of link building tactics that Google no longer like because they worked. I don't think many SEOs were under the illusion that it was genuinely high quality stuff, but it worked and it was far less risky to do than it is today. Unless you were super-spammy, the low-quality links just worked.

Fast forward to a post-Penguin world, things are far more risky. For me, it's because of this that we see the trends like the above. As an industry, we had the easiest link building methods taken away from us and we're left with fewer options. One of the main options is content marketing which, if you do it right, can lead to good quality links and importantly, the types of links you won't be removing in the future. Get it wrong and you'll lose budget and lose the trust if your boss or client in the power of content when it comes to link building.

There are still plenty of other methods to build links and sometimes we can forget this. Just look at this epic list from Jon Cooper. Even with this many tactics still available to us, it's hard work. Way harder than it used to be.

My summary here is that as an industry, our mindset has shifted but it certainly wasn't a voluntary shift. If the tactics that Penguin targeted still worked today, we'd still be using them.

A few other opinions...

"I definitely think too many people want the next easy win. As someone surfing the edge of what Google is bringing our way, here's my general take—SEO, in broad strokes, is changing a lot, *but* any given change is more and more niche and impacts fewer people. What we're seeing isn't radical, sweeping changes that impact everyone, but a sort of modularization of SEO, where we each have to be aware of what impacts our given industries, verticals, etc."

- Dr. Pete

"I don't feel that techniques for acquiring links have changed that much. You can either earn them through content and outreach or you can just buy them. What has changed is the awareness of "link building" outside of the SEO community. This makes link building / content marketing much harder when pitching to journalists and even more difficult when pitching to bloggers.

"Link building has to be more integrated with other channels and struggles to work in its own environment unless supported by brand, PR and social. Having other channels supporting your link development efforts also creates greater search signals and more opportunity to reach a bigger audience which will drive a greater ROI."

- Carl Hendy

"SEO has grown up in terms of more mature staff and SEOs becoming more ingrained into businesses so there is a smarter (less pressure) approach. At the same time, SEO has become more integrated into marketing and has made marketing teams and decision makers more intelligent in strategies and not pushing for the quick win. I'm also seeing that companies who used to rely on SEO and building links have gone through IPOs and the need to build 1000s of links per quarter has rightly reduced."

- Danny Denhard

Signals that surround link building have changed

There is no question about this one in my mind. I actually wrote about this last year in my previous blog post where I talked about signals such as anchor text and deep links changing over time.

Many of the people I asked felt the same, here are some quotes from them, split out by the types of signal.

Domain level link metrics

"I think domain level links have become increasingly important compared with page level factors, i.e. you can get a whole site ranking well off the back of one insanely strong page, even with sub-optimal PageRank flow from that page to the rest of the site."

- Phil Nottingham

I'd agree with Phil here and this is what I was getting at in my previous post on how I feel "deep links" will matter less over time. It's not just about domain level links here, it's just as much about the additional signals available for Google to use (more on that later).

Anchor text

I've never liked anchor text as a link signal. I mean, who actually uses exact match commercial keywords as anchor text on the web?

SEOs. :)

Sure there will be natural links like this, but honestly, I struggle with the idea that it took Google so long to start turning down the dial on commercial anchor text as a ranking signal. They are starting to turn it down though, slowly but surely. Don't get me wrong, it still matters and it still works. But like pure link spam, the barrier is a lot more lower now in terms what of constitutes too much.

Rand feels that they matter more than we'd expect and I'd mostly agree with this statement:

"Exact match anchor text links still have more power than you'd expect—I think Google still hasn't perfectly sorted what is "brand" or "branded query" from generics (i.e. they want to start ranking a new startup like meldhome.com for "Meld" if the site/brand gets popular, but they can't quite tell the difference between that and https://moz.com/learn/seo/redirection getting a few manipulative links that say "redirect")"

- Rand Fishkin

What I do struggle with though, is that Google still haven't figured this out and that short-term, commercial anchor text spam is still so effective. Even for a short burst of time.

"I don't think link building as a concept has changed loads—but I think links as a signal have, mainly because of filters and penalties but I don't see anywhere near the same level of impact from coverage anymore, even against 18 months ago."

- Paul Rogers

New signals have been introduced

It isn't just about established signals changing though, there are new signals too and I personally feel that this is where we've seen the most change in Google algorithms in recent years—going all the way back to Panda in 2011.

With Panda, we saw a new level of machine learning where it almost felt like Google had found a way of incorporating human reaction / feelings into their algorithms. They could then run this against a website and answer questions like the ones included in this post. Things such as:

• "Would you be comfortable giving your credit card information to this site?"
• "Does this article contain insightful analysis or interesting information that is beyond obvious?"
• "Are the pages produced with great care and attention to detail vs. less attention to detail?"

It is a touch scary that Google was able to run machine learning against answers to questions like this and write an algorithm to predict the answers for any given page on the web. They have though and this was four years ago now.

Since then, they've made various moves to utilize machine learning and AI to build out new products and improve their search results. For me, this was one of the biggest and went pretty unnoticed by our industry. Well, until Hummingbird came along I feel pretty sure that we have Ray Kurzweil to thank for at least some of that.

"There seems to be more weight on theme/topic related to sites, though it's hard to tell if this is mostly link based or more user/usage data based. Google is doing a good job of ranking sites and pages that don't earn the most links but do provide the most relevant/best answer. I have a feeling they use some combination of signals to say "people who perform searches like this seem to eventually wind up on this website—let's rank it." One of my favorite examples is the Audubon Society ranking for all sorts of birding-related searches with very poor keyword targeting, not great links, etc. I think user behavior patterns are stronger in the algo than they've ever been."

- Rand Fishkin

Leading on from what Rand has said, it's becoming more and more common to see search results that just don't make sense if you look at the link metrics—but are a good result.

For me, the move towards user data driving search results + machine learning advanced has been the biggest change we've seen in recent years and it's still going.

Edit: since drafting this post, Tom Anthony released this excellent blog post on his views on the future of search and the shift to data-driven results. I'd recommend reading that as it approaches this whole area from a different perspective and I feel that an off-shoot of what Tom is talking about is the impact on link building.

You may be asking at this point, what does machine learning have to do with link building?

Everything. Because as strong as links are as a ranking signal, Google want more signals and user signals are far, far harder to manipulate than established link signals. Yes it can be done—I've seen it happen. There have even been a few public tests done. But it's very hard to scale and I'd venture a guess that only the top 1% of spammers are capable of doing it, let alone maintaining it for a long period of time. When I think about the process for manipulation here, I actually think we go a step beyond spammers towards hackers and more cut and dry illegal activity.

For link building, this means that traditional methods of manipulating signals are going to become less and less effective as these user signals become stronger. For us as link builders, it means we can't keep searching for that silver bullet or the next method of scaling link building just for an easy win. The fact is that scalable link building is always going to be at risk from penalization from Google—I don't really want to live a life where I'm always worried about my clients being hit by the next update. Even if Google doesn't catch up with a certain method, machine learning and user data mean that these methods may naturally become less effective and cost efficient over time.

There are of course other things such as social signals that have come into play. I certainly don't feel like these are a strong ranking factor yet, but with deals like this one between Google and Twitter being signed, I wouldn't be surprised if that ever-growing dataset is used at some point in organic results. The one advantage that Twitter has over Google is it's breaking news freshness. Twitter is still way quicker at breaking news than Google is—140 characters in a tweet is far quicker than Google News! Google know this which is why I feel they've pulled this partnership back into existence after a couple of years apart.

There is another important point to remember here and it's nicely summarised by Dr. Pete:

"At the same time, as new signals are introduced, these are layers not replacements. People hear social signals or user signals or authorship and want it to be the link-killer, because they already fucked up link-building, but these are just layers on top of on-page and links and all of the other layers. As each layer is added, it can verify the layers that came before it and what you need isn't the magic signal but a combination of signals that generally matches what Google expects to see from real, strong entities. So, links still matter, but they matter in concert with other things, which basically means it's getting more complicated and, frankly, a bit harder. Of course, on one wants to hear that."

- Dr. Pete

The core principles have not changed

This is the crux of everything for me. With all the changes listed above, the key is that the core principles around link building haven't changed. I could even argue that Penguin didn't change the core principles because the techniques that Penguin targeted should never have worked in the first place. I won't argue this too much though because even Google advised website owners to build directory links at one time.

You need an asset

You need to give someone a reason to link to you. Many won't do it out of the goodness of their heart! One of the most effective ways to do this is to develop a content asset and use this as your reason to make people care. Once you've made someone care, they're more likely to share the content or link to it from somewhere.

You need to promote that asset to the right audience

I really dislike the stance that some marketers take when it comes to content promotion—build great content and links will come.

No. Sorry but for the vast majority of us, that's simply not true. The exceptions are people that sky dive from space or have huge existing audiences to leverage.

You simply have to spend time promoting your content or your asset for it to get shares and links. It is hard work and sometimes you can spend a long time on it and get little return, but it's important to keep working at until you're at a point where you have two things:

• A big enough audience where you can almost guarantee at least some traffic to your new content along with some shares
• Enough strong relationships with relevant websites who you can speak to when new content is published and stand a good chance of them linking to it

Getting to this point is hard—but that's kind of the point. There are various hacks you can use along the way but it will take time to get right.

You need consistency

Leading on from the previous point. It takes time and hard work to get links to your content—the types of links that stand the test of time and you're not going to be removing in 12 months time anyway! This means that you need to keep pushing content out and getting better each and every time. This isn't to say you should just churn content out for the sake of it, far from it. I am saying that with each piece of content you create, you will learn to do at least one thing better the next time. Try to give yourself the leverage to do this.

Anything scalable is at risk

Scalable link building is exactly what Google has been trying to crack down on for the last few years. Penguin was the biggest move and hit some of the most scalable tactics we had at our disposal. When you scale something, you often lose some level of quality, which is exactly what Google doesn't want when it comes to links. If you're still relying on tactics that could fall into the scalable category, I think you need to be very careful and just look at the trend in the types of links Google has been penalizing to understand why.

The part Google plays in this

To finish up, I want to briefly talk about the part that Google plays in all of this and shaping the future they want for the web.

I've always tried to steer clear of arguments involving the idea that Google is actively pushing FUD into the community. I've preferred to concentrate more on things I can actually influence and change with my clients rather than what Google is telling us all to do.

However, for the purposes of this post, I want to talk about it.

"General paranoia has increased. My bet is there are some companies out there carrying out zero specific linkbuilding activity through worry."

- Dan Barker

Dan's point is a very fair one and just a day or two after reading this in an email, I came across a page related to a client's target audience that said:

"We are not publishing guest posts on SITE NAME any more. All previous guest posts are now deleted. For more information, see www.mattcutts.com/blog/guest-blogging/".

I've reworded this as to not reveal the name of the site, but you get the point.

This is silly. Honestly, so silly. They are a good site, publish good content, and had good editorial standards. Yet they have ignored all of their own policies, hard work, and objectives to follow a blog post from Matt. I'm 100% confident that it wasn't sites like this one that Matt was talking about in this blog post.

This is, of course, from the publishers' angle rather than the link builders' angle, but it does go to show the effect that statements from Google can have. Google know this so it does make sense for them to push out messages that make their jobs easier and suit their own objectives—why wouldn't they? In a similar way, what did they do when they were struggling to classify at scale which links are bad vs. good and they didn't have a big enough web spam team? They got us to do it for them :)

I'm mostly joking here, but you see the point.

The most recent infamous mobilegeddon update, discussed here by Dr. Pete is another example of Google pushing out messages that ultimately scared a lot of people into action. Although to be fair, I think that despite the apparent small impact so far, the broad message from Google is a very serious one.

Because of this, I think we need to remember that Google does have their own agenda and many shareholders to keep happy. I'm not in the camp of believing everything that Google puts out is FUD, but I'm much more sensitive and questioning of the messages now than I've ever been.

What do you think? I'd love to hear your feedback and thoughts in the comments.

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The Reach, Engagement, and ROI of Content Marketing vs. Native Advertising (New Research)

Posted by KelseyLibert

As the efficacy of outbound marketing continues to wane, more and more marketers are considering native advertising and content marketing as viable alternatives. According to our survey, 72% of clients have asked their content marketing agencies about native advertising.

While these two strategies have many similarities, one of their major differences is cost. Based on new exclusive research conducted by Fractl and Moz, these top-tier publishers require the following minimum spend to produce native advertising campaigns for brands:

Methodology

The goal of our research was to take a data-driven approach to comparing the efficacy of native advertising versus content marketing. For the first part of our study, we created a 14-question survey for content marketing providers which explored everything from the cost of their services to the reach of their campaigns. Our friends at Relevance were kind enough to offer the raw data on their native advertising cost research as well, allowing us to focus on gathering additional cost data from the top-tier publishers we maintain relationships with. After we received the survey responses from over 30 different content marketing agencies and cost data from close to 600 digital publishers, we began our analysis.

I. Identifying marketing objectives and challenges in the digital age

Before we dive into our findings, it's important to know the collective objectives and challenges of the inbound marketing age. Since Fractl and Moz spearheaded this study, we wanted to use an authoritative third-party source to support our research and set the stage for our discussion.

For that, we'll refer to HubSpot's State of Inbound 2014–2015 Report. The four graphs below shed light on marketing's key objectives, challenges, and wins.

1. The top 60% of marketing objectives focus on increasing leads, converting customers, and reaching relevant audiences.

2. The number one challenge marketers report is proving the ROI of their marketing activities.

3. SEO is the number one lead-generating source reported by inbound marketing professionals.

4. The companies with the highest ROI focus on blogging, organic search, and content amplification.

Right out of the gate we see that content, organic search, and content amplification are leading the way for marketers, priming content providers and promoters for exponential growth.

So how does content marketing compare to native advertising?

II. The landscape of content marketing and native advertising opportunities

The bullhorn of radio, television, print, and other one-way interruptive marketing approaches are quickly losing efficacy, allowing content marketing and native advertising to step in and solve the following problems:

• Banner blindness: The average click-through rate (CTR) of display ads is 0.1%.
• Eroding email engagement rates: Industry CTRs range from 1.5%–4.79%.
• Skipped pre-roll ads: 94% of people hit the skip button.
• Fragmented consumer attention: 77% of people watch TV while using another device.
• Inability to track outbound marketing ROI: Marketers can easily track content performance and conversion with inbound.
• High cost-per-lead for outbound marketing: Inbound leads are more cost-effective, with over 2x the marketers citing inbound (45%) as their primary source of leads versus outbound (22%) in 2014.
• Low brand engagement: While outbound marketing interrupts consumers, inbound marketing attracts and engages prospects in an organic way.

But what are the major differentiating factors between content marketing and native advertising?

Both content marketing and native advertising can be used to generate brand awareness and engagement. While top-tier publishers sell themselves on their large, built-in reach, sponsored content doesn't guarantee engagement. Below, we created a Buzzsumo analysis of 38 BuzzFeed native advertising campaigns in comparison to 58 Fractl content marketing campaigns. The BuzzFeed campaigns were calculated using all of the posts on a "Brand Publisher's" page (e.g. Kindle); while the Fractl campaigns were calculated using all of the campaigns executed for each of our client's during 2014.

At Fractl, we've earned an average of 90 links and 10,000 social shares per campaign, across 140 different campaigns executed between 2013 and 2015. In comparison, with native advertising, you're often just paying for the ability to publish content solely on the site you're partnering with. Although BuzzFeed boasts monthly traffic numbers in the multi-millions, this doesn't guarantee social engagement nor syndication of a campaign, as seen above.

Further into our research, you'll see that that content marketing agencies are doing the additional legwork with influencer marketing to amplify their content, which creates a larger reach than most top-tier publishers offering native advertising.

Furthermore, content marketing results directly impact a client's organic search positioning, whereas native advertising is limited by Google's guidelines:

• Content Marketing: ROI can be tracked through increased organic rankings as a direct result of earning a diverse, high-quality link portfolio.

• Native Advertising: Reach is limited to the number of paid publisher partnerships, and "sponsored links" are not allowed to pass value.

Has the cost of native advertising been inflated as a means of recovering revenue, or is it truly worth the tens of thousands of dollars that top-tier publishers are charging?

Let's dig further into the numbers to find out.

III. Cost analysis of the native advertising industry

Based on HubSpot's report, 93% of companies with an annual marketing budget between $1 and $5 million are practicing inbound.

Estimates from BI Intelligence show that spending on native ads will reach $7.9 billion in 2015 and grow to $21 billion in 2018, rising from just $4.7 billion in 2013.

But can most businesses afford the exorbitant costs for native advertising on top-tier publishers? Is the ROI worth it? Using native advertising cost data gathered by Relevance and Fractl, we analyzed the cost of native advertising on general news publishers with a domain authority (DA) greater than 80 and a social following greater than 100,000 – highly sought after placements for most brands.

The average cost of launching a native advertising program with a top-tier news publisher was $54,014.29. The highest cost was $200,000.

When we expanded our analysis to include all publishers who have a DA greater than 80, we found the average cost of launching a native advertising program was $35,482.50*.

*Average value derived from original cost totals and not the averages displayed in the image above.

When we evaluate all publishers and blogs below a DA of 80, we see the less valuable publishers (lower reach) offer a significantly reduced cost. For sites with a DA less than 80, the highest cost was $20,000 and the lowest cost was $10.

As outlined above, native advertising cost is largely associated with authority and reach. However, since engagement isn't a guarantee and the costs can be exorbitant for most brands, there's a need for other options that leverage and amplify content.

IV. Analysis of the efficacy of content marketing

Through our exclusive survey of over 30 content marketing agencies, we discovered how the content marketing landscape compares to native advertising.

1. 70% of content marketing agencies offer monthly retainers.

The industry is largely dominated by retainer packages, which often include production on multiple campaigns, influencer marketing, and on-site/overall strategy consultation. As represented in this pie chart, the pay-per-word structure is quickly eroding, and more comprehensive inbound marketing strategies are taking its place.

2. Retainers tend to fall into four buckets: $1,000–$5,000, $5,000–$10,000, $10,000–$50,000, and $50,000–$100,000.

Of all of our questions, this answer had one of the most evenly balanced responses, which demonstrates that there is a content marketing package that almost every business can afford. Similar to the native advertising scale, content marketing costs largely relate to the scope of the projects being produced (e.g., press releases versus interactive graphics) and their reach (e.g., influencer marketing versus no outreach).

3. On average, 65% of agencies produce between 1 and 10 campaigns per month for each client.

With content marketing campaigns, success is largely determined by a portfolio of executions: it's natural to have some campaigns flop for reasons outside of your control (i.e., poor publisher headlines, trending stories monopolize news, etc.), but over a portfolio of executions (i.e., three- to six-month retainers), most agencies can guarantee a base level of success.

4. Articles and infographics represent almost 60% of production, with case studies, interactive graphics, and videos accounting for close to 30% of production.

Based on our previous survey of 500 top-tier publishers, we found that articles and infographics were the most sought after content formats, so it's good to see most agencies are producing what's in-line with the publishers that will give them the largest reach.

5. Excluding outliers, the average content marketing campaign earns 27 links.

Across 38 native advertising campaigns produced by BuzzFeed, only eight backlinks were earned – an average of 0.18 backlinks per campaign. If you include the BuzzFeed article itself as a pickup (like we did in section II), you'll get an average number of campaign pickups of 1.18.

6. The average for each agency's "most successful campaign" is 422 links and the median is 150 links.

Again, we see a fairly even split with this response, likely relating back to the even split we saw with the monthly retainer.

7. Does agency cost correlate to performance?

Here, we see the sweet spot for success comes from agencies that are given the budget to produce larger-scope campaigns and invest in influencer marketing – those charging $5,000 to $50,000 per content marketing campaign or retainer.

8. 48% of clients measure content marketing success by the number of leads, high-quality links, and total social shares generated by each campaign.

Remember, marketing professionals listed two top objectives: increasing the number of leads and reaching the relevant audience. With content marketing, this translates directly into the number of leads generated from high-quality links/placements, and reaching the relevant audience translates into total social shares/engagement on a targeted campaign.

9. 39% use DA to evaluate the authority of a link.

While 39% of agencies use DA to evaluate the authority of a link, an almost equal number of agencies (35.7%) aren't tracking link authority. This is interesting, considering high-quality links were reported as the number two metric for content marketing success; however, high-quality links only accounted for 14.3% of the total pie, so DA might only be tracked by the agencies that have the budget to produce campaigns that earn high-quality links.

V. The ROI of content marketing vs. native advertising

As we saw in Section I, proving ROI is a marketer's biggest challenge. In fact, 20% of inbound marketers aren't measuring ROI. However, those who are measuring ROI have been able to prove that inbound unlocks ROI and ROI unlocks budget.

So, how do you prove ROI? And which tactic is best for your brand?

As a starting point, we'll refer to Neil Patel's estimates for content marketing by the numbers:

Using these metrics, we came up with a beta content ROI calculator which determines campaign ROI by analyzing traffic, social shares, links, and major placements:

When we plugged our most viral infographic to-date into our handy calculator, we found the client received a low estimated ROI of greater than 1,551% and a high estimated ROI greater than 2,942%.

Now, let's perform the same analysis for Intel's most successful BuzzFeed native advertising campaign "15 Things We Did At School That Future Students Will Never Understand," which earned 109,020 social shares and 1 backlink generated from BuzzFeed itself. Since there's no way for us to determine traffic data as an outsider, we'll assume this post made it to BuzzFeed's "top posts this week section." Out of the 20 top posts from this past week, the average view count was 989,332, which we'll use as our guesstimate for their traffic number.

At the $100K level a brand gets 3 custom pieces of content from BuzzFeed, meaning this single campaign cost $33,333.33. When we put the max value for links and major placements, and Neil Patel's highest estimated value for visitor and share, we find Intel's campaign ROI was:

This puts the high-performing campaign ROI for BuzzFeed at 720.53% and Fractl at 2,942%.

Based on all of the above, we know that the average content marketing campaign can deliver the same if not better KPIs than most native advertising campaigns. While some companies have the budget to invest in both tactics, others have to focus on the tactics driving the highest ROI. So, which tactic is right for your brand?

Whether you go with content marketing or native advertising, you'll always need to refine your processes to increase your content ROI. To do this, download our research bundle and leverage data-driven insights on content creation and pitching best practices.

In closing, we want to give a special thanks to Relevance for providing us with the raw native advertising cost data from over 500 publishers.

We'd also like to give a shout out to the 32 agencies that participated in our study and generously provided their sensitive data to produce our report.

What do you think about the value of native advertising versus content marketing? Share your thoughts in the comments below!

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