An SEO audit helps charities improve their online presence, engage with a larger audience, enhance user experience, and ultimately achieve their goals more effectively. By identifying strengths, weaknesses and opportunities, charities can make informed decisions that support their mission and objectives. By taking either a technical, on-page, backlink or a full SEO audit, we can form an SEO roadmap, from quick wins to longer-term goals to improve rankings on the SERPs. 

Why is an SEO Audit useful? 

An SEO Audit will help you identify any technical issues that may be preventing pages on your website from being indexed and ranked by search engines. If you are aware of anything technically wrong with your website, you can ask us to look into it in more detail. If you have made any significant changes to your site, such as a site migration, an SEO audit can help identify any outstanding issues left behind. 

 

How can charities benefit from an SEO Audit?

Increased Visibility and Awareness

SEO optimisation following an SEO audit helps charities appear higher in search engine results, making it easier for people to find them. Enhanced visibility in the search results supports awareness campaigns, helping to spread the charity’s message and attract more supporters.

 

Improved Donor Engagement

A well-optimised site ensures potential donors can find the information they need quickly and easily through improved user experience (UX). The SEO audit often highlights where navigation and UX can be improved, making the site more user-friendly.

High search engine rankings achieved through SEO post-audit can improve the perceived credibility of the charity, encouraging donations.

 

Enhanced Content Strategy

An audit can identify which keywords and content topics are most relevant to the charity’s mission, helping to create content that resonates with and shows up for their target audience. Content gaps can also be filled to better meet user needs and improve search rankings.

 

Competitive Advantage

Charities have competitors too – an audit provides insights into how the website compares to competitors with similar causes, allowing for strategic improvements. An SEO audit can identify the best practices to implement in order to stay ahead of the curve.

 

Increase Online Donations

An audit can uncover obstacles in the donation process, helping to streamline and increase online donations. Improving the placement and effectiveness of calls-to-action (CTAs) can lead to higher conversion rates. 

 

Long-Term Benefits

The benefits of SEO are long-lasting, continuous improvement to your website and boosting revenue over time. As SEO focuses on organic traffic, an SEO audit uncovers both improvements that can be implemented and will see results in the form of short-term ‘quick wins,’ and long-term gradual improvements in organic traffic and conversions. 

 

Find out more about how we conduct our SEO Audits at Uprise Up. 

 

It’s a dark and stormy night. High up in Alphabet Towers, the Google Privacy Sandbox team opens the roof to reveal the darkness above. Suddenly, a blinding bolt of light arcs down and slams into the table at the centre of the room. In the silence that follows, a form rises from the slab. A form of tracking once believed forever doomed to the grave. The Privacy Sandbox team raise their hands to the thunderous clouds above, and scream:

“It’s ALIVE!”

I apologize for the somewhat dramatic introduction, but I felt I needed to make up for the rather limp manner in which Google themselves announced one of the biggest turnarounds in recent history. A few days ago, Google announced in a blog post that they would be scrapping the planned depreciation of third party cookies from Google Chrome, which was scheduled to happen at the end of this year, in favour of ‘an updated approach that elevates user choice’. This comes after years of announcements and delays regarding the change, which was going to be a seismic shift in how marketing operated online.

In this blog, I’m going to go through what Google have told us about the decision, what we think has actually driven them to make the change, and what the future might now look like for the advertising industry. Many might be celebrating the resurrection of third party cookies, but I’ve read Frankenstein, and it didn’t end well for the monster.

 

What Google Have Said

The only announcement we have at the moment is Google’s blog post, which I linked earlier. In it, Google starts by reaffirming that the Privacy Sandbox will be able to fulfil its purpose to allow advertisers to target relevant users with ads whilst keeping privacy and a high level for users. They then go on to announce, however, that they have decided to scrap the planned removal of third party cookies entirely.

Instead, Google will be introducing a ‘new experience’ to Chrome, which will allow users to ‘make an informed choice that applies across their web browsing’. They emphasise that they will continue working on the Privacy Sandbox, and that it will be provided as an option to advertisers as a more privacy focussed option. They finish by saying that they will be working with regulators, such as the CMA in the UK, as they get this new direction in place.

I think this blog post is very… strange.

For a start, they begin by telling us that the Privacy Sandbox is going great, and will be able to perform its function of allowing us to target advertising without cookies. Then they tell us that we get to keep cookies anyway. So, and I don’t think I’m asking a crazy question here, why does the Privacy Sandbox exist?

They then go on to be strangely vague about the ‘new experience’ we will see in Chrome, despite it being pretty obvious, to my reading, that what they mean is that users will be asked to opt in or out to cookies when they first open Chrome. If that is the decision, why not just announce that?

And then finally, the change itself. Google have been working on the Privacy Sandbox for four years, and have been planning to remove third party cookies for about the same time frame. Now, mere months before the planned date, they have turned around and scrapped the whole thing.

What on earth has happened?

 

What (We Think) Actually Happened

In Frankenstein, at one point the monster says “I am fearless, and therefore powerful.” I think it describes Google’s approach to removing third party Cookies quite well. But I hope you can see the issue – just being confident you can do something does not give you the functional ability to do it.

I imagine that when Google announced that they would be removing third party cookies from Chrome, they were confident that they could update their systems to handle a cookieless world. They have one of the biggest data sets in the world after all, and entire teams of industry professionals to dedicate to the task. How hard can it be?

And so they announced it, which appeased regulators who had been circling the industry giant after both Firefox and Safari had already scrapped third party cookie tracking. Google announced in 2020 that they would follow suit.

In 2022.

So you can tell it wasn’t all plain sailing.

The big challenge for Google is that, unlike Apple and Mozilla, a huge proportion of its revenue comes from advertising. Advertising requires tracking, and tracking largely requires third party cookies. This was the challenge the Privacy Sandbox was built to solve.

The unfortunate truth, however, is that it has struggled to fulfil the purpose it was built for. The first few times advertisers were allowed to test the Sandbox, it failed to achieve anywhere near similar levels of performance to traditional advertising. It has improved since then, but still falls short of equalling cookie-based marketing methods.

At the same time, not all of Google’s marketing systems had an integration that allowed them to use the Privacy Sandbox. We had recent contact with Google reps who had told us that Campaign Manager, the main tracking system for Google’s Marketing 360 suite of tools, had no released integration. This was a deep concern to us.

And so Google pushed the date of removal backwards, and backwards, and backwards, from 2022 to August 2024, to end of 2024, to beginning of 2025. It was pretty clear that Google was simply not ready to make the change. Systems were not in place, and performance was still low. Maybe this result was inevitable, but Google clearly didn’t think so until recently.

 

Never Has a Cookie-Filled Future Felt Less Appetising

Many advertisers are likely rejoicing right now, feeling like the removal of cookies was a sword of Damocles that has been taken down from its precarious position above their heads. Google has brought back the dead, they should be applauded!

I suspect that, just like Frankenstein, Google may have spent too much time asking if they could, and not if they should.

There are three big concerns I have for the future of cookies on Chrome, and in a wider sense advertising on Google in general…

 

The Regulators

Google has been struggling in recent years to battle against huge resistance from online regulators. They want Google to be less monopolising, less invasive, and most importantly in this case, more privacy friendly. I am sure they are not too happy that Google has essentially backpedalled on the 4 years’ worth of work they have put into making Google adopt a cookieless browser system.

It must be pointed out that some of the delays were caused by regulators themselves, who were concerned about rushing out a half-baked solution on a browser used by over half the world, but I still suspect that there will be pushback on this new, complete reversal of direction.

Even if regulators accept this ‘new experience’ version of privacy Google are moving towards, they will want to make it as easy as possible to get rid of third party cookies. Which leads me on to…

 

The Data

The reason so many marketers will be happy with this news is that they feel that they will not lose anywhere near as much data as they were going to, but I suspect this is a rather optimistic view of the future.

We already have data on cookie acceptance rates based on banners on websites. This is, on average, somewhere around 65% for websites we have looked at. Assuming the overall opt-in rate for Chrome is similar, that means you will, on average, only see 42% of your users through third party cookie-based tracking. For small or even medium-sized charities, this is going to leave data sets small enough that it may be difficult to draw any significant conclusions.

This is my best guess as to why the Privacy Sandbox is staying around at all, but the big difference now is that, because Google will provide the option of third party cookies, they are under no obligation to make the Sandbox work as well as traditional advertising. This could place small charities between a rock and a hard place: using hamstrung cookie tracking or a Privacy Sandbox that is only half baked.

 

The Competitors

Take a look at Safari’s current advertising campaign – currently taking over many tube stations in London:

Now isn’t that a coincidence.

Whether or not Safari had any forewarning this announcement was coming, this illustrates the third danger I foresee from this change of direction. Google has exposed a weak spot, something that, categorically, the other, smaller browsers of the world can confidently say they do better than the giant. Many users in the modern age are concerned about their data privacy, and (rightly or wrongly) third party cookies are now seen as a feature that is very close to the line of data privacy acceptability. I anticipate we see far more of this sort of advertising from Apple and Mozilla, and if this causes Chrome’s market share to begin to dip we may see a turnaround to the turnaround before too long.

 

So, the deed is done. Google have made the decision, pulled the lever, and raised the dead. Third party cookies have taken their first stumbling steps back into a world that was already grieving their untimely demise. Will it be a world that welcomes them with open arms, or one that immediately reaches for the torches and pitchforks?

Only time will tell how this story ends, but I believe we are still in for a rocky road ahead, just not quite the one we were expecting. We’ll see what further details of the new Chrome experience Google announce in the coming weeks, but as I write this now I can’t help but feel that the future of Chrome, and by extension the whole internet, has just profoundly changed.

One final quote from Frankenstein: “Nothing is so painful to the human mind as a great and sudden change.”

And boy does my head hurt right now.

 

The Euros are well underway now, and we’ve seen some fantastic, exciting, free-flowing football… just unfortunately not from England, so far.

This was surely the one where it comes home though. Talent across every position, including the Premier League’s best player, La Liga’s best player, and the Bundesliga’s top scorer. A whole nation united, pushing aside any election differences, poised ready to back their team like never before.

But for whatever reason, it just hasn’t clicked yet. Lack of energy in midfield? Lack of left-footed LB? Foden playing out of position? Kane carrying a back injury? Poor quality pitches? Substitutions too late? Playing too defensively and deep? It seems there are 101 potential reasons. Pundits, journalists, fans, marketeers, anyone across the country really (and evidently including Southgate…) can’t seem to pin-point why.

But should we really be so critical, when really all that matters at the end of the day, is the result? We’ve topped our group, made it through the last 16, and have our eyes set on a quarter final match against Switzerland.

Yes, we’ve been subjected to some pretty painful viewing, but ALL that matters in these matches is the score.

Much like with Google, really. The most important thing is the score – to be specific, Quality Score and Optimisation Score – right?

 

So what are Quality Score and Optimisation Score?

 

Quality Score – the G.O.A.T

 

As my colleague Dan explained in his recent excellent blog examining Quality Score:

“Quality Score is a value assigned to a keyword, between 1 and 10, and is based on three factors: Landing Page Experience, Ad Relevance, and Expected Clickthrough Rate (CTR).

Quality Score is essentially multiplied by your bid in the ad auction, so if you doubled your Quality Score you would essentially double your competitiveness in the auction. This is why Quality Score is such a key metric, and why we want it as high as possible.”

We do have a more back-to-basics style blog on Quality Score right here, if you’re wanting a refresher on the 3 different factors. The solid back 3, if you will.

Now, while there are some potential flaws or unknowns with how to improve certain aspects of your Quality Score, it still remains one of the most (if not the most) important metric in a Google Ads/Paid Search account.

It provides a window into where and how improvements can be made to your campaign performance, which is becoming increasingly rare given Google’s general trend towards a black-box approach to managing Google Ads. The important takeaway being: if you do improve your Quality Score, you are likely to see improvements in results.

Note: be more fox in the box, less black box.

 

Optimization Score

 

On the other hand, Optimisation Score is:

“An estimate of how well your Google Ads account is set to perform. Scores run from 0–100%, with 100% meaning that your account can perform at its full potential.

Along with the score, you’ll see a list of recommendations that can help you optimise each campaign. Each recommendation shows how much your optimisation score will be impacted (in percentages) when you apply that recommendation.”

The idea here is that Google will expect a number of settings and features to be applied to your campaigns (based on your chosen objective) and so will give you a score to show how well you have adopted those settings. It will then show you recommendations on what other settings and features to apply to improve your score. You can then choose to review and apply these changes at the click of a button.

Some suggestions may include:

• Add dynamic images to your ads automatically
• Remove redundant keywords
• Remove conflicting negative keywords
• Review x number of ad groups’ missing ads

These are all arguably sensible suggestions that can be automatically applied. Even just flagging that some RSAs could be improved by including more headlines, and offering some AI-generated options, can be a helpful time-saver (if still reviewed before applying).

Seems fairly simple, somewhat helpful, and certainly harmless. But just remember, it’s a game of two halves…

The issue comes more with recommendations such as:

• Add broad match keywords
• Expand your reach with Google Search Partners
• Use Display Expansion
• Create a Performance Max campaign
• Raise your budgets (!)

You’ll notice all suggestions that appear say something along the lines of ‘get more conversions’ or ‘more potential customers’, and often include a tagline ‘This recommendation is an AI Essential’.

To an inexperienced advertiser, that seems like an obvious change to make? Of course, I’d like more conversions and customers.

But here lies the issue. From our experience, these suggestions are seldom best for actually improving your results – they generally only increase your costs. That’s not to say using broad keywords or PMax campaigns can work, but generally they need to be well considered and applied and tested appropriately. Not applied on a whim, at a click of a button because an automated system says to.

In the above examples (and what we generally find is) the suggestions don’t consider any context about the advertiser either, whether they can actually afford to increase their CPA an extra £2.26, or even if they have more budget available.

 

Do I need to be concerned about my Optimisation Score?

In most cases, no. You should not be optimising campaigns solely according to your Opti-Score.

I mean, don’t get me wrong, there can be some good recommendations. At minimum, we still suggest reviewing the ‘Recommendations’ tab every few weeks, to see if there are any noteworthy potential optimisations. Occasionally we find some quick wins or elements missing from accounts that we may have overlooked. But you need to:

a) Not get carried away with trying to improve your score for the sake of it.
b) Take any recommendations with a pinch of salt. Carefully consider whether they will benefit your account/campaigns.

The only case where Optimisation Score can matter, though, is as an agency, if you are a Google Partner. This is because Google Partners must maintain an Optimisation Score (measured as an average across their whole MCC) above 70%, as one of their requirements to remain a Partner.

Sometimes if you want to be a big game player, you have to follow the rules…

 

Why does my Google say I need to improve it? (I detect match-fixing!)

If Google are promoting a big shiny box that says CLICK HERE TO IMPROVE THIS, yet many of the improvements only lead to higher costs and not necessarily to better results – our cynical reaction is a fairly obvious one. It’s designed (at least in part) for Google to make more money.

It’s suspicious that most Google ‘Account Strategists’ are technically working on behalf of their sales department, and their advice is usually to enable auto-apply on the in-account recommendations. For advertisers blindly following their advice, we can maybe call this an own goal.

It should be noted you can still improve your Optimisation Score by simply dismissing the suggestions too – you don’t have to apply them. However, given it’s quite hidden and the fact it literally makes no difference whether you apply the feature or not, it still feels quite deceptive.

As another aside, you might be interested to know that Meta have also introduced a similar metric in the last few months, called ‘Opportunity Score’. It’s essentially the same thing – equally optimistic (and gimmicky) sounding, and potentially equally likely to encourage you just to spend more.

Don’t get caught sleeping. Be cautious when optimising!

 

Are Quality Score and Optimisation Score related in any way?

In short, no. I should firstly caveat however, that Google make clear:

“Quality Score isn’t an input in the ad auction. It’s a diagnostic tool to identify how ads that show for certain keywords affect the user experience.”

That being said, Quality Score still has its basis in actual performance data. Generally, better set-up campaigns lead to better Quality Scores, which generally lead to better results. It has a real-world implication on your day-to-day as a Paid Search advertiser.

As Dan also said in his blog, “you should care about your Quality Score, and you should put time aside to try and improve it as much as possible”.

On the flip-side, your Optimisation Score does not have any bearing on your actual results. Yes it can provide some interesting recommendations and offer guidelines, but it can mislead advertisers just as much. It simply is a vanity metric.

And in an age where we’re all stats-focussed, be it pass-completion %, expected goals/xG, or expected CTR (maybe I should call it xCTR), as marketers we want the data that matters to help us make informed decisions.

 

So that’s full time – what’s the verdict? Is all that matters the score?

To sum up, I think it would be helpful to quickly jump back to the definition of Optimisation Score.

“With 100% […] your account can perform at its full potential”

The important part here is ‘potential’. It’s like saying (bear with me…) given how much potential Theo Walcott* had, we should’ve already won a Euros years ago. The ‘potential’ is merely an estimation of what may or may not happen if you follow some of their guidelines. Whereas all that matters are the actual stats (like Quality score) when it comes to optimising campaigns.

 

*Jude Bellingham stepping up by scoring an overhead kick goal in the 95th minute to send us through to the Quarters? That’s not potential. That’s the real deal.

And while Google might be losing fans amongst the chaos of their anti-trust trials, no amount of poor performances will stop us from losing faith when it comes to England playing in tournament football.

Let’s follow the footsteps of our Lionesses, and bring it home, boys.

 

If you were to ask me what the single most important non-conversion metric for account performance is in Google Ads, I’d probably choose Quality Score.

Google has always said that Quality Score and CPC bids are what define your ad rank, which is what defines how powerful your ads will be in the ad auction. In today’s world, with automated bidding taking so much of the CPC bidding process away from advertisers, it’s more important than ever to make sure Quality Score is as high as possible on as many keywords as possible.

But what actually is Quality Score? How does it work? Is there anything that Google aren’t telling us about it? And what can we do to ensure that our Quality Scores are as high as possible?

Well, I took every keyword that received a Quality Score in any of our Grants Accounts in 2023 , and set out to find out if there were any insights hiding inside that data. Along the way, I’m going to explain the basics of Quality Score, why it is so important, and how you can work to get the highest Quality Score possible for keywords.

So, if you want to find out who would win: 20,000 keywords or one data analyst with a spreadsheet? Keep reading…

 

Back to Basics (or, How I Lost My Mind About Expected CTR)

Before we get into the numbers, I’m going to explain the basics of Quality Score, so that the many (many) graphs that follow make sense.

Quality Score is a value assigned to a keyword, once it has received a low number of impressions. It is a value between 1 and 10, and is based on three factors: Landing Page Experience, Ad Relevance, and Expected Clickthrough Rate (CTR).

Quality Score is essentially multiplied by your bid in the ad auction, so if you doubled your Quality Score you would essentially double your competitiveness in the auction. This is why Quality Score is such a key metric, and why we want it as high as possible.

To go into a little more detail in the factors, Landing Page Experience is a measure of how well your landing page is related to your keyword, along with general landing page best practices like short load times and low link density. Ad Relevance is a measure of how relevant the ad that the keyword serves is to the keyword. Expected CTR is a measure of…

Well, Google says: “how likely it is that your ads will get clicked when shown for that keyword, irrespective of your ad’s position, assets and other ad formats that may affect the prominence and visibility of your ads.”

But this is confusing. CTR is already a measure of how often your ads get clicks; are Google saying that this is a guess about how your CTR will change? Or is it a measure of your CTR against your competitors? Or is it something else entirely?

This was a large part of the motivation to do this analysis. Expected CTR has always been a huge black box in the Quality Score system, which has very unclear definitions and no clear explanation for how to make it go up. For years I’ve sat, watching this value in my accounts go up and down without knowing why. What did I do well to make it go up? What can I do when it goes down? My answer, up until now, has been to do everything else right, and hope it follows along.

But let’s see if the numbers can tell us more than Google has.

 

Quality Score Distribution (or, Why We’re Pretty Great at Google Ads)

The first, and most basic, graph to look at is just what the Quality Score distribution looked like across the 20,000 keywords that had a Quality Score in 36 of our Grants accounts, which encompass a range of different charity causes:

And already we begin to see some interesting results.

Firstly, we note that 7 is the most common Quality Score in our accounts, followed by 8 and then 10. This is all in the top half of the Quality Score range, and in particular the number of perfect Quality Scores is encouraging!

More interesting than patting ourselves on the back, however, is the fact that Quality Scores 6 and 9 are relatively rare in our accounts. This is especially surprising for 6, as it’s immediately followed by the most common Quality Score. This piqued my interest – is there a reason 6 and 9 might be so unlikely? Is there something more subtle at play here that can be investigated? It is a little beyond the scope of this blog, but stay turned for a follow-up blog where we delve into this in far more detail.

But let’s get into more important graphs. First of all, let’s ask the simple question – how much does Quality Score actually affect results?

 

Performance Metrics (or, How Quality is Quality Score?)

Let’s start with CTR:

The overall results are as expected. CTR is higher for high Quality Scores than for low ones, but it’s interesting that CTR doesn’t really begin to increase until we reach the highest Quality Scores of 8, 9 and 10. From the description Google gives of Quality Score, we would likely expect a more linear increase from low to high.

To an extent, this is unsurprising – the higher Quality Scores have gained those Quality Scores precisely because their CTR is so high. But the fact that it has collected in the final few scores is interesting.

On to Cost per click (CPC).

 

For the most part, this one is completely as expected. The higher your Quality Score, the lower you have to bid to outperform your competition. It’s somewhat interesting that Quality Score 1 keywords were abnormally high compared to the rest of the trend. Potentially, Google will only let these low-quality keywords show if you really show you want it.

It’s also notable that the CPC for Quality Score 2, 3 and 4 keywords is relatively flat. It’s only once you hit Quality Score 5 that the decreases begin in earnest. Our expectation was always that the graph would be an even decrease across all Quality Scores, but this data suggests you have to reach the higher Quality Scores before you begin to see significant drops in cost.

But all of these graphs were just the prologue. What I was really interested in were those Quality Score factors – how do they work, and which matter the most? Let’s get into that.

 

Quality Score Factors (or, The Main Event)

Let’s start with the basics. Each subfactor can be assigned a score of Below Average, Average, or Above Average. We can plot the different amounts of these scores for each subfactor, to see the numbers of above- and below-average scores achieved.

The fact that the average scores above  are dominant in all metrics is unsurprising. We already saw that our overall Quality Scores are high, which would suggest good subfactor scores.

Far more interesting here is that Expected CTR deviates from the other two factors in its distribution. Both Ad Relevance and Landing Page Experience show a high number of above-average scores, and then a roughly equal, lower amount of average and below-average scores. Expected CTR, however, shows a far smaller dropoff from above-average to average, before it drops to a small number of below-average.

This tells us two things. Firstly, it reinforces what I already said at the start of the blog. Expected CTR is the least understood subfactor, and therefore the one hardest to optimise towards. That means less of a push towards above average in the score split.

The second point it proves, however, is that it is a ‘picky’ factor, more willing to drop to average even when the other two factors are high.

But maybe that is unimportant, if having a low Expected CTR has little or no effect on results. Let’s take a look at that, shall we?

 

We’ll start with CPC. A reminder that here a lower value is better. Our expected result here is that higher factor scores should lead to a lower CPC, as you are able to be more competitive with a lower bid.

When we look at Expected CTR, we see what we expect. Above-average has the lowest CPC, and it increases for each following factor. But when we look at Ad Relevance and Landing Page Experience, we see a different story. Both show far less adherence to the expected trend, with Ad Relevance having average scores achieve lowest CPC, and Landing Page Experience having average achieve the highest CPC.

This indicates, at least to me, that Expected CTR has far more effect on your final CPC than the other two factors.

Let’s take a look at CTR.

Now this is some interesting data. When we look at CTR statistics, both Expected CTR and Landing Page Experience show what we would expect – highest CTR occurs when the factors are above average, and it decreases as the factor score gets lower. However, Ad Relevance shows no relationship to CTR at all. All the scores have similar CTRs, and above-average actually has the worst performance.

This is an indication that Ad Relevance has, at least, a lower impact on your CTR than the other two factors of Quality Score. This is a very interesting result as we would expect this to be the metric that Ad Relevance influences the most strongly. It has been proven that Ad Relevance is the ‘weakest’ Quality Score factor when it comes to calculating final Quality Score (something I’ll back up in that follow-up blog I mentioned earlier) and this data shows that the theory matches our real world performance data.

 

Quality Score Factor Association (or, Relationship Counselling)

The last thing I want to investigate in this blog is a matter of correlation. If I have an above-average score in one factor, how likely is it that I will have above-average in another factor?
I did this using pivot tables, which are a good way of comparing the correlation of two different dimensions.

This data is quite insightful. However, of all of my visualisations, I think that this is the hardest to actually read, so let me go through this piece-by-piece.

The first two tables compare Expected CTR to Ad Relevance and Landing Page Experience. They both show broadly similar data. The values are concentrated in the first cell, where both Expected CTR and the other factor are both above-average. Next most likely is expected CTR, being average with the other factor being above-average, and then several other factors are in third place.

But this is not nearly as interesting as the question of what’s lowest likelihood. On the Ad Relevance graph, it appears quite easy to have a below-average Expected CTR, with an above-average Ad Relevance. This was the 4th most common combination in our data, and over 5 times more likely than any other Ad Relevance score getting a below-average Expected CTR. This is one of those times where the data baffles me – why is this so concentrated?

For Landing Page Experience, the below-average Expected CTR scores are far more evenly distributed between all Landing Page Experience scores. It seems that these two scores are largely independent of each other.

The final table shows Ad Relevance and Landing Page Experience against one another. Although the heatmap looks more correlated, the data here is full of little deviations. For example, you’re more likely to have a below-average Landing Page Experience than average when you have an above-average Ad Relevance, for example.

This is, again, due to the fact that this is not random Quality Score data, but data pulled from our actively managed accounts. For this reason we’re likely to see more high scores as we are actively improving Quality Score at all times.

 

Conclusion (or, No More Graphs, I Promise)

So, what are the conclusions we can glean from all these graphs? Data is only as good as what you can learn from it, and I have three main conclusions to draw:

 

1. Quality Score Works

This might seem like an obvious conclusion, but in recent times, where Google explaining how their systems work feels increasingly like a conspiracy theorist explaining how the Earth is flat, it is reassuring to see performance data match to what Google states should happen. You should care about your Quality Score, and you should put time aside to try and improve it as much as possible. From our data, getting your Quality Score to 7 or above is ideal, as this appears to be where the biggest performance improvements occur.

 

2. Expected CTR is the most powerful factor.

The data shows that Expected CTR is the only Quality Score factor to have a strong correlation with all performance metrics. It seems like achieving a high Exp. CTR is the best way to guarantee higher performance. However, we also saw that expected CTR seems to be the hardest factor to improve.

 

3. Quality Score factors should be treated as separate entities.

This is the gift of the final pivot tables. We don’t see major correlation between any of the Quality Score factors, even ones we would expect to see relationships between, such as Ad Relevance and Landing Page Experience. This means that improving one factor to above-average is not necessarily going to pull other factors up along with it. If you want to improve a subfactor score, you’ll have to focus on it.

 

This is all great information, but at the end of it I found myself still frustrated. None of this tells me what Expected CTR actually is. So, I knew I wasn’t done. There was more to find. Perhaps it was time to do some real spreadsheet magic.

But that will have to wait for following blogs. In my crusade to shine a light on Expected CTR, I have at least been able to show you some interesting features of Quality Score, and how it relates to other performance metrics. Happy quality scoring!

 

In 2015, Jerry Dischler, VP of Google Ads (at the time called AdWords), was keynote speaker at the SMX Advanced conference. He was given a question about why CPC prices seemed to be rising arbitrarily, and whether that was due to Google’s own internal profit goals.

That was because a speaker earlier in the day had claimed that they believed Google was manipulating auctions to increase CPCs for profit. Jerry responded: “Full stop, we are not manipulating search results or manipulating the ad auction in order to increase profits. That’s just not what we do.” You can watch the question and answer right here if you want the full conversation.

This is really encouraging to hear. If Google were raising prices artificially, that could really harm the trust in the auction process. We can all take this statement as the final word on it, and I’m sure nothing will counteract it, right?

Right?

 

Setting the Scene

Jerry… That’s not very helpful.

So, this is the news that Google actually does make changes to the auction to inflate prices. This is a pretty scandalous admission, and if the American Department of Justice logo in the top left of that image hasn’t tipped you off yet, Google aren’t coming out with this information because of a sudden push for transparency. They’re admitting it under oath.

If you’ve read John’s excellent blog from a few months ago, you’ll already be up to date, but in case you haven’t yet, I’ll give you all the gory details.

Google is currently being taken to court by the US Department of Justice. It claims that Google is engaging in anticompetitive practices, and essentially operating an illegal monopoly. In the process of this trial, a number of high-ranking members of Google’s search team are being forced to give public testimony under oath, and they are revealing some inner workings they perhaps would rather not, such as meddling with the ad auction and search results page, purely for profit.

So we know that Google have been inflating prices. But why? Why would a well-meaning company like Google do such a thing?

 

The Motive

Money. The answer is money.

Well, a desire to hit quarterly revenue targets that were supplied to Wall Street, at least. In a 2019 email, Jerry said:

“If we don’t meet quota for the second quarter in a row and we miss the street’s expectations again, which is not what Ruth signalled to the street, so we will get punished pretty bad in the market.”

Ruth is Chief Financial Officer at Google, and in case it isn’t clear, “the street” in question is Wall Street. He is essentially saying that quarterly earnings reports have to align with the projections provided to Wall Street. If they do not, their stock will likely take a hit, and that will have negative impacts on the company.

The motive is important. Google Ads has always had an overtly pro-customer emphasis, and this is one of the few times we have seen a clear example of Google doing something to the ads scheme exclusively for their own benefit, at the cost of the customer’s ad performance.

 

The Method

So, what exactly did Google do? This was a bit vague at the start of the trial, but by closing arguments the DoJ had a list of changes made by Google since 2017 to show us.

 

Project Momiji

 

The first method was an update to the auction called Project Momiji. This update aimed to inflate the bid made by the runner up in the auction. By inflating this bid, the eventual winner of the auction would be forced to pay more for the position 1 slot. Supposedly this led to a 15% increase in cost to the winning advertiser.

Internal Google documents show Google staff talking openly about using this feature to increase prices without any mention of how the system is intended to improve user experience or advertiser performance.

But hey, omission is not admission. Maybe project Momiji does improve user experience, but that was not the subject of discussion. At least they didn’t admit that the update had no user benefit at all. No one would publish an update like that right?

Right?

 

Randomised Generalised Second-Price Auction System (henceforth, RGSP)

Well… That’s awkward.

Now bear with me here; the RGSP auction isn’t the easiest thing to explain.

Imagine that you’re at an art auction. The auction house has decided that it’s not going to conduct a normal auction, or a second-place auction (where you just have to pay a set amount more than whatever the second highest bid was), but a RGSP auction instead.

To do this, the auction house collects a lot of other data about you, like how you will use the art, where you will store it, if you have a good history of art buying, etc. It then combines this with your bid to decide where you place in the auction.

Now comes the confusing bit. Say you and the second-place bidder bid quite close together (£180 and £200 for example) and your other factors are quite similar too. The auction says that, randomly, it might swap you and decide to give the second-place bidder the item instead of you. Now, this might seem counterintuitive –the auction house is just making less money this way– but the devil is in the details.

There are two ways to avoid losing out to second place in RGSP auctions. You can try to improve the quality of all those factors that I mentioned get collected, but this is vague and difficult to do. Alternatively, you can simply bid more.

Most bidders end up taking the second option, and rather than bidding £200 to win against a £180 second bid, people might bid £400 instead, just to guarantee they acquire that painting.

This is the slightly sneaky way in which RGSP auctions can increase Google’s revenue, and in the antitrust trial, Dischler has confirmed that not only does Google do them (which we knew) but that these methods increase revenue when utilised (which we didn’t).

Of course, all of this gets so much easier for Google when automated bidding is being used, as they know exactly how the bidding strategies will react to changes.

But hey, maybe Google released updates that purely improved profits without improving search quality, so what? A company with an annual revenue in 2023 of $305bn just needs to eat, you know?

At least we can all sleep safe in the knowledge that Google never released updates that knowingly harmed user experience just to increased profits, right?

Right?

 

Squashing

Ah… Well…

Google, I’m struggling to defend you on this one.

This is squashing, and of all of the updates we learned about in the trial (so far), this is probably the most egregious.

The basic principle, according to Google’s own internal documents, was that squashing would “increase an advertiser’s lifetime value based on how far their predicted clickthrough rate (pCTR) is from the highest pCTR on query”. So, if your CTR were lower, it would actually boost your ranking. Why would you boost the ranking of an ad you predict is worse than another? Simple: by boosting that ranking, you force others to bid more to beat them.

As the image above shows, Google themselves were aware that boosting ads which the system knew were worse quality was a dangerous move from a user experience perspective. They also quite rightly assessed that, in the long term, this could reduce the need for advertisers to chase high quality ads at all, as long as you didn’t care about position 1, the system would boost you artificially to higher slots regardless.

But Google published the change anyway. In internal documents for teaching new users how the auction system works, they said they were “working on using it to engender a more broad price increase”. Or in other words, using it to make money

 

The Opportunity

Despite all of this being very worrying, this is the part that the trial cares most about.

How are Google able to increase prices by up to 10% on a whim? The DoJ are arguing that this is because there is really very little competition elsewhere. Bing Ads does exist, but its market share is tiny compared to the goliath that is Google, in 2023 it held a 3.63% market share, compared to Google’s 91.5%. The DoJ are arguing that this makes advertisers a captive audience, who simply must comply with the whims of Google rather than switch to a viable alternative.

 

The Verdict

So, what is my opinion on this?

Undoubtably the admissions are troubling. Even taking the charitable view that Google reps have never knowingly lied when they denied (at the time) inflating prices, they have still given advertisers incorrect information through ignorance of the true facts . I think it should have at least warranted an announcement telling users that their advertising costs would go up, and by how much. Otherwise, how are we to know if performance changes in an account are due to search environment changes, or merely Google themselves fiddling with the auction?

I think this also might be the best time to abandon the ad auction messaging altogether.

With RGSP, squashing, automated bidding, smart campaigns, and now Google’s price tweaking, the idea that the system for placing ads is in any way similar to an auction process is somewhat deceptive. I think this whole mess is as much a product of this bad messaging as it is a product of deceptive practices.

But do I think that Google’s users are a captive audience, unable to move anywhere else with their advertising? That part I’m not so sure about. Even now, Google Ads still sits as the most efficient form of digital marketing possible for many advertising areas.

Particularly for charities, donation and legacy giving campaigns always perform best on Google Ads, even compared to Bing Ads, its closest competitor.

However, much of this comes down to one simple factor: the user base. Google has far more users than any other search engine, and with more users comes more data to train machine learning models; an easier task to analyse that data for optimisation opportunities; and a faster reaction to changes in user behaviour. The fact that user base makes the job of building a good search engine easier means that the industry is always going to be filled with the equivalent of rolling snowballs, where the largest has the best opportunity to grow even larger.

Ultimately, I do think that Google has damaged the trust between its advertisers and itself with this news, and I hope this moves Google to implement a new, more transparent system. However, in the context of this trial, I am not so sure that the DoJ are going to be able to leverage the revelation in the way they want. We have seen closing arguments now, and we are waiting on a verdict form the Judge. Regardless of the verdict, however, the effects of this trial will be with us for some time.

 

The Context

With the general election looming, many charities have been asking how it might impact them.

In theory, increased competition on Meta caused by political parties entering ad auctions could drive up costs (both higher CPCs and CPMs). A more expensive platform would, by extension, result in CPAs increasing. 

It’s worth noting though, this won’t impact Paid Search, given the nature of the platform only targeting specific searches vs. targeting audiences.

Moreover, with more ‘noise’ on Meta vying for people’s attention, this could (again, in theory) reduce ad engagement and conversion rates. You could also argue, uncertainty about the future could mean people might be hesitant to donate to charities at this stage – and potentially large donors could even be donating to political parties instead of charities. 

If you’re interested, you can actually see what ads political parties (or any organisations, for that matter) are running, including their estimated spend and targeting. You can visit the Meta Ads Library: https://www.facebook.com/ads/library. It’s a great tool for reviewing competition generally, and we’re actually in the process of developing scripts to pull this data into our reporting through an API.

In reality though, it’s difficult to exactly measure the impact. Even if you can see what ads are running.

 

So why are we writing this blog?

As the blog title suggests, there are pretty clear restrictions and guidelines for running political ads on Meta. What charities might not be aware of, however, is that this also applies to ads about ‘social issues’. These are defined by Meta as:

“sensitive topics that are heavily debated, may influence the outcome of an election or result in / relate to existing or proposed legislation […] These ads can come from a range of advertisers. They include activists, brands, non-profit groups, and political organisations.

Ads about social issues, election and politics seek to influence public opinion through discussion, debate or advocacy for or against important topics, such as health and civil and social rights.”

That criteria extends to any ads that aim to call on the government or specific MPs to enact change aligned with their cause, often through petitions. We have also found many charities still require the extra verification, even if ads are not directly related to politics. This particularly impacts homelessness, environmental, humanitarian, and animal welfare charities.

This isn’t a blanket policy though – the focus is on the content of the ad and, as such, certain ads do or don’t require authorisations and disclaimers.

 

So what do you have to do?

In short, in order to run ads about social issues, elections, and politics, the page you’re running the ads for needs to have a ‘disclaimer’ created – and then that page needs to be linked to the ad account you’re running ads from.

The aim of a disclaimer is to help increase transparency on the platform. All ads about social issues, elections, or politics must be clearly labelled with a ‘Paid for by’ disclaimer from the advertiser, communicating the organisation or person behind the ad. This information is linked in the ad itself via an ‘About this ad’ icon, which gets appended. More info about what a disclaimer is can be found here: https://www.facebook.com/business/help/198009284345835?id=288762101909005.

Disclaimers were first introduced in the US in May 2018. This was following controversy around the 2016 US election, where it was discovered ads had been bought and run on Facebook by a Russian Influence Operation, designed to sway the election results. Disclaimers were introduced in the UK later in October 2019, although this was pushed back (eventually in March 2019), owing to concerns around the reliability of their identity checks.

 

What does a disclaimer on Meta look like?

Firstly, you will see a link appended to the ad which says ‘Paid for by [name of organisation]’:

It will then open up a menu of options in Meta, with a link to see ‘Who paid for this ad?’:

Within this, you will be able to find key information about the organisation: 

 

How do you set up a disclaimer in Meta? 

As you can imagine, there are quite a few steps involved to get verified and approved to run ads on social issues, elections, or politics. Meta has clear instructions on how to do this, so I won’t go into all the details below, but will outline the basic steps and link to the relevant instructions.

 

1)

Firstly, a page admin will need to have their identity verified on Meta. 

This doesn’t actually take very long, and is normally approved within 24 hours. The key thing to note is you will need to provide a photo of some form of ID, e.g. driving licence or passport.

Meta may ‘periodically’ ask you to reconfirm your identity in the United Kingdom, but this normally isn’t within 1 year.

There are a few options to confirm your identity, although I have found ‘Option 2’ to be the easiest.

All details can be found here: https://www.facebook.com/business/help/2992964394067299?id=288762101909005

 

2)

Once finished, you will then need to create the disclaimer for your organisation’s page.

This is probably the trickiest part, with a couple of layers (mobile and email) of verification needed. Key information you’ll otherwise need to provide is your organisation’s name, a phone number, email address, and website.

 

3)

Then, you’ll need to link your disclaimer to an ad account you want to run the ads from.

All details can be found here: https://www.facebook.com/business/help/488070228549681?id=288762101909005

 

4)

The last step is to set up your campaign, but make sure to select the ‘special ad categories’ option.

You’ll notice there are other options for credit, housing, and employment – but the category to select is of course ‘social issues, elections or politics’.

If your identity has been confirmed and your page disclaimer set up, you will see all authorisation options approved to run ads:

 

FAQs

There are a few considerations to note and questions that frequently come up, so I’ve detailed the most common ones below:

 

Can only page admins create ads about social issues, elections, and politics then?

No. Once you have created the disclaimer for your page, anyone with access to ‘create ads’ for your page can continue to do so – provided they have also verified their ID (in step 1). Similarly, any edits to ads will need to be done by someone who’s verified.

 

 

I’m not sure if my ads fall under ‘social issues, election and politics’. Should I select the ad category or not?

If you’re not sure, I’d suggest trying without selecting the special ad category first. You can always turn on the special ad category if your ads do get flagged for this. Just be aware that your ads will need to go into review again if updating the category.

 

 

Do I always need to choose a special ad category if my ads have previously been disapproved? 

No. Again it’s about the content of the ad. That being said, if your ads have always been flagged (and your charity’s cause is highly aligned with bringing about change) then it might be more time efficient to do so from the start.

 

 

What should I do if my Meta ads get disapproved for being issue, electoral or political, but they belong to this ad category?

If you believe your ad was incorrectly rejected, you can request a manual review. If your ad rejection is successfully overturned, this will not count as an ad violation. More information about the ad review process here.

It’s worth noting that if you are verified to run ads about social issues, elections, and politics, and they are frequently being rejected – it might be worth selecting the category anyway to prevent frequent issues.

 

 

Will running a charity campaign under a special ad category impact the performance?

Choosing the ‘social issues, elections or politics’ special ad category shouldn’t drastically impact performance in itself, as it shouldn’t affect your ranking going into an auction. However, it can limit placements where your ads can run. Also, users have the option to request seeing less ads about social issues, election and politics, which could mean you don’t reach certain users.

 

Will running a charity campaign under a special ad category limit my options with targeting?

According to Meta, only the credit, employment or housing ad category comes with limitations to targeting options e.g. not being able to target based on age, gender, postcodes, as well as certain interests. 

It’s worth noting however, you can only run ads for social issues, elections and politics in the country in which your identity has been verified. That means if you are verified in the UK, you can only runs these ads in the UK and not outside. 

 

 

What can you do if you’re an international charity wanting to run ads about social issues, election and politics?

This becomes tricky. You would need an advertiser with their ID verified in each country you’re wanting to target, to then set-up a campaign each individually targeting that country.

 

 

If I’m running ads for a homeless charity, should I select the ‘housing’ specific ad category?

As mentioned above, there are additional special ad categories for credit, housing and employment. If running ads for a homelessness charity, the correct category would still be ‘social issues, election and politics’. The housing element refers more to property listing, insurance and mortgages. 

 

 

What kinds of charities are likely to use Meta’s special ad categories? 

It really depends on the content of the ad itself, whether it falls under Meta’s description of ads about social issues. As previously mentioned in the blog, we have found this most likely to affect homelessness, environmental, humanitarian and animal welfare charities in particular.

 

 

Start at the beginning.

It’s easy to get pulled into a conversation where all anyone cares about are how many new followers your charity’s social channels have acquired that week, or what the click-through rate is on the latest ad campaign. But what’s more important is not the stats that answer these questions – it’s whether these questions are the right ones to ask. 

To get to a point where you have everyone in your charity lined up behind the stats you are reporting on, you need to start at the beginning. Go back to the organisation’s overall strategy.

A good example here is Samaritans. (And just to note, I’m using this purely as an example, we’ve not worked with them at all on this, so full credit to the Samaritans team!)

Their vision:

Fewer people die by suicide.

Their mission: 

Here every day and night for anyone struggling to cope. They make sure people have support and somewhere to turn when they need it most. They work with communities to let people know they’re there for them, and they campaign to make suicide prevention a priority. 

Their strategy: 

Tackling suicide together: providing a safe space in uncertain times.

From these bedrocks, they’ve built out five strategic priorities: 

1. 1. 1. 1. 1. Access
            2. Reach
            3. Impact
            4. Capacity
            5. Sustainability

Each of these areas could (and potentially should) have specific digital marketing metrics aligned to them. 

Looking at the first area as an example: 

Access: Make sure anyone who needs us can access our support.

The challenge: We cannot always meet the demand for Samaritans’ services and there is a risk that people who are trying to contact us can’t get through or get the response they need.

Ambition: People will be able to access our support whenever they need it and get through to us in a way that works for them.

Samaritans have six action points to achieve this: 

• Recruit more volunteers
• Expand digital services
• Improve service to callers
• Review and improve accessibility to hubs
• Undertake targeted recruitment campaigns to increase diversity
• Improve rotas

Some of these areas link to digital marketing and metrics that could be used to measure progress.

Recruitment needs reach, click-through, landing page sessions, and conversion. To hit the diversity metrics, you could look at specific demographics within the conversion regarding marginalised groups.

Digital service metrics could look at awareness of these offerings through snapshot surveys, landing page sessions (again), conversions around opening the chat option, and the length of engagement.

To make the most of these stats, I’d suggest using an OKR framework (objectives and key results). Setting an overall objective for each of these areas (which is already done in this instance – Samaritans could use their Ambition here as the objective) and then key results, including targets for each operational area. This is then measured quarterly, with relevant targets in place.

So in this instance, it may look something like this: 

Objective: People will be able to access our support whenever they need it and get through to us in a way that works for them.

Key results: 

• Improve reach of recruitment campaign from x to y by Q2
• Reach xx,xxx landing page sessions on samaritans.org.uk/volunteer
• Improve conversions of those on the support page, who go on to use the live chat support by x%
• Hit x% conversions from target demographics

Setting these key results out for each area that you, as Marketing, are responsible for contributing to, is vital in ensuring you can report on areas that matter without being distracted by vanity metrics. If they are tied back to the original organisational strategy, it’s far easier to get buy-in from relevant stakeholders too. Win win!

If you need any support in working out which digital metrics are best to focus on for your charity, get in touch with our strategy team. We’d love to chat. 

Creating a link strategy to enhance your SEO efforts is essential to ensure your website is getting as much organic visibility as possible. We have created a guide to help your charity perform to its maximum potential.

The importance of SEO

SEO is crucial for all charities with an online presence as it helps your website become more visible in the search results. The more visible you are, the more traffic you are likely to receive, opening up more opportunities for your site users to perform the conversion you want them to.

There are hundreds of charities and websites out there, all competing to be visible, so without best-practice SEO implemented throughout your website, you are less likely to appear for your target keywords, and hence lose out on potential traffic. 

The role links play in SEO

Links play a pivotal role in SEO by acting as pathways that connect different web pages, enabling search engines to crawl and index content effectively, ultimately influencing a site’s visibility in search results.

In SEO, the quality of links to a website serve as a key indicator of its authority and relevance, with well-crafted link strategies not only improving rankings but also establishing a webpage’s trustworthiness in the eyes of both users and search engines.

The more credible the website that is linking to you, the better reward you will see in the search results.

Why a well-thought-out link strategy is beneficial for optimal SEO performance

A well-thought-out link strategy is crucial for any website’s success because it enhances a site’s visibility in search engine results, improving the chances of attracting organic traffic. 

Link strategies not only contribute to higher search engine rankings, but also establish a website’s authority and credibility within its niche, ensuring your website is deemed trustworthy.

In the competitive online landscape, a robust link-building strategy serves as a powerful tool to navigate algorithms, ensuring sustained growth and relevance for a website in the ever-evolving world of digital marketing.

What is link building?

Link building is the process of acquiring hyperlinks from external websites to your own domain with the end goal being improving a website’s visibility, authority, and credibility.

These links should be acquired naturally and not be part of any paid link schemes – as that can have detrimental consequences on your organic visibility. 

Understanding the different types of links

Understanding the difference between dofollow and nofollow links is crucial. Dofollow links are hyperlinks that allow search engines to follow through and crawl the linked pages. These links pass on authority and influence search engine rankings. 

Nofollow links instruct search engines not to pass authority or credibility to the linked page, essentially signalling that the linked content is not necessarily endorsed. 

Website owners commonly use these nofollow attributes for user-generated content, advertisements, or links that they don’t want to vouch for. Striking a balance between dofollow and nofollow links is vital for a well-rounded link strategy, as it not only influences a site’s SEO but shapes its overall online reputation.

Prioritise the quality of links over the quantity

This is always a popular topic of debate  in the SEO world. However, while accumulating a large number of links might seem appealing to many, the emphasis must be on the quality and relevance of those links to make any impact on your SEO.

Search engines, especially Google, will always prioritise the quality of the backlinks over the number of backlinks your website has. The reason being, the higher quality the backlink, the more weight they carry in influencing a website’s organic performance. This means you may only need a handful of high quality backlinks to move the needle on your performance. 

It’s more valuable from a time perspective to focus on securing a small number of high quality backlinks than an abundance of easy-to-gain, low-quality links that offer no long-term value. 

These high-quality backlinks must come from reputable and contextually relevant sources to make a meaningful impact on your organic performance. These links signal the trustworthiness which helps when optimising for E-E-A-T (Experience, Expertise, Authoritativeness and Trustworthiness – an algorithm update which you can read more about here).

Setting smart link-building goals

The first fundamental step is to set clear and strategic goals to craft an effective link-building strategy. Defining your link-driven objectives —which could be along the lines of improving search engine rankings, increasing organic traffic, or enhancing online authority—will provide a foundation to keep your efforts aligned. Remember, these objectives should be specific, measurable, and aligned with the broader charity goals.

Link-building goals not only provide a roadmap for the implementation of the strategy, they enable you to evaluate success  and afford you time to adjust and refine  your strategy throughout its timeline 

Researching keywords and competitors to focus your link-building strategy

Researching keywords and competitors is a pivotal phase in developing a robust link-building strategy.

Identifying relevant keywords for a specific niche is essential for understanding the language and topics that resonate with the target audience. This knowledge forms the basis for creating content that not only aligns with user intent but attracts natural and authoritative backlinks. 

Simultaneously, by analysing competitor link profiles you can discern valuable insights and include them within your strategy to maximise success. By understanding where competitors are earning their backlinks, you can uncover potential opportunities and gaps in the market to take full advantage of.

By leveraging advanced tools (such as Ahrefs and SEMRush) and techniques for keyword and competitor research, you will develop   a link-building strategy that is informed and poised for success in the competitive digital landscape. 

Creating high-quality content to attract links

Creating high-quality content is the forefront of any successful link-building strategy. Quality content serves as the magnet that naturally attracts backlinks from authoritative sources. It’s not just about information provided; it’s about crafting engaging, informative, and shareable material that provides real value to your target audience.

Linkable content that is forever valuable, such as answering questions, solving problems, or presenting unique perspectives, is the secret sauce to success here.

In short: Understand  the dynamics of your target audience and cater to their needs through content that becomes a go-to resource within the industry. 

Incorporating visual elements, such as infographics and multimedia, further enhances the content’s appeal, making it more shareable across various platforms. By focusing on creating content that stands out in  quality and relevance, link builders can organically cultivate a diverse and authoritative backlink profile, contributing significantly to the success of the link-building strategy.

Building internal links to spread the value

Now you have written appealing content for your readers that will also attract backlinks naturally, you need to ensure this content is visible on your website. This is where internal linking comes in.

Not only will internally linking to and from this content enhance user experience across the website, it will allow the authority gained from your backlinks to flow through the website, giving other important pages on your domain a boost.

Outreach and relationship building

Outreach and relationship-building are how you generate these powerful backlinks, and they work  best when they are personalised with the human touch.

A one-email-fits-all approach isn’t always the wisest. Crafting personalised emails is a strategic art and one that involves reaching out to potential link partners in a genuine and compelling manner. 

The best approach to building relationships within the industry is to put effort into establishing a long-term relationship, as opposed to a one-time short in the dark . Ideally, you want to ensure you are always engaging with influencers, connecting with other industry professionals in online communities, or networking through social media to build relationships that can lead to valuable backlinks. 

By establishing long-term partnerships, it will not only open the doors for future link opportunities but also go beyond this and contribute to the overall growth and credibility of a website which will benefit all in the long run.

Why you need to track and analyse link-building results

Tracking your link-building performance will allow you to prove success and get buy-in from stakeholders for future projects or even more budget. 

Monitoring the growth of backlink profiles, understanding the sources of incoming links, and assessing the anchor text diversity are essential metrics checks for evaluating the effectiveness of your strategy.

You have the SEO performance to consider here also. A successful link strategy means increasing several metrics, including  organic traffic,search rankings, and the overall authority score of your domain. 

Analysing performance on a regular basis allows time to refine and optimise strategies to ensure improvement is continuous and moving in the desired direction. 

There is no use continuing with a link strategy that is clearly not working for your particular industry. What works for one will not necessarily work for another so it’s best to try a range of tactics, monitor performance, and then tweak where needed to ensure you are reaching your initial link-building objectives.

Link-building can be hard, so no need to get disheartened over one tactic. Simply try another until you find what works for your website in your industry. 

What does the future of link building look like?

The landscape of link building is constantly evolving, and understanding future trends is crucial for staying ahead of the game in SEO.

One emerging trend that is repeated to us with all the latest Google core algorithm updates, is the increasing importance of user experience as a ranking factor, emphasising the need for links from websites that enhance overall user satisfaction. 

As search engines continue to become more sophisticated, there is a growing emphasis on context and relevance, making niche-specific and contextually relevant links more valuable than ever. 

The rise of AI is also expected to influence how search engines interpret content, which will more than likely impact the way links are evaluated. 

However, we think the integration of multimedia elements like video and interactive content is likely to play a more significant role in link-building strategies as we move into 2024. 

It’s crucial to keep an eye on these ever-emerging trends and proactively adapt your approach to link building to align with the evolving SEO landscape.

Key takeaways

In summary, there are 8 questions you need to ask yourself when crafting the perfect link-building strategy for your charity.

1. What is the end goal you want to achieve?
2. How do links play a part in this?
3. Who are you competing against in your industry?
4. What are they doing to stand out?
5. What do you need to create that will naturally attract links?
6. How will this be integrated with your wider website?
7. How are you going to build mutually beneficial, long-term partnerships?
8. How are you going to track performance to show those all-important results?

By developing a plan based on these questions, you will have a solid foundation by which to execute a successful link strategy. Remember: link building is all about testing what works and iterating with different tactics until you achieve the desired outcome.

Contact us if you are keen to grow your organic presence in your industry. Our SEO experts will help you develop a link strategy that will increase your website’s authority and trustworthiness.

The digital landscape is constantly evolving, and trying to keep up with the most recent trends can cause brands to derail from their path. Understanding audiences and keeping the focus on solving their problems is one of the most effective strategies for staying true to your mission and strategy. In a world where users and their search behaviour changes so rapidly, the question is, how is that even possible?

While creating static marketing personas has long been a staple, it’s time to take a step further and embrace personas that reflect changing user behaviours. In this article, we’ll explore how dynamic marketing personas can revolutionise the marketing strategy of charities and keep them ahead in their competitive landscape.

The Limitations of Marketing Personas

Traditional marketing personas are like snapshots frozen in time, offering a static view of your audience. They provide valuable insights initially but fail to keep up with the ever-changing dynamics of search. Relying solely on static personas can lead to missed opportunities and stagnant growth, as user preferences shift and trends evolve.

Understanding Dynamic Marketing Personas

Dynamic personas, in comparison to traditional marketing personas, have the same function but are fluid and responsive. We observe and constantly analyse the shifts in user behaviours online and continuously adapt based on real-time data and user interactions.

Harnessing the power of data analysis and the audience insight from marketing teams, you can identify dynamic marketing personas that evolve, and whose behaviour patterns you can track. Close monitoring ensures that your marketing efforts are always finely tuned to user needs and keep resonating with them.

The Benefits of Dynamic User Personas

Dynamic user personas provide a clear understanding of the target audience, allowing companies to tailor their marketing efforts precisely to the preferences and needs of potential customers – and to keep them up to date. Here are the benefits of creating dynamic user personas for brands:

• Lead to Informed Decisions: Adapting to the queries of ever-changing audiences encourages marketers to look for data patterns and helps them make more informed, data-driven decisions.
• Encourage Real-Time Insights: Dynamic personas are built on the most recent datasets, allowing brands to capture the latest trends and user preferences. This enables them to stay agile and respond quickly to changes in the trends.
• Help Craft Personalised Messaging: With dynamic personas, charities can deliver highly personalised content and experiences to individual users. Once the personas are identified, AB tests can be performed to see which messages resonate more with different audiences, allowing the message to be  refined over time. Personalising messaging in line with evolving personas  enhances both engagement and conversion rates.
• Improve ROI: By targeting audiences more precisely, brands can optimise their marketing budget and achieve a higher return on investment. Understanding dynamic personas helps brands allocate resources where they will have the most impact.
• Help Gain Flexibility and Adaptability: As user behaviour shifts, dynamic personas adapt accordingly. This flexibility ensures that your brand stands out from the competition and your marketing strategy remains relevant and effective.

Integrate Personas to Marketing Strategy

To create dynamic personas, start by collecting and analysing real-time data from various touchpoints, including website analytics, social media interactions, and customer feedback. Utilise AI and machine learning algorithms to identify patterns and segment your audience dynamically.

We work with charities to identify their dynamic marketing personas and create content that resonates with each segment, all while keeping  up with the changing trends in their search behaviours.

Steal Our Strategy to Create Your Dynamic Personas

We take various data points into account and merge the findings with our existing knowledge of the user profiles. Our strategy consists of 4 steps:

Step 1:

Get the basic marketing personas from the brand and note all essential traits and interests down. Next, dive into GA4 to identify personas that may stand out.

1. 1. This can be as simple as creating custom audience segments, or
   2. Targeting users based on interest and then retargeting them to track  the actions taken by users.

Step 2:

Identify the use cases and  patterns associated with each action.

1. 1. Hotjar can also be a good option here to track the user behaviour across pages
   2. Look at how different actions are preferred by each sub-segment created 

Step 3:

Identify a select group of individuals within each audience segment, using relevant social media channels that fit the profile – e.g. a ‘representer’. Keep an eye on what they’re talking about and engaging in – and build out your SEO plans accordingly to cover any content gaps.

Step 4:

Check in on your site demographics quarterly. Make sure that your groups are still similar sizes and  are still performing the same actions. If not – react accordingly.

 

via GIPHY

Case Study: The Power of Understanding Audience Interests

Pedalo are a London-based web development agency specialising in WordPress and Drupal site development and management. They needed to better understand their audience’s pain points and needs, as well as demonstrate their expertise and authority through informational content and cater to their audience’s searches.

We helped them identify their marketing personas and what they are likely to search for. This helped us craft a more tailored messaging for Pedalo and create content to reach their audiences more effectively.

Pedalo earned new Page 1 rankings, including the featured snippet for ‘How to increase page speed in WordPress’ in June 2021 (it was in position 32 in June 2020).

We credited the success of this page to our understanding of what level of technicality would resonate with Pedalo’s audience and by catering to it accordingly. The announcement of Google’s Page Experience Update meant Pedalo’s new content was a trending topic, accruing additional traffic. 

By understanding and accommodating their target audience, Pedalo increased engagement, achieved higher conversion rates, and sustained growth. Read Pedalo’s marketing persona and content marketing case.

Create Dynamic Marketing Personas for Your Charity

In the ever-evolving world of digital marketing, static personas are no longer enough. Embracing dynamic personas is the key to staying competitive, relevant, and responsive to your audience’s evolving needs.

By continuously adapting to real-time data, our SEO services for charities can help you create highly personalised, engaging, and effective marketing campaigns for your dynamic marketing personas. Reach out and let’s create a tailored strategy for your brand together.

The Greatest Charity Digital Benchmark

We’ve got some exciting news to share. Uprise Up have created a subsidiary, Digital Benchmark Limited, to use as a focussed vehicle to manage and grow the Charity Digital Benchmark, as we take on the mantle from CharityComms. Some of our clients and friends are members of the Digital benchmark already.

For anyone not aware though, the CharityComms Digital Benchmark has been established since 2013, when CharityComms got together with a number of other charities and charity digital consultant Bertie Bosredom to share their Google Analytics data in a common dashboard.

 

What is the Charity Digital Benchmark?

The basic premise of the benchmark is that by sharing their data with each other in a closed group dashboard, all members will be able to learn from each other, spot opportunities and understand charity sector digital media trends.

Since I first heard about it, I loved the idea. Uprise Up got involved in 2017, when we advised that Data Studio would be the most effective means by which to create a dashboard. Shortly afterwards we were volunteering on the CharityComms Digital benchmark to develop the dashboard, and later, a database to process the data. Since then it’s been a passion project for us, and amazing to have been involved. In 2021 we won the Drum Award ‘Best use of Data’ beating John Lewis, ITV and the NFL!

The new organisational structure

Digital Benchmark Limited’ is now going to manage the CharityComms Digital Benchmark, (now named ‘Charity Digital Benchmark’).

Digital Benchmark Limited is owned by Uprise Up and I am now the MD of both. We created Digital Benchmark Limited as a separate entity that can focus on developing and improving the Charity Digital Benchmark. Also, as a separate legal entity, we can share its financial accounts with CharityComms.

We are still working in close partnership with CharityComms, who will be on our new Advisory Board, and have access to our quarterly financial accounts. Also on the Advisory Board will be Bertie Bosrédon, who has been working on the Digital Benchmark since its inception.

 

Developing the Charity Digital Benchmark

We believe that the cooperative sharing of data in the charity sector will supercharge the rate at which we maximise on the potential of digital media. This will help member charities realise their vision – and it will drive the positive impact of digital campaigns across the sector.

This benchmark database is going to be a significant component to the digital strategy toolkit of all UK charities; and by extension, it will be instrumental in supporting the development of best practice in the industry.

Currently there are four areas of opportunity where we are looking to enhance the Charity Digital Benchmark:

Making a GA4 Analytics compliant version. UA Analytics stops altogether at the end of June, so this is an absolute must. We’re all systems go on developing the new dashboard. Our team are working hard to have it functioning in April.

Improving the existing dashboard.

Because the new dashboard will be using Google Big Query, we expect it to be faster as well as have a greater range of data.

Over time we’d like to increase the metrics we report on, including adding common conversion metrics, such as membership sign-ups, online donations, or volunteer recruitment. We’ll also be able to separate Google Ad grants from Paid search, pull more audience demographic data, nullify the impact of various cookie policies on the data and improve the separation of paid and organic social media.

There will be improved data visualisation and design. We’ve a member of the team focussed on developing this.

Growing the membership. The more members we have, the more robust the sample size. Also, increased membership will help us to better cut the data in various ways, just as by type of charity, size or location.

Deliver greater value to the membership. This includes training and supporting members using the Benchmark, arranging peer to peer meetings, (such as roundtables to discuss sector trends), and sharing more commentary and insight on the benchmark data..

To ensure the benchmark data is accurate, we’ll also be providing a free Google Analytics review and monitoring service for all members, which will act as your third-part check for any data inaccuracies.

 

Join the Advisory Board as a charity member representative

If you’re as excited about the potential of this project as us and can spare a few hours each year, we would love your support to help develop the benchmark further. We’re looking for two charity member representatives to join the Advisory Board. The Board will meet every quarter (online) and discuss improvements to the benchmark, the annual survey and the annual conference.

Members of the Advisory Board will have additional influence over shaping the benchmark for the future. They would also have first sight of modifications, annual survey data, and be able to raise the profile of their charity within the group. Please let me know if you might be interested in joining and I’ll send more details.

 

Timeline for Charity Digital Benchmark development

 

Below, we have highlighted key milestones and deliverables we’re looking to achieve over the next few months. As of now, Digital Benchmark Limited are actively managing the current (UA Analytics) benchmark. If you need anything or can see any issues, please let me know.

March

New website. Launches by the end of March. This will be a library for blogs and insights and will be an important tool as we increase membership.

 

April

New GA4 Benchmark operational. We expect this to be ready in April (we’re currently aiming for early April).

New member agreements. New agreements need to be with Digital Benchmark Limited. We’ll also be moving to a monthly subscription model to provide you greater flexibility as members. Continuing members of the current benchmark will be on a £35 rate for at least a year. Our rate for new members will increase in 2024, but the lower rate for current members will be locked-in until at least 2025.

 

May

New Community Manager. Once things are up and running, we will recruit a Community Manager to be your first point of contact. They will keep everything organised, including project management of the continuous developments to the benchmark and onboarding new members. We’ll likely start recruiting for this post in May.

Annual survey. We’d love to reinstate this as it will help us to deliver increasingly better insights and service to our members. We’re aiming for the survey to go out in May.

 

June

Annual online members meeting. We would like to reinstate this meeting too. Our current plans are to host the first one in June.

Updates to the UA dashboard will stop at the end of June. This is because UA Analytics will stop processing data at the end of June as Google moves to GA4. Existing data (up to the end of June) will still be available until 2024, and we are exploring ways to keep the old data on our record. If you would like guidance on how to keep your UA analytics data available after Google deletes it next year, please let us know.

 

Digital Benchmark Feedback

If anyone has any feedback on the digital benchmark, we’d love to hear from you. This is very much a collaborative effort, initially created by its membership. It can be of tremendous value to charities, and I’d love to hear your thoughts.

 

Help drive change for the charity sector

If you’re not in it already, we’d love for you to join the Digital Benchmark. There has never been a better time. We are keeping the benchmark free until at least August, so the GA4 benchmark has a chance to demonstrate its value before charging.

All members of the benchmark at that time will have their rate fixed at £59, until at least 2025. In 2024 we expect the monthly rate to increase to £90 for new members. If you sign up now, we’ll be able to add you to the UA Analytics benchmark, as well as the GA4 benchmark which should be live before May.

With a lot of developments coming up across the next few months, sign up now to gain access to the greatest resource of charity data and insights! You can email us at hello@digitalbenchmark.co.uk to discuss becoming a member.