Beginning last week, many publishers began receiving emails from Google – or banners atop their Google Analytics – announcing that support for the old version, Universal Analytics (UA), will end July 1, 2023.

TL;DR WARNING: Before you do anything … don’t.

WARNING WITH ADDITIONAL WORDS: If you are a publisher and switch to GA4 now, it will break your Dashboard analytics, and with it the ability to see your Mediavine RPM.

We know, Google says to switch. But we have over a year until July 1, 2023, and more significantly, there are some issues to be ironed out with GA4.

Despite many cool promises Google has made regarding GA4, which we’ll get to shortly, it’s not quite there yet, nor is support for GA4 on all platforms, including Mediavine.

So before you wreck your RPM calculations and likely other third-party tools, let’s dive into Google Analytics 4, when you should migrate and what our plan is.

What is Google Analytics 4 (GA4)?

Google Analytics 4 is designed as a cross-platform service for mobile web sites and mobile apps, geared toward large publishers that run both.

According to Google, it’s more privacy-centric than previous versions of Analytics and powered by machine learning to uncover more insights.

While that sounds great, what does it mean for the average publisher with Mediavine?

Honestly, with the exception of a handful of our biggest publishers, very few have their own apps and therefore will miss out on most of the biggest GA4 cross-platform upgrades.

The biggest benefit to GA4 is that it’s the future. It’s where new Google Analytics will be added in the years to come, and we will definitely recommend switching for this reason.

Eventually.

Once Mediavine and others commit to this transition and make it seamless and effective for publishers, it will be worthwhile. Today is not that day, and honestly, Google knows this.

Google made this announcement and established July 1, 2023 as a target date for tools like the Mediavine Dashboard to prepare — and we will.

In the meantime, however, all is well with UA.

When Will Mediavine Support GA4?

With this date in mind, Mediavine can prioritize when to launch GA4 support, and we promise to alert you as soon as we do, giving you plenty of time to migrate.

For now, please know we’re well aware of this date.

Just click dismiss on that banner in your GA, archive that email, and rest assured that we’ll alert all of our publishers once we have GA4 support.

As for today? There’s nothing for you to do. Other than creating beautiful, optimized long-form content and being the best community of publishers imaginable.

I Don’t Want to Wait – What Can I Do Now to Prepare?

GA4’s interface is quite a departure from the UA version of the analytics admin.

If you want to get a head start on familiarizing yourself with the new reports and functionality, Google encourages you to create a separate property in your Google Analytics account specifically for GA4.

Using a separate property allows you to run both UA and GA4 side by side.

Your UA property will still be the one that Mediavine uses for your ads stats and Grow tracking events, but you’ll be able to learn GA4 at your own pace, well before you’re forced to switch.

Our Support team has created step-by-step instructions on how to set-up a new GA4 property without interfering with your UA property.

The post Google Analytics 4 is Coming, But *Please* Do Nothing For Now appeared first on Mediavine.

Today we’re welcoming the wonderful Sherry Smothermon-Short of Cub Scout Ideas and Painless Blog Analytics to the Mediavine blog. Sherry’s years of experience have taught her how to use data to grow and improve her blog. She loves sharing what she’s learned with other bloggers by providing information, resources, training and services. Here she’s sharing her expertise in Google Search Console to help you increase traffic to older content.

Sherry was an incredible guest during Summer of Live 2020, where she talked about Rocking Google Analytics, so we knew we had to have her back on the blog.

Hi Sherry!

One of my favorite ways to increase traffic to old posts is by working to improve the click through rate (CTR).

What exactly is a click through rate? Google Search Console defines it as the percentage of impressions that result in a click.

Does a good CTR move you up in rankings? There is a lot of debate in the SEO world about whether or not CTR impacts your ranking.

Personally, I don’t think it does. Barry Schwartz from Search Engine Roundtable published this article debunking the myth.

BUT… CTR absolutely impacts your traffic, and here’s an example.

Let’s say that one of my posts is getting 15,000 impressions a month, and my click through rate is 1%.

15,000 x .01 = 150

That means I’m getting 150 pageviews a month to that post.

I work on the post to improve my CTR, and it increases to 3%.

15,000 x .03 = 450

I have tripled my traffic to that post. How many of you would love to have your traffic tripled in a month?

To improve our CTR, we need to focus on improving our titles and meta descriptions.

But before you jump in and start on these, you need to strategically choose the posts that you should be working on.

How to choose which posts to update

None of us have unlimited amounts of time to work on our blogs, so we need to be smart about the posts we choose to update. We want to invest our time on tasks that give us the best ROI.

There are several factors that we need to consider before deciding to work on a post. Three of these are potential, search intent and competition.

Potential

We want to look for posts that have a high number of impressions, a decent position, but a low CTR.

What is considered a high number of impressions really depends on your site. A post with an average position (the same as or better than your site average) is a good choice.

Any one of these four posts would be good candidates for updating. They have a decent number of impressions for my site and niche, the average position for all of them is better than my site-wide average and the CTRs are all horrible compared to my site average.

But we don’t need to jump in immediately and start updating these because we have a little more analysis to do first.

Search Intent

What exactly is a person looking for when they search for a particular term? If I search for “pizza,” what am I looking for? The closest pizza restaurant? A pizza recipe? The different types of pizza?

If our post doesn’t match the intent of the keyword phrases we’re ranking for, it may not make sense to try to improve CTR. Instead, think about whether you can update the post to match the intent.

Let me give you an example:

One of my clients has a blog post about creating a dry creek bed to help with the drainage in her yard.

Her Google Search Console results for that post seem to indicate that this would be a good candidate for updating. She has lots of impressions, a decent page position and a low click through rate.

So, let’s see what queries she’s ranking for.

Based on these numbers, we should try to improve her CTR for the keyword phrase “dry creek bed vs French drain.”

We could stop our analysis here and start working on the post, but our ROI probably wouldn’t be the best.

Here are the results we get when we search for the term “dry creek bed vs French drain.”

Based on these results, it seems that someone searching for this term is looking for a comparison between the two. They’re probably trying to decide whether to put a French drain or a dry creek bed in their yard.

My client’s post is about how she created a dry creek bed, so it would be a better post for someone who has already decided that’s what they want —not for someone who is researching the differences.

You may ask why she’s ranking for this term, and it’s because she mentions a French drain once in the post.

This particular post doesn’t meet the searcher’s intent for this term, so this is not a post she can update for a comparison.

Trying to improve the CTR for this post isn’t likely to yield results.

Competition

Another client wrote a post about making a diy bathtub tray.

The post looks like a good candidate. It has good impressions with a low CTR, so let’s see what queries it’s ranking for.

Looks like there is a lot of opportunity for the keyword phrase “bathtub tray.”

Head over to Google and search for “bathtub tray.” You may want to open an incognito window so that your results aren’t skewed by your own search history.

Unfortunately, the search results tell us this may not be a good post to optimize.

First, it’s not likely that our blog post will outrank Amazon or House Beautiful. It’s not impossible, but it is definitely not low hanging fruit.

Second, Google thinks that if you’re searching for the term “bathtub tray,” it’s because you want to buy one, not build one.

If you notice, the next two queries are “diy bathtub tray” and “bathtub tray diy.” Together, they have about 7,200 impressions, so you may decide to work on improving your CTR for these terms.

I would make note of this information and continue your analysis to see if there are other posts with higher potential.

After you’ve identified the posts to work on, it’s time to start updating.

What to update to improve CTR

We’re going to talk about two of the post attributes that impact CTR — titles and meta descriptions. Both of these can help your post stand out on the search results page.

Titles

Titles on the search results pages are usually in blue font that’s a bit larger than the other elements.

Some of the changes you can make to titles are:

1. Use a list, how-to or question title
2. Include numbers
3. Use dates if it makes sense
4. Use the proper length
5. Include keywords the post is ranking for

Use a list, how-to or question headline rather than a generic one.

These types of headlines are more likely to match the searcher’s intent.

Here are some examples:

Numbers can make your title stand out in search results.

Numbers attract our attention, so we’re more likely to click on them. I personally think there’s an “I’m getting more for my money” rationale behind it too.

If I see “9 Socially Distanced Service Projects for Cub Scouts,” I think I’m getting more information than if the title was simply Socially Distanced Service Projects for Cub Scouts.

Examples include:

• 10 Reasons Why You Should Switch to the Gutenberg Editor
• 4 Ways to Hang Holiday Wreaths on your Windows
• 7 Easy Steps to Making the Best Chocolate Cake

Include dates if it makes sense.

Did you know there’s an option to automate the year in your title? But just because you can do it doesn’t mean you should.

If it’s content that you’re going to tweak each year, change the date when you tweak it. The last thing you want is outdated 2021 information on a post that says it’s for 2025.

Date ideas include:

• Spring Fashion Trends for 2021
• 2021 WordPress Updates
• What You Need to Fill Out the 2021 FASFA (for those of you who don’t have high school or college-aged kids, this is the Free Application for Federal Student Aid which many schools require even for scholarships)

Length

You don’t want your title to be too long or too short.

What is the right length for your title? It depends. Right now Google is showing a maximum of 600 pixels (not characters). As we all know, Google likes to change things, so when you’re reading this, the maximum may be different.

Because Google is using a fixed width of 600 pixels, titles with more narrow letters can include more characters.

Here’s an example:

iiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiii

wwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwww

Both of these lines have 20 characters, but the length is very different because W is a wider letter and takes up more pixels than I.

If you use the Yoast SEO plugin, you can see how your title will look in the search results. Moz also has a title tag preview tool.

There may be times when you may intentionally make your title too long to build up some intrigue. People might click over just to find out what the missing part is.

Keywords

Are you ranking for keywords that aren’t in your title? Could you add them?

One of my posts is How To Make Super Cool (And Easy) Cub Scout Robots, and it was doing well on Pinterest but not on search.

Last October, I realized that it was ranking for the terms “toothbrush robot” and “toothbrush robots” (the plural version), but the search results were showing the title “How to Make Super Cool (And Easy) Cub Scout Robots.” If you aren’t a Cub Scouting family, you would assume that this is something specific to the Cub Scout program and would probably skip right over the results.

This chart shows my results from July through October.

I updated the post in October.

One of the changes I made was to change my SEO title to “How to Make Super Cool (and Easy) Toothbrush Robots.” If you’re on my site, the title still says Cub Scout Robots but it shows up as toothbrush robots in search results.

Here are my results for the three months after the post was updated:

You can see how much better my average position and CTR are for those terms.

One caveat was that I changed several things during the update, so I can’t say that the improvement came just because of adding the keyword to the SEO title.

Meta Descriptions

Way back in ancient times (2009!), Google told us they don’t use meta descriptions as a ranking factor and they may not show your exact meta description in search results, but that doesn’t mean they aren’t important.

Think about your meta description as an invitation to visit your post. When I’m scanning through search results pages, I want to see WHY I should visit your post rather than any of the other ones.

Here are a few things to keep in mind when writing your meta descriptions.

1. Keep it to 155 characters

2. Have a call to action

3. Include your keyword

4. Explain the benefits

Keep it to 155 characters

Generally, Google will truncate your meta description at about 155 characters or so. If it’s longer than this, an ellipsis will be added at the end.

Now, if you want to create a little mystery, write a longer description. You can see an example of this in the second image below where we’re told, “…just imagine this,…” What should I imagine? Inquiring minds want to know, so I’ll have to click over to figure it out!

Have a call to action

A good meta description tells the searcher exactly what they should do. Check out some of these great calls to action from the examples below.

“Read on for how to get them right.”

“Follow these guidelines for success.”

Include your keyword

Make sure you include your keyword in your meta description. Google will bold the words that match the search terms. This draws the attention of the person searching because when they see their phrase bolded, they’re likely to click on over.

Explain the benefits

Basically, you’re selling your post to the searcher. And the best way to sell anything is to explain how the product (or post in this case) will help the buyer (or searcher). Take a look at the examples from the “how to improve bowling skills” search results.

One of them tells us that by practicing the techniques they’re going to share with us, we’ll hone our skills to improve our game. Another one tells us the bowling improvement tips they’re sharing will help us be more confident about our skills.

Other types of updates

While you may be focused on these particular ways to improve your click through rate, don’t overlook other updates you can make. Does your post need a recipe card? More images? More text? Updated information? You can add these while you’re working on the post.

Look for interlinking opportunities. If you’re like me, you’re pretty good at linking from a new post to some old ones but you may forget to link to the new post from old ones.

Promote your post again. Share it to your social media platforms and also include it in your newsletter.

What to do next

After you’ve updated your old post, add a note to your calendar for about a month or six weeks out to remind yourself to check your results to see if your hard work has paid off.

The post How Content Creators Can Use Search Console to Increase Traffic to Old Posts appeared first on Mediavine.

Whether you’re here, there or somewhere in between, Sherry Smothermon-Short of Cub Scout Ideas and Painless Blog Analytics is here to help. She stopped by the Summer of Live with Mediavine’s Director of Marketing Jenny Guy to help you unlock this wealth of information. Plus learn how GA + the new Mediavine Dashboard = BIG EARNINGS.

Find content ideas, optimize for income, identify your replicable successes and avoid the 7 potential data pitfalls. (Originally aired 7/2/20)

The post Summer of Live: Rocking Google Analytics with Sherry Smothermon-Short appeared first on Mediavine.

A veritable onslaught of negative news, and so much uncertainty and trepidation regarding the path forward, invariably leads to panic.

But please don’t.

(more…)

The post Recession-Proof Your Blog: Don’t Give Up. Double Down. appeared first on Mediavine.

Are you struggling to understand sessions, user and pageview metrics in Google Analytics 4?

Don’t worry, you’re not alone. Google Analytics 4 (GA4) is the new way to measure your website traffic. It’s more powerful and flexible than Universal Analytics, and designed to help you understand your users better.

But before you can do that, you need to understand the differences between these two platforms and the terminology they use.

We’re here to help you do just that.

The post How to Find Sessions in Google Analytics 4 appeared first on Mediavine.

My role is to analyze new opportunities, and offer performance suggestions and troubleshooting guidance to our product, revenue and publisher support teams. So when I was approached to write something for our publishers, I shockingly decided to talk about performance and analyzing it.

What is Performance?

What do you consider performance? Is it how you’re tracking compared to a goal you set? How you’re performing compared to another website? Week over week? Year over year?

There are so many different ways to monitor and analyze performance. Some can be complicated, others pretty straightforward.

Here’s a simple step-by-step process, and some tips to help analyze your performance for the more complicated questions.

Step 1: What is Your Ultimate Goal?

Do you want to increase revenue? Do you want to hit 1 million sessions? Do you want to increase your traffic from social media? Focus your analysis on what will help you achieve your goal.

Most likely, there will be more than one step to take, and more than one action needed to reach your ultimate goal. This is very typical. Just keep your goal in mind as you monitor results.

Helpful Tip:

Don’t make the ultimate goal unreachable. It’s also easier if you build a number into your goal, e.g. “Increase revenue 10%” vs. “Make more money.”

For the sake of this blog post, we’re setting an ultimate goal for you to follow along with:

Reach 1 million sessions per month.

Growing site traffic is a great goal. (Go you!) We have a number of resources to guide you on the road to achieving your goals.

In this scenario, let’s say we worked on increasing pagespeed and it went up 20%! (Here’s a post on how to increase pagespeed.)

We’ll use this example throughout the steps to help guide you through your own analysis. Now we’ll look at how increasing pagespeed helped us attain our ultimate goal of 1 million sessions per month.

NOTE: You can follow these steps for any goal, so use our example as a jumping off point as you follow the rest of the steps.

Step 2: What Question Do You Want to Answer?

Next, determine the question you want an answer to.

It could be really simple, such as “How many sessions did I have yesterday?” It could be more complex, such as “Has changing pagespeed impacted my session growth?”

Figure out the question before looking at the numbers. This may sound backwards, especially if you only have a specific data set, but there are times that seeing the data could influence your question.

Helpful Tip:

Be specific. Asking something like “Did my revenue go up?” is generic and may not lead to results that can help guide you.

Our Example Question:

“How much have my sessions grown since my pagespeed went up 20%?”

Step 3: Do I Have the Data I Need?

The next step is figuring out if you have the data you need. In certain cases, you might not. If that’s true, there are still ways to infer answers (we’ll go over some of these later).

Helpful Tip:

Focusing on 2-3 things helps you zero in on the question. Too much data can create noise and not provide actionable insights.

Our Example Data:

• Date pagespeed changed (10/1/2019)
• Pagespeed before 10/1/2019
• Pagespeed after 10/1/2019
• Sessions by Day

Step 4: What Do I Want to Compare?

If you’re looking at performance, you probably want to compare it with something, most likely a date range.

Keep in mind that multiple factors might impact the comparison. For example, Sunday performance differs from Monday, January performs differently than June, Google Search traffic performs better than Pinterest, and so on.

Helpful Tip:

Focus on one or two comparisons. Also make sure you give the data time to adjust to any changes you have made.

Our Example Metrics:

• 7 Day period before change (9/22/2019-9/28/2019)
• 7 Day period after change, plus a few weeks (10/13/2019-10/19/2019)

Step 5: What Metrics Will Help Answer My Question?

We could throw out many three-letter acronyms, but which ones mean something to you? If your question is “Has changing pagespeed impacted my session growth?” then looking at CPM won’t help you.

Again, there are a lot of metrics. Always focus on the question you want to answer. Obvious as it sounds, it’s easy to spiral down into a rabbit hole without that focus.

Useful metrics can be RPM, CPM, Sessions, Revenue, Pageviews and/or Impressions. You can also break each of these down by Geo, Device Category, Day of Week, Traffic Source, etc.

Helpful Tip:

Make sure the metrics link exactly to your question. CPMs may be affected by session growth, but session growth won’t be impacted by CPMs.

Our Example Metrics:

Date, Sessions

Step 6: How to I Analyze the Data?

There are many different ways to analyze data. One that is usually very effective is % change. For example, if your RPM changes from $25 to $30, the change would be 20% growth.

To calculate % change, take the number you want to compare ($30 in the above example), subtract the number you’re comparing to ($25), and divide the answer ($5) by the number you’re comparing to ($25):

($30-25) / ($25) = .2 = 20%

Helpful Tip:

Perhaps you had an article go viral and this could account for your session growth. Always look to see if there are outlying factors that could have influenced results.

Also, keep track of any changes you might have made, such as adding or removing a plugin, changing ad settings, etc. Any of these might skew the data.

Our Example:

• Sessions between 9/22 – 9/28: 105,000
• Sessions between 10/13 – 10/19 – 125,000

(125,000 – 105,000) / (105,000) = .19 = 19% session growth

Advanced Tips

Try to piece out if data is correlated.

Just because a bird flies by your window doesn’t mean your hair is turning gray (that might just be my hair … I blame my kids). Two things that have no relationship can occur simultaneously.

Keep a spreadsheet of any changes you make with plugins, layouts, styles, SEO, etc. with dates. This gives you historical reference points that you may not remember a month from now.

Inferring Data

There are times when you don’t have all the data in front of you. For example, if you’ve increased your Google traffic due to SEO improvements, you might also see an increase in RPM using the above tools.

Even if you don’t have Google session RPM broken out, you can use the data in this article to help infer that RPM has increased because Google sessions increased, illustrating the value of improving SEO.

Here are some basic data points to keep in mind when looking through data:

Referral Source Value

Most publishers know that not all traffic is created equal.

You may be surprised at just how much more some referral sources are worth to your site than others, though. Keep that in mind when you look to increase your users.

Below is a graph showing the value of sources compared to one another.

For example, Google traffic is worth 10.1% more than average. If you grow Google traffic, your RPM would be impacted positively, especially compared to increasing your traffic from Instagram.

Geography Value

Country of origin is one of the most important factors that determines the value of a user, as ads perform far better in the U.S. than anywhere else. Here are our top countries and their values compared to each other.

Device Value

Not unlike geography, device values also lead to a wide variance. Here are value breakouts by device compared to each other:

Try it Yourself

We put together a simple spreadsheet to help you try these new tools yourself:

https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1ApFwrakOcJCyjJT1zTu8gScBsmEIH0X305unMMuGTXg/edit#gid=0

Using your dashboard data, pull in data from last Monday (New) and compare it to data from the Sunday (Original) before. See if you can figure out which of those two days performs better for your site.

You can use this information to help inform you on when to post updates on social media, add blog posts, etc., to maximize revenue.

Good luck! As always, feel free to leave a comment or email publishers@mediavine.com with any questions you have along the way.

The post What is Performance: How to Measure, How to Compare appeared first on Mediavine.

The answer is … it depends. 

Mediavine has one of the most comprehensive application processes in the industry, which is how we guarantee high-quality sites and the best ad inventory. Our CEO, Eric Hochberger, has written extensively about the key Mediavine requirements and why they matter.

Here’s a quick recap of what Mediavine looks for in an application:

• How many sessions the website has
• Where its traffic comes from (Google, social, newsletters, direct, etc)
• Where traffic is originating from geographically
• The most popular posts/landing pages
• How long users view those posts
• The format of the posts
• The website layout
• Whether or not the traffic is consistent (or the result of a recent spike)
• The overall look and quality of the site
• What language the site is written in
• The site’s target audience (is it targeting minors, etc.)
• Whether the content is brand-friendly

Once we review the site, we send it off to our ad partners to be reviewed as well. Sometimes, even if all the pieces are in place on the site itself, one or more of our partners will say no for a variety of reasons.

If these ad partners are large buyers of inventory, and an applicant’s earning potential would be significantly limited without those partners on board, we often have to turn the website down. 

All of this can take an unpredictable and significant amount of time. 

We don’t have a waiting list, and we never have. However, we’ve been very fortunate to see our volume of applications grow steadily for years as our happy clients tell their fellow publishers about us.

On behalf of all of us at Mediavine, thank you! Your recommendations mean the world to us. The only caveat is that between our thorough vetting and the sheer number of applicants, new sites aren’t onboarded instantly.

Each application we receive is reviewed by a minimum of two different people on our team, and any site we’re considering turning down is examined by no fewer than three people internally. 

We take every Mediavine application seriously to ensure the highest quality of our platform as a whole. For this reason, don’t be alarmed if 14-21 business days pass from the time you submit your application until a final decision is made.

Sometimes, everything runs smoothly and it may not take as long. Other times, if application volumes are extremely high or we need to dive deeper into a particular application, it can take up to 28 days.

This isn’t because we like to keep people waiting. We simply don’t cut corners or blindly accept websites that might negatively impact the earning potential of our 5,650 publishers and counting.

Tips to make our application process as fast as possible

Whitelist our domains in your email client

Add “publishers@mediavine.com” and “mediavine-2d8c00c7ee73.intercom-mail.com” to your contacts and/or whitelist those domains in your email client. This will ensure our communications don’t accidentally end up in your SPAM folder.

Fill out the application completely and accurately

If we are missing details, or there is inaccurate information provided, it slows down the process.

Be patient (please and thank you)

As we described earlier, it is normal for it to take 2-3 weeks for a site to make it through our entire review process. We appreciate your eagerness to come on board, but if it hasn’t been longer than 21 days, sending multiple follow-up emails only adds to our support team’s backlog. We’re on top of it, and if we have questions about your application or need clarification on anything at all, we will let you know!

Apply with one domain at a time

If you are hoping to bring multiple sites on board, we suggest you start with one, then submit the others individually. Each site is vetted individually, and each site goes through its own set of launch procedures, so we recommend not applying with more than 1-2 at a time.

If you are planning on rebranding, don’t

So much of the application process is dependent on the domain you are applying with. Don’t change yours. For real, please don’t rebrand your site, if there’s any chance we can talk you out of it. If we can’t, then we encourage you not to do so in the middle of the launch process. New domains mean new approvals from ad partners and potential delays in re-indexing as well. 

The post How Long Does the Mediavine Application Process Take? appeared first on Mediavine.

The EU’s General Data Protection Regulation is a massive new law that will impact the way business is done online for the majority of digital publishers, whether they’re EU residents or not.

At Mediavine, we’ve been hard at work for months to make sure we’ve got our ducks in a row and that we’re doing everything possible to protect the Mediavine family and enable us all to continue earning strong revenue for our hard work creating digital content.

So, in preparation for GDPR, Mediavine has become a registered Content Management Platform (CMP) with the IAB Europe.

We know this sounds like alphabet soup, but basically, the IAB (International Advertising Bureau) Europe is providing a framework to help all parties in digital advertising ensure that they comply with GDPR when processing personal data.

According to the IAB Europe, “a key piece of the Framework is a unique registry of third-party data controllers, a Global Vendor List, on whose behalf consent may be requested by the first parties that have the direct interface with users.”

And here’s ours, all conveniently collated onto one page.

So that’s what Mediavine has done, but what do I do?

As we all panic scramble to meet the May 25th, 2018 compliance deadline, we wanted to gather our educational resources in one place in the hopes of making one aspect of the process a little easier for publishers.

First, digital ads. All Mediavine publishers can obtain GDPR-compliant consent for their Mediavine digital advertising through our Consent Management Platform, or CMP – available now through the dashboard.

Here’s our help document that goes through the implementation process step-by-step.

Our CMP enables you to gain consent to display personalized Mediavine ads. With the IAB framework, it is also customizable, enabling you to seek additional consents beyond ads. It’s important to note that any uses outside of the consent to display personalized Mediavine ads may require additional development work and you should engage a tech professional to help with that if needed.

Mediavine CEO Eric Hochberger got together on Facebook Live with Jamie Lieberman of Hashtag Legal, a law firm offering legal solutions for small businesses, social media professionals and creatives, to talk about our solution for compliant ads and GDPR in general.

Eric also wrote a blog post on how GDPR will impact the digital advertising industry, with an accompanying video, as part of his weekly Go For Teal series.

For general help, take a look at our GDPR For Publishers guest post. It includes a checklist of steps to take for compliance:

For more general GDPR questions and answers, here’s our first Facebook Live on the subject, again featuring guest Jamie Lieberman.

And finally, one of the biggest data collectors used by the vast majority of website owners is Google Analytics. Here’s our guide to anonymizing your GA for GDPR compliance.

If you’re a member of our Mediavine Facebook Group (for our publishers only), it’s another a great resource. If you’re a Mediavine publisher, but not yet a member of our Facebook group, please email us at publishers@mediavine.com — we’d be happy to get you added! 

There you have it. It’s a lot of material, but GDPR is a lotta law.

It’s seemed overwhelming to all of us at times, but remember, it’s NEW. There are tools coming out daily to assist website owners with compliance, and, as always, Mediavine is here to help you with the ad side of things.

(But if you have your own tropical island, we’re coming to visit…)

The post GDPR Resource Hub appeared first on Mediavine.

Before we break this down for you, make sure you’ve read this helpful GDPR guide for publishers by attorney and guest blogger Jamie Lieberman of Hashtag Legal. We’ve also done two GDPR interviews with Jamie on Facebook Live, here and here, which you can watch on the Mediavine YouTube channel.

Now that we’re all GDPR experts, let’s talk about how it affects Google Analytics …

GDPR is primarily concerned with data collection as it pertains to user privacy, so Google Analytics — likely the place where you’re storing the most data about your users, even if you don’t realize it — is a great place to start on your roadmap to compliance.

There are essentially two options. One is obtaining explicit consent (not very feasible based on how Google Analytics works) and the other is adjusting your data collection settings in Google Analytics. Luckily, Google has released some tools to help you do the latter.

Option #1: Obtaining Explicit Consent

According to the GDPR, a publisher needs to obtain “explicit consent” from users at time of data collection — essentially giving them a clear way to opt in (or out).

That means you cannot send a request to Google Analytics until AFTER your user has consented to giving you this data, and if they don’t consent, you’ll need to make sure you’re not tracking any of their personal information — including details as basic as IP Addresses — going forward.

That means in order to be in compliance, you’d need to first run a consent form before running any Google Analytics tracking code. This method would be ideal, as it would allow you to collect that same level of detail about your users, but it’s definitely the most challenging method.

In reality, we don’t think this option is technically feasible for most publishers, so we’re going to focus on working within Google Analytics to help you stop collecting personal information in the first place, and cleaning up data retention to boot.

Option #2: Ending Personal Information Collection & Setting Data Retention

The other option is simply not to collect anything related to your users personally, including IP addresses, and making sure you periodically clear out any user data you previously stored.

Unfortunately, you won’t have the ability to apply this to EU users alone. Following the steps described here will stop Analytics from collecting personal data across the world.

You’ll lose demographic information (if you were collecting that) and some degree of accuracy in other reports. However, based on the simpler implementation, and in the interest of user privacy and GDPR, our opinion is that this is the preferred option at this time.

Anonymous IP collection

When you’re browsing the web and send out any request, along with it goes your IP Address, given to you by your ISP. By default, Google records this IP Address with Analytics.

IP Addresses are considered personal information by the GDPR because using an IP Address and a time of access is enough, technically, to identify a user from that IP address.

Translation: Obtaining and storing this data requires you to obtain consent first — unless you mask or anonymize the IP Address, which will circumvent this issue.

IP Addresses are of the format 216.239.32.21. Generally, the first three groups of numbers are enough to determine the country of origin for that particular user.

If you drop the last group, or everything after the third dot, you will not be able to track users individually — no further than beyond their country of origin.

The bad news is that this requires a code change. The good news is that Google has made it simple with only one line of code that you need to add to the tracking code on your page:

ga('set', 'anonymizeIp', true);

Before the pageview is tracked:

ga('send', 'pageview');

Even if you’re not a programmer, you should be able to locate the Google Analytics code and insert the anonymizeIp code right before the Google Analytics pageview tracking. That’s it!

Disabling Demographics and Interest Reports

Google Analytics also provides the ability to access to your audience’s demographics — data like gender and age — if you enable the advertising features.

This, too, could be considered personal information — and involves tracking based on cookie collection and remarketing data, so if you have it enabled, we suggest turning it off.

Again, this will require a code change. If you’re using this feature, you’ll need to remove the following line from your tracking code:

ga('require', 'displayfeatures');

Then you’ll want to disable the features in the Google Analytics admin. Find the property, click “Tracking Info” and then “Data Collection.” From there, just make sure both Remarketing and Advertising Reporting Features are disabled. Done!

Data Retention

So far, so good, but you still have existing data — and data about anonymous users — stored at the individual level at Google, which has added new data retention settings going live May 25 to help publishers stay compliant with GDPR.

Luckily, this is an easy one and requires no code change. Simply go to the admin in Google Analytics, find your property, choose “Tracking Info” and select “Data Retention.”

For Mediavine’s own websites, we personally left the default setting in place for “User and event data retention,” which is “26 months.” That means after 26 months, any individual user data will be cleared, while the aggregate data about them remains.

Translation: You’ll still be able to pull your total pageviews, sessions, etc. for that older archived data, but will lose individual-level data on some reports.

We’ve also disabled “Reset on new activity” to make sure if a user returns, the data is still cleared after 26 months. Otherwise, recurring visitor data will never be cleared.

Using WordPress Plugins

If you run WordPress plugins to set up Google Analytics and need to make the Demographic and Anonymous IP Address changes, please consult support forums and help guides from the plugin.

If they don’t provide that support, we would recommend reaching out to the plugin author. These are important changes to user privacy that should not go unaddressed.

If You Run Global Site Tag or gtag.js

You will need to copy the following code and replace your current gtag code with this code, replacing the UA- numbers with your own. This will place the anonymize and display features code into your tracking.

<!-- Global site tag (gtag.js) - Google Analytics -->
<script async src="https://www.googletagmanager.com/gtag/js?id=UA-Your_Number_Here"></script>
<script>
window.dataLayer = window.dataLayer || [];
function gtag(){dataLayer.push(arguments);}
gtag('js', new Date());
gtag('config', 'UA-Your_Number_Here', {'anonymize_ip': true, 'allow_google_signals': false, 'allow_ad_personalization_signals': false });
</script>

For more information please see this post and this post on the google developers website.

Is this Overkill?

Probably. Nevertheless, we’d rather be on the safe side when it comes to GDPR and user privacy.

We don’t believe these changes will have a significant impact on publishers’ ability to get the analytics they need, and they will protect individual users’ privacy.

If striking that balance is the goal, and we believe it is, this solution for Google Analytics and GDPR is more than adequate. Remember, Mediavine will help ensure your advertising GDPR compliance, so there’s only a few more points of data collection you’ll need to address, such as your mailing list, before you’re good to go.

The post Google Analytics and GDPR Compliance: What You Need to Do appeared first on Mediavine.

We spend a lot of time here at Mediavine talking about site speed, why it’s important, and how to achieve it, and that’s because we looooove search traffic, but we also love your readers. Site speed is crucial for user experience, and a big part of building your business is to keep them coming back.

Let’s talk about AMP

Installing Accelerated Mobile Pages (AMP for short!) is one way you can opt to work on your mobile site, but because it’s really still in its early stages, it can have mixed results. For big sites like The Huffington Post or our own The Hollywood Gossip, AMP pages are good for the reader, monetize at a competitive rate, and custom AMP themes lead readers around the site and keep them engaged, making them good for the publisher, too.

My name is Heather, and I’m the Publisher Support Manager here at Mediavine. And here is a cake because cake makes everything better.

I enabled AMP pages on my own site, Sugar Dish Me, in January 2017. We test all kinds of things on my site; it’s a fun way to learn and is pretty useful for my day job here at Mediavine.

But I’m no Huff Post.

No custom theme. No way to capture an email subscriber. No functional recipe card. AMP rendered a super fast page and great user experience, but overall, with a standard AMP implementation, it was really hard for me to keep a reader coming back. Not to mention that for me, AMP traffic monetized at a lower rate.

It’s important to understand WHY AMP traffic monetizes at a lower rate for some sites. AMP prioritizes content over advertisements. When your readers are on a mobile device they scroll crazy fast and try to get to the info they want as quickly as possible. On a food site that info is the recipe card. So when your reader lands on your page and then zoom-scrolls to read the recipe at the end, that causes lower viewability, lower CPM’s, and lower RPM’s.

There’s also not any evidence to date that shows adding AMP pages has any effect on search rankings for food blogs. It’s not a ranking factor. For Google News sites, there’s a carousel of top stories where only AMP articles can appear, but outside of those sites there’s currently no additional boost from Google for running AMP content.

So what does this have to do with Pinterest?!

Let’s get down to the nitty gritty.

Bloggers in any lifestyle niche will tell you that they rely on Pinterest to drive a fair amount of traffic. As a food blogger I can say that Pinterest is the driving force behind about 40% of my readership. 40% is no small potatoes, and for some bloggers it’s much higher than that. So caring what Pinterest thinks is absolutely part of this weird blogging job.

Pinterest recommends enabling Rich Pins to help provide more context for a user because rich pins show extra information directly ON the pin. For sites with recipe content that can mean an ingredient list. For product pins that extra info means real-time pricing. For article pins you get a headline, an author, and a story description. Sounds like all good things, right?

Let’s add to this discussion Amber’s post from a while back on why is site speed driving everyone’s development decisions. She reflected on everything from social traffic (*cough*cough*Pinterest*cough*) to SEO and ads. It seems like with what we know about the importance of speed, and the importance of Rich Pins, we are heading down a pretty righteous blog path!

When I married together Rich Pins and AMP I learned this whole other thing.

My AMP traffic increased all year in 2017. It wasn’t an increase in search traffic, though! I realized that Pinterest was redirecting my readers to my AMP pages.

So if I am a Pinterest user and I pin the mobile version of a post, I expect that pin to render the mobile version of that post when I return. What was actually happening:

Pinterest User pins https://www.sugardishme.com/morning-glory-pancakes/
That pin redirects Pinterest User(s) to https://www.sugardishme.com/morning-glory-pancakes/amp

This was a problem for me because of all the details I laid out earlier. I was unable to capture my Pinterest users to keep them coming back. Those same users were also unable to actually pin from the AMP version of my post. And my AMP traffic was monetizing at a lower rate.

Add in that zoom-scroll thing that people do, ESPECIALLY when they are visiting from Pinterest, and what’s left is a site that’s missing form and function, and it’s not really benefiting anybody.

The Facebook debate

Y’all know bloggers spend half their lives debating the merits of all things in secret Facebook groups. It’s a big part of how we learn and how we foster community.

In November 2017, a food blogger in a group that I am in posted some things about her findings when she decided to TURN OFF Rich Pins. She tested things out, carefully watched her traffic, and then shared her results for further discussion. This prompted an avalanche of other bloggers testing out whether or not Rich Pins help or hinder Pinterest traffic. The results were mixed, the discussion was really interesting, and on vs. off is still a debate that pops up every 6 weeks.

So I thought, “Hey hey, I’ll turn off Rich Pins!”

In the interest of participating in that debate I was excited to see what might happen for me.

I turned off Rich Pins

To see how turning off Rich Pins affected my traffic, I logged in to my Google Analytics, set my date range, and then went to Acquisition > All Traffic > Source/ Medium. Then I clicked on Pinterest/Referral. My dates are offset by one day so that I am comparing Sunday to Sunday (since I always see a spike in traffic on Sundays).

You can see the arrow here notating the date that I disabled Rich Pins, November 13, 2017. There’s no real jump in traffic. My growth year over year is great, but my search traffic follows the same pattern.

Where I really noticed a change was in the breakdown of my AMP vs mobile pages.

Here’s a look at November 1 – 12, 2017:

46.2% AMP traffic to my site. Now let’s take a look at November 13, 2017.

My AMP traffic dropped by more than 6% overnight!

You’ve seen the growth in Google Analytics year over year. My traffic did not drop. What we are looking at here is that disabling Rich Pins effectively prevented Pinterest from redirecting my Pinterest traffic to AMP pages.

If we jump forward and look at December 2017, the difference is even more apparent.

I cut my AMP traffic in half!

So now, for my Pinterest users, mobile stays mobile. And AMP stays AMP.

It’s like magic! For me anyway.

I’ve left my Rich Pins disabled, for now.

Disabling Rich Pins helped me strike a balance. It let Google send some of my search traffic to AMP posts when they wanted, and it let my Pinterest users see my ACTUAL mobile site.

It also gave me a little more balance with keeping readers moving around my site and, of course, my earnings.

In February 2018 I actually started rolling back my AMP pages because for Sugar Dish Me the negatives outweigh the positives. I’m down to around 4% AMP traffic now, but am still rocking my Pinterest AND search rankings. My email subscriptions are up, and I am tackling all my site speed needs with the help of awesome developers (hay Once Coupled!) and awesome hosts (haiiii Agathon!).

The goal of AMP is to help build faster sites. At Mediavine, we recommend that you work to optimize your mobile and desktop web experiences using Page Speed Insights, another awesome Google tool, instead of using AMP to meet that need. As long as your site is fast, you’re making Google and your users happy, and that is the goal!

The post AMP + Rich Pins and What It Means For Your Blog appeared first on Mediavine.