Tips, Expertise, Articles and Advice from the Pro's for Your Website or Blog to Succeed
Giant kudos to Scott Jehl on releasing his new Web Components De-Mystified online course! Eight full hours of training from one of the best in the business.
Quick Hit #12 originally published on CSS-Tricks, which is part of the DigitalOcean family. You should get the newsletter.
Eric gifting us with his research on all the various things that anchors (not links) do when they are in :focus.
Turns out, there’s a lot!
That’s an understatement! This is an incredible amount of work, even if Eric calls it “dry as a toast sandwich.” Boring ain’t always a bad thing. Let me simply drop in a pen that Dave put together pulling all of Eric’s findings into a table organized to compare the different behaviors between operating systems — and additional tables for each specific platform — because I think it helps frame Eric’s points.
That really is a lot! But why on Earth go through the trouble of documenting all of this?
All of the previously documented behavior needs to be built in JavaScript, since we need to go the synthetic link route. It also means that it is code we need to set aside time and resources to maintain.
That also assumes that is even possible to recreate every expected feature in JavaScript, which is not true. It also leaves out the mental gymnastics required to make a business case for prioritizing engineering efforts to re-make each feature.
There’s the rub! These are the behaviors you’re gonna need to mimic and maintain if veering away from semantic, native web elements. So what Eric is generously providing is perhaps an ultimate argument against adopting frameworks — or rolling some custom system — that purposely abstract the accessible parts of the web, often in favor of DX.
As with anything, there’s more than meets the eye to all this. Eric’s got an exhaustive list at the end there that calls out all the various limitations of his research. Most of those notes sound to me like there are many, many other platforms, edge cases, user agent variations, assistive technologies, and considerations that could also be taken into account, meaning we could be responsible for a much longer list of behaviors than what’s already there.
And yes, this sweatshirt is incredible. Indeed.
Basic keyboard shortcut support for focused links originally published on CSS-Tricks, which is part of the DigitalOcean family. You should get the newsletter.
I remember running my first A/B test after college. It wasn’t till then that I understood the basics of getting a big enough A/B test sample size or running the test long enough to get statistically significant results.
But figuring out what “big enough” and “long enough” were was not easy.
Googling for answers didn’t help me, as I got information that only applied to the ideal, theoretical, and non-marketing world.
Turns out I wasn't alone, because asking how to determine A/B testing sample size and time frame is a common question from our customers.
So, I figured I'd do the research to help answer this question for all of us. In this post, I’ll share what I’ve learned to help you confidently determine the right sample size and time frame for your next A/B test.
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When I first saw the A/B test sample size formula, I was like, woah!!!!
Here’s how it looks:
Pretty complicated formula, right?
Luckily, there are tools that let us plug in as little as three numbers to get our results, and I will cover them in this guide.
Need to review A/B testing key principles first? This video helps.
In theory, to conduct a perfect A/B test and determine a winner between Variation A and Variation B, you need to wait until you have enough results to see if there is a statistically significant difference between the two.
Many A/B test experiments prove this is true.
Depending on your company, sample size, and how you execute the A/B test, getting statistically significant results could happen in hours or days or weeks — and you have to stick it out until you get those results.
For many A/B tests, waiting is no problem. Testing headline copy on a landing page? It‘s cool to wait a month for results. Same goes with blog CTA creative — you’d be going for the long-term lead generation play, anyway.
But certain aspects of marketing demand shorter timelines with A/B testing. Take email as an example. With email, waiting for an A/B test to conclude can be a problem for several practical reasons I’ve identified below.
Unlike a landing page (where you can continue to gather new audience members over time), once you run an email A/B test, that‘s it — you can’t “add” more people to that A/B test.
So you've got to figure out how to squeeze the most juice out of your emails.
This will usually require you to send an A/B test to the smallest portion of your list needed to get statistically significant results, pick a winner, and send the winning variation to the rest of the list.
If you spend too much time collecting results, you could miss out on sending your next email — which could have worse effects than if you sent a non-statistically significant winner email on to one segment of your database.
Your marketing emails are optimized to deliver at a certain time of day. They might be supporting the timing of a new campaign launch and/or landing in your recipient‘s inboxes at a time they’d love to receive it.
So if you wait for your email to be fully statistically significant, you might miss out on being timely and relevant — which could defeat the purpose of sending the emails in the first place.
That's why email A/B testing programs have a “timing” setting built in: At the end of that time frame, if neither result is statistically significant, one variation (which you choose ahead of time) will be sent to the rest of your list.
That way, you can still run A/B tests in email, but you can also work around your email marketing scheduling demands and ensure people are always getting timely content.
So, to run email A/B tests while optimizing your sends for the best results, consider both your A/B test sample size and timing.
Next up — how to figure out your sample size and timing using data.
For this guide, I’m going to use email to show how you'll determine sample size and timing for an A/B test. However, note that you can apply the steps in this list for any A/B test, not just email.
As I mentioned above, you can only send an A/B test to a finite audience — so you need to figure out how to maximize the results from that A/B test.
To do that, you must know the smallest portion of your total list needed to get statistically significant results.
Let me show you how you calculate it.
To A/B test a sample of your list, you need a list size of at least 1,000 contacts.
From my experience, if you have fewer than 1,000 contacts, the proportion of your list that you need to A/B test to get statistically significant results gets larger and larger.
For example, if I have a small list of 500 subscribers, I might have to test 85% or 95% of them to get statistically significant results.
Once I’m done, the remaining number of subscribers who I didn’t test will be so small that I might as well send half of my list one email version, and the other half another, and then measure the difference.
For you, your results might not be statistically significant at the end of it all, but at least you're gathering learnings while you grow your email list.
Pro tip: If you use HubSpot, you’ll find that 1,000 contacts is your benchmark for running A/B tests on samples of email sends. If you have fewer than 1,000 contacts in your selected list, Version A of your test will automatically go to half of your list and Version B goes to the other half.
HubSpot's A/B Testing Kit has a fantastic and free A/B testing sample size calculator.
During my research, I also found two web-based A/B testing calculators that work well. The first is Optimizely’s A/B test sample size calculator. The second is that of Evan Miller.
For our illustration, though, I’ll use the HubSpot calculator. Here's how it looks like when I download it:
This is a lot of statistical jargon, but don’t worry, I’ll explain them in layman’s terms.
Statistical significance: This tells you how sure you can be that your sample results lie within your set confidence interval. The lower the percentage, the less sure you can be about the results. The higher the percentage, the more people you'll need in your sample, too.
Baseline conversion rate (BCR): BCR is the conversion rate of the control version. For example, if I email 10,000 contacts and 6,000 opened the email, the conversion rate (BCR) of the email opens is 60%.
Minimum detectable effect (MDE): MDE is the minimum relative change in conversion rate that I want the experiment to detect between version A (original or control sample) and version B (new variant).
For example, if my BCR is 60%, I could set my MDE at 5%. This means I want the experiment to check whether the conversion rate of my new variant differs significantly from the control by at least 5%.
If the conversion rate of my new variant is, for example, 65% or higher, or 55% or lower, I can be confident that this new variant has a real impact.
But if the difference is smaller than 5% (for example, 58% or 62%), then the test might not be statistically significant as the change could be because of random chance rather than the variant itself.
MDE has real implications on your sample size in terms of time required for your test and traffic. Think of MDE as water in a cup. As the size of the water increases, you need less time and effort (traffic) to get the result you want.
The translation: a higher MDE provides more certainty that my sample’s true actions have been accounted for in the interval. The downside to higher MDEs is the less definitive results they provide.
It‘s a trade-off you’ll have to make. For our purposes, it's not worth getting too caught up in MDE. When you‘re just getting started with A/B tests, I’d recommend choosing a smaller interval (e.g., around 5%).
Note for HubSpot customers: The HubSpot Email A/B tool automatically uses the 85% confidence level to determine a winner..
Let's say I want to run an email A/B test. First, I need to determine the size of each sample of the test.
Here‘s what I’d put in the Optimizely A/B testing sample size calculator:
Ta-da! The calculator has shown me my sample.
In this example, it is 2,700 contacts per variation.
This is the size that one of my variations needs to be. So for my email send, if I have one control and one variation, I‘ll need to double this number. If I had a control and two variations, I’d triple it.
Here’s how this looks in the HubSpot A/B testing kit.
HubSpot customers, I‘m looking at you for this section. When you’re running an email A/B test, you'll need to select the percentage of contacts to send the list to — not just the raw sample size.
To do that, you need to divide the number in your sample by the total number of contacts in your list. Here's what that math looks like, using the example numbers above:
2700 / 10,000 = 27%
This means that each sample (both my control AND variation) needs to be sent to 27-28% of my audience — roughly 55% of my list size. And once a winner is determined, the winning version goes to the rest of my list.
And that's it! Now you are ready to select your sending time.
If I want to test a landing page, the timeframe I’ll choose will vary depending on my business' goals.
So let’s say I‘d like to design a new landing page by Q1 2025 and it’s Q4 2024. To have the best version ready, I need to have finished my A/B test by December so I can use the results to build the winning page.
Calculating the time I need is easy. Here’s an example:
When I plug the BCR, MDE, and statistical significance into the Optimizely A/B test Sample Size Calculator, I got 53,000 as the result.
This means 53,000 people need to visit each version of my landing page if I am experimenting with two versions.
So the time frame for the test will be:
53,000*2/7,000 = 15.14 weeks
This implies I should start running this test within the first two weeks of September.
For emails, you have to figure out how long to run your email A/B test before sending a (winning) version on to the rest of your list.
Knowing the timing aspect is a little less statistically driven, but you should definitely use past data to make better decisions. Here's how you can do that.
If you don't have timing restrictions on when to send the winning email to the rest of the list, head to your analytics.
Figure out when your email opens/clicks (or whatever your success metrics are) starts dropping. Look at your past email sends to figure this out.
For example, what percentage of total clicks did you get on your first day?
If you found you got 70% of your clicks in the first 24 hours, and then 5% each day after that, it‘d make sense to cap your email A/B testing timing window to 24 hours because it wouldn’t be worth delaying your results just to gather a little extra data.
After 24 hours, your email marketing tool should let you know if they can determine a statistically significant winner. Then, it's up to you what to do next.
If you have a large sample size and found a statistically significant winner at the end of the testing time frame, many email marketing tools will automatically and immediately send the winning variation.
If you have a large enough sample size and there's no statistically significant winner at the end of the testing time frame, email marketing tools might also allow you to send a variation of your choice automatically.
If you have a smaller sample size or are running a 50/50 A/B test, when to send the next email based on the initial email's results is entirely up to you.
If you have time restrictions on when to send the winning email to the rest of the list, figure out how late you can send the winner without it being untimely or affecting other email sends.
For example, if you‘ve sent emails out at 3 PM EST for a flash sale that ends at midnight EST, you wouldn’t want to determine an A/B test winner at 11 PM Instead, you‘d want to email closer to 6 or 7 PM — that’ll give the people not involved in the A/B test enough time to act on your email.
What I have shared here is pretty much everything you need to know about your A/B test sample size and timeframe.
After doing these calculations and examining your data, I’m positive you’ll be in a much better state to conduct successful A/B tests — ones that are statistically valid and help you move the needle on your goals.
Editor's note: This post was originally published in December 2014 and has been updated for comprehensiveness.
When prospects first come to your business page, they probably won’t just click and buy your offering immediately.
In fact, they may have different goals for visiting your page — some might want to learn about you and your products or services, others may be sold on you but aren’t sure what they need from you. Still, others have a different goal in mind.
That means you’ve got to ensure that they can easily find the content they need. I’ve found one of the best ways to make sure you’re getting the right information to the right prospect is by building out a content map.
Content mapping allows you to create highly targeted, personalized content at every stage of the buyer’s journey, helping to nurture leads and prospects toward a purchase decision.
In this post, I’ll show you what a content map is and how you can start content mapping for your brand. Let’s get started.
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For example, if your business is building a brand new website, you’ll have to begin creating a content map based on why the customer is going to your page.
If customers are coming to your website looking for a credible solution worth paying for, they need to establish that you’re trustworthy before making a decision.
At this point, your marketing team begins to map out the kind of content needed to build that trust between the company and the customer.
Content mapping helps you plan for content creation that supports the customer journey and creates a more cohesive, personalized customer experience.
When it comes to content, one size rarely fits all. On the contrary, each piece serves a different purpose.
To ensure that your company's content is effective at generating leads, you need to deliver diversified content that covers different topics that your buyers are searching for at each step of the way.
Content mapping is the process of doing just that.
Let’s say your prospects are visiting your website because they already know you but just need to decide what service to go with. If you don’t have any service comparison content, it may detract them from finishing the process.
That’s not to say that it’s mandatory. Many of my clients don’t have and don’t need this. However, if it’s applicable to your business, you may want to consider this strategy.
Here’s the thing. Coming up with topics for a highly targeted content strategy isn't always easy. However, content mapping with the audience in mind can help you put together a manageable plan that you can actually follow.
To help you brainstorm and map out content ideas for targeting specific segments of your audience, check out our free template resource: The Content Marketing Planning Template.
Download Your Free Template Now
The template includes an introduction to content mapping, a crash course on buyer personas and lifecycle stages, a content mapping template (plus examples), a website content map template, and bonus buyer persona templates.
With the template, you'll:
Buyer personas are fictional, generalized representations of your ideal customers.
They help you understand your customers (and prospective customers) better and make it easier for you to tailor content to the specific needs, behaviors, and concerns of different groups.
The strongest buyer personas are based on market research as well as on insights you gather from your actual customer base (through surveys, interviews, etc.).
Depending on your business, you could have as few as one or two personas or dozens. If you’re just getting started with personas, don’t go crazy! You can always develop more personas later if needed.
So, what’s my take on buyer personas? I love them, but my advice is to keep it simple.
When I work with clients to develop buyer personas, we focus on going as narrow and detailed as possible, because it’s far easier (and more effective!) to market to just one person than it is to market to a segment of a population.
And while each persona doesn’t represent every single person in that segment, you can get pretty close.
The buyer persona you target with your content is only half of the content mapping equation. In addition to knowing who someone is, you need to know where they are in the buying cycle (i.e., how close they are to making a purchase).
This location in the buying cycle is known as a lifecycle stage.
Our Content Mapping Template divvies up the buying cycle into three lifecycle stages: Awareness, Consideration, and Decision.
By combining buyer personas with lifecycle stages, you can hone in on specific segments of your audience and tailor content to resonate with each of those segments.
Your awareness stage content should target prospects early in the buying cycle.
People in this segment are just becoming aware that they have a problem.
At this stage, think of how your content can help people become more informed about the problem in general, and you'll (hopefully) find that they continue moving closer to a purchasing decision.
Important questions to start thinking about:
Taking your buyer personas' questions into account, you can turn them into topics for awareness stage content.
The content you want to provide them should speak to their current needs, not jump straight into product-focused content.
This can take the form of insightful blog posts, webinars, ebooks, or social media posts that give information to solve initial concerns and slowly familiarize prospects with how your product can help them.
Looking for advice? I recommend putting yourself in your customers’ shoes and thinking of questions you’d ask in your place.
What information would you look for? And here’s the kicker — you already know these questions because you probably answer them every day!
At this point, you’ve provided your prospect with enough information to become fully aware of their problem, and they know it can be remedied.
This is when you should begin trying to move them closer to a purchasing decision and become more interested in your product offering, using consideration stage content.
Your consideration stage content can more explicitly mention how your product or service could potentially solve a problem.
At this point in the buying cycle, people are still evaluating their options. Your purpose now is to help them narrow down the solution that works the best and provides them the most value.
The types of content used for the consideration stage can look like this:
Now that you’ve identified the “why” behind your prospect choosing your solution, it’s time to consider the “why not”.
Some competitors may have a more affordable solution, different methods of remedying issues, or more authority (popularity) in the market.
While some of these aspects cannot be changed, you can still appeal to the prospect and move them closer to purchase if your offering is a real value add, regardless of the rest.
Pro tip: You don’t always have to be the cheapest! Quality wins over quantity. I’ve made choices that have been more expensive or not as well-known due to how well the solution met my needs, overcame objections, or added value.
At the decision stage of the buyer journey, you can primarily lean into marketing your products or services.
If someone has reached this stage, they've already identified a problem and a solution, and are now getting ready to pull the proverbial trigger toward a purchase decision.
This is where you can directly present the prospect with examples of positive experiences or success derived from your product or service offering, with decision stage content like:
Now that you’ve identified all the different types of content that buyers of each stage are looking for, it’s time to map the ideas.
This content mapping visualization keeps the marketing strategy focused on the goal specified with all the steps necessary to gradually reel in buyers.
Our template can also help you to schedule when you want content published on a monthly or quarterly basis if you want to manage it in one place.
You can approach content mapping to serve more specific strategies this way, too. I’ll discuss content mapping for your website in more detail below.
Website content mapping is the process of planning the pages, blog posts, and offers you’ll publish on your site and identify which buyer personas those pages and posts will serve.
Website content mapping also identifies which pages and posts address different lifecycle stages.
Website content mapping is a key element of website personalization. In essence, you’ll create different pages, posts, and offers to address different buyers at different points in the buyer’s journey.
To give you a better idea of website content mapping, I will walk you through a simple example.
The buyer persona (and a key problem or opportunity that the persona is struggling with) is at the start of the grid.
Jenny is opening a gym. Her problem is that she needs gym equipment but has a limited budget. She has taken to the internet for a solution.
In the awareness life cycle stage, she’ll be looking for introductory content to gain knowledge about the types of equipment necessary to bring customers into her gym.
In the consideration life cycle stage, she’ll have a better understanding of her need for equipment and price expectations.
She'll be looking to create a clearer budget for different items and should consider how long this investment will last — seeking templates that outline that information.
Finally, in the decision stage, Jenny has identified her needs and is looking for a provider to fill them.
She will feel inclined to request demos, consults, or quotes from a company that has guided her through her journey to their solution of cost-effective gym equipment.
This type of content map works because it segments personas as they progress through the buyer lifecycle. If you have more than one persona, you can expand your map into a segmentation grid.
A content segmentation grid is a tool to help businesses plan the content they will produce based on the different types of audiences they want to reach.
A common mistake I see marketers make when it comes to content planning is that they’ll understand the need to make personalized content for customers as they navigate the buyer stages.
But they'll ignore the need for individualized messaging.
A content segmentation grid solves that problem as marketers will be able to better serve every customer segment at each stage they reach.
So, instead of writing messaging for one buyer persona, you can potentially increase engagement and conversions across different audiences.
Now that we’ve explored what content mapping is and you’ve seen how to get started, you might be wondering what type of tools you can use to start content mapping.
Content mapping may seem like a difficult task that requires highly specialized software. It’s not true. All you need to get started are simple business tools you may already be using in your day-to-day.
We’ll start with the most basic tools you need to start content mapping, such as word processors and visualization tools.
Pro tip: When looking for the right content mapping software for your business, take into account the size of your business and your budget.
You’ll also want to make sure you have at least one tool to visualize your content map and one to research your personas.
Pricing: Free
First up in your content mapping tech stack is your preferred word processor, Google Docs.
It has the feature to draw and insert different types of diagrams into documents, which can be translated into a content map to align your marketing mix with your goals.
I highly recommend this tool because it makes it easier to share work across your team, and you never have to worry about backing up your content map once you’ve created it.
What I like: Not everyone has the funds to buy software from the beginning if they’re starting a business. With Google, you get access to Docs along with an entire suite of tools that can help you with your content mapping process.
In fact, Google apps may be enough to run most of your business and content operations.
Pricing: Free basic plans are available. Individual plans cost $9 a month. Team plans cost $10 a month. Enterprise plan pricing is available upon request.
If you’re more of a visual person, then a flowchart tool is a must. Also, if you’d prefer to create a content map with lines and diagrams, then you need a more sophisticated tool than Google Docs.
Lucidchart’s flowchart maker is a top-of-the-line tool that also allows you to connect different apps and services.
Like Google Docs, it allows you to work collaboratively, but Lucidchart takes it a step further and provides users with more visually appealing formatting.
What I like: Lucidchart’s integration allows you to directly embed your flowcharts into other tools, and even edit the charts in the external tool like Microsoft Powerpoint, for example.
Pricing: Free
Before you can even begin to create a content map, you need to identify the buyer persona(s) you’re creating content for.
HubSpot has a buyer persona tool made to build and save professional buyer persona documents with its intuitive generator. The generator is easy to use and allows you to add a name and avatar to humanize your persona.
And if you want to take it a step further, HubSpot also has a list containing even more buyer persona resources to build out your customer profiles for your business, too.
What I like: The persona generator is visually appealing, making it easy to understand. And while there are only 7 sections it has you fill out, you can add and customize your own sections to flesh out your personas on a deeper level.
Pricing: A free basic plan is available. Starter plans cost $15 a month. Professional plans cost $800 a month. Enterprise plans cost $3,200 a month.
In the Marketing Hub, there is an SEO Topics tool that provides content mapping capabilities to help users organize their ideas for organic-focused awareness stage content.
With this capability, your team will be able to collaborate and execute your content map once it’s ready for deployment.
What I like: The tool also has a performance tab, so you can regularly check how your topics are doing and help you determine if those topics are working for you or not.
Pricing: Free plans are available. Starter plans cost $8 a month. Business plans cost $16 a month. Contact Miro for enterprise pricing.
Miro is a visual workspace with versatile functionality. I like it for content mapping because it’s easy to use and allows you to lay out your buyer’s journey and its respective content with graphics and other assets to make it easy to understand.
It’s intuitive and easy to use, and I love how colorful it is.
The platform can easily integrate with over 100+ apps and lends itself to collaboration, so you can work with teammates on the project together.
Miro also has a number of tutorials on their site so you can learn how to get the most out of the platform.
What I like: If you don’t know where to start, Miro houses a large library of over 2500+ workspace templates to choose from.
Pricing: Free plans are available. Unlimited plans cost $7 a month. Business plans cost $12 a month. Contact ClickUp for enterprise pricing.
ClickUp is a project management tool great for businesses of every size. It’s one of my favorite tools and I use it everyday in my own business.
The platform has a feature called ‘Whiteboards’ that can be used to brainstorm and plan out workflows. ClickUp is a great collaboration tool and through the “Whiteboards” function, you can work on the same board at the same time.
This platform also has a native docs feature, so you can also use that to build out your content if you’d like to keep everything in one place.
If you’d like to use it in conjunction with your existing suite of tools, ClickUp can be easily integrated with over 100 tools.
What I like: Since ClickUp is a project management tool first and foremost, you can actually take your “Whiteboard” and create tasks for your team members within the feature. This makes it easy to go from planning to execution.
Pricing: Team advantage plans cost $25 a month. Team premier plans cost $75 a month. Contact Survey Monkey for enterprise pricing.
Before you start mapping out all the content you’ll create for your customers, it’s important you get to know those customers first.
This is where a tool like SurveyMonkey comes in handy. SurveyMonkey is an online software platform designed for creating surveys and data collection.
This is one of the most widely used survey tools and is a great option to gather data about your customers to build out your personas.
I like exploring their extensive library of templates that you can choose from if you’re not sure what kind of questions to ask and features an easy-to-use interface.
SurveyMonkey also offers Market Research Solutions if you need in-depth data.
What I like: To make sure their customers are as educated as possible on surveys and data collection, they provide blogs, a resource center, and a help center.
Pricing: Pro plans cost $129.9 a month. Guru plans cost $249.95 a month. Contact SEMRush for business pricing.
SEMRush is one of the most used SEO tools out there.
SEO is very important in the content creation process as it can drive more traffic to your website, but it also has a place in the content mapping stage.
With SEMRush, I like to do keyword research to see what customers are likely to search and use that information to create personas.
This platform features a user-friendly interface and includes a variety of tools like a backlink checker, competitor analysis, and organic research, so you’ll get access to tools you can use during content mapping and in other areas of your business.
What I like: SEMRush has a search intent feature that tells you not only what people are searching for, but why, which is a fantastic bit of information to collect.
Pricing: Pricing must be requested.
While most businesses might be able to use platforms like SurveyMonkey that I mentioned earlier or even Google Forms to collect information from their customers, some companies may require more robust solutions.
Qualtrics is a customer experience company that offers three solution suites: Customer Experience, Employee Experience, and Strategy & Research.
Because of its complex interface and high price point, Qualtrics is best suited for companies requiring large-scale market research and high-level data collection.
What I like: Qualtrics is capable of delivering incredible results because of its ability to be customized and can be integrated with a wide range of tools.
Pricing: Free
HubSpot’s CRM is the one tool you need to compile all of your data from current and prospective customers.
The CRM will allow you to discern different lifecycle stages and pinpoint commonalities between customers who are ready to purchase based on lead scoring.
Your content map can help someone build a lead scoring system to identify high-value leads who have consumed the content close to a purchasing decision.
What I like: HubSpot’s CRM has the ability to create contact lists using customized criteria. When used together with the lead scoring, you can create multiple lists of your personas to deliver content to in a streamlined fashion.
Pricing: Professional plans cost $800 a month. Enterprise plans cost $3,600 a month.
A content management system is probably the most important tool for your content mapping efforts.
A CMS will allow you to publish personalized content that targets different site visitors at — you guessed it — different stages of the buyer’s journey.
With Content Hub, you can continue testing and retesting your content for better results.
What I like: Content Hub is fully integrated with HubSpot’s CRM platform and Marketing Hub, allowing you to create a seamless experience for your customers as they receive the content you’ve designed for them.
It will help you execute your content map flawlessly.
So, are you ready to begin creating your own content map? Before you start, let's hear some tips from marketers who attribute part of their success to this strategy.
When it comes to content mapping, creating high-quality material is important. Just ask Adanna Austin, a business coach and consultant at Marketing Dynamics Business Solutions.
“We all have to create compelling content to attract our ideal clients, build an active and engaged audience, and get daily sales. Spend time building your audience by educating them and engaging with them,” Austin says.
Austin also emphasizes that variety is key.
“No one has built a business by posting the same image or type of image every day on socials and not having convoys with their audience. It is not just about showing up, but doing so with intention so you can attract your ideal clients who will buy from you,” she says.
When asked about the benefits of content mapping, Digital Atlas Marketing Founder Laura Hogan focused on the importance of foresight.
"With content mapping, you can give your prospects the information they are asking for before they even ask for it. Buyer personas and lifecycle stages allow you to be one step ahead of the game by mapping out what your prospect's next steps are and delivering them the content from numerous different avenues,” Hogan says.
Hogan says her team creates buyer personas as part of their onboarding process.
From there, “everything we do — from content offer to daily tweets — is centered around that document. We also always ask ourselves, ‘Would business owner Bob open this email, click this tweet, or download this offer?’” Hogan explains.
No two customer journeys are cut and paste. Everyone’s path looks different. Marc Herschberger, director of operations at Revenue River Marketing, explains.
For example, Herschberger notes, when mapping out content for a site's visitors, teams have to remember that some personas would rather speak to someone on their terms, rather than fill out a form for a consultation.
“Understanding how they are most comfortable when it comes to making decisions can help you understand what points of conversion will be the most relevant and successful for that persona,” Herschberger says.
He continues, “Optimizing your site pages (landing and thank you pages, as well)...and workflows with direct contact information (phone #, email, etc.) is a great way to ensure that visitors, prospects, and leads who may shy away from form submissions still have readily available, alternate means of converting.”
Mapping out buyer personas and lifecycle stages is extremely important when creating content, shares Spencer Powell, CEO of Builder Funnel.
“In terms of buyer personas, it‘s easy to see that a marketing director will have different questions, information needs, and interests compared to a CEO,” says Powell. “Both of these personas may be searching for your product or service, but they’ll be looking for different topics.”
To get around this, Powell recommends creating content that appeals to each audience. That allows you to be more effective in attracting that specific audience.
“By the same token, each persona of yours may be in a different stage of the buying process, so it's important to think through and create content that appeals to someone looking for basic, high-level information such as an ebook, as well as specific information like a pricing guide or case study,” Powell says.
Powell also suggests that teams dedicate an entire section of their site to each audience. This allows them to curate content for that specific audience.
“We actually took this concept and went a step further by creating unique brands for each one of our vertical markets. Each brand has its own section of the website, its own blog content, and its own premium content (downloadable offers).
It's really helped us attract and convert visitors at a higher rate because all the content is more relevant to that persona,” Powell says.
"By taking the buyer and buying stage into account when creating content, you can be sure that you're designing content to help move them through the buying process,” notes Diona Kidd, a managing partner at Knowmad.
In addition to mapping content to the buyer profile and buying stage, Kidd’s team regularly pulls topics from the sales process.
“Then we offer the content in later sales calls. This helps us not only evaluate the relevancy of the content but also the interest of the buyer. We encourage clients to do the same,” Kidd says.
Delivering the right content at the right time can do wonders for your company’s growth.
By meeting prospects’ needs based on their persona and lifecycle stage, you’re delighting them at every turn, boosting your chances of winning a loyal customer and turning them into a brand evangelist.
I’ve walked you through the importance of having a content map and the tools I recommend you use. The most important part of the process, and the one you’ll want to spend time on, is persona building.
Remember, everything you do in the content mapping process hinges on your personas.
If you’re ready to start researching your personas and building your content map but still need a little more guidance, remember you can always use HubSpot’s content planning template.
Editor's Note: This post was originally published in March 2014 and has been updated for accuracy and comprehensiveness.
In the world of search engine marketing (SEM), I’m seeing a growing number of marketers turn to PPC campaigns. That’s how Google has significantly grown its advertising revenue every year.
In 2023, 77.8% of Google’s revenue came from advertising on Google properties and YouTube.
Why? Well-run pay-per-click or PPC campaigns help you generate leads by nearly guaranteeing ad placement in search engine result pages.
And if your ads tool is tightly integrated with your CRM, you can use insights from your ad data to nurture leads across their buying journey.
In this post, I’ll walk you through what makes a successful campaign and the best practices for optimizing your PPC campaigns.
Table of Contents
So, how can you win a PPC campaign? Success starts by using research, data, and insights to create an effective strategy.
If you jump into a PPC campaign without an effective strategy, it’s easy to waste money, attract the wrong leads, and set yourself up for frustration without much to show for it.
Here are a few ways I’ve seen marketers go wrong with PPC campaign management:
Building an excellent campaign structure can help you avoid these obstacles. Luckily, building an excellent PPC campaign structure can help you avoid these obstacles.
To help you succeed with your next campaign, we’ve created a free PPC campaign management template.
What I love about this template is that it allows you and your clients to set up a full-funnel campaign structure that follows PPC best practices.
Once you do that, you’ll be better positioned to maximize the return on your PPC investment. The template is broken into two sections: Ads Planner and Ads Results.
In this section of the PPC template, you’ll record your ad campaign information.
The first three columns contain your campaign name, keywords, and negative keywords (keywords you don’t want ads shown for).
Enter your ad variations in the next section. There’s room for multiple headlines, descriptions, and URL paths to help you keep track of your running ads.
This part of the PPC template allows you to track relevant campaign metrics. Use it to record your total ad cost and analyze the performance of impressions, conversions, cost-per-click information, and more.
Now that you’re familiar with the template’s components, let’s look at managing your PPC campaign.
I’m going to show you how to use the PPC template in this blog post — so download it now and follow along with me.This template acts like a checklist that can help you manage the steps along the way.
Pro tip: Here’s what you need to know to make using this template easy:
Now, let’s dive into PPC campaign management.
There are several platforms for managing your PPC campaign. I recommend starting with one platform and mastering it to keep your costs low in the initial stages of PPC planning.
To simplify managing your campaign, you can natively manage it in the platform you’re already using for running the ads, rather than paying for an external campaign management tool.
However, as you expand your strategy to include more sites, I’ve found that I’ve needed the features of a more robust PPC campaign management software.
These more advanced tools allow you to keep track of each platform, budget, and set of ad creatives in one place.
Pro tip: Here are some of my favorite tools for the job:
Don’t fall into the trap of setting up an account, creating an ad, directing the ad to a website’s home page, picking some keywords, and hitting go.
Running a successful PPC campaign is all about organizing your campaigns and ad groups effectively, choosing the right keywords, and targeting your audience with precision.
You’ll want to manage your budget wisely, craft relevant ad copy, and continuously optimize based on performance data.
And remember, PPC isn’t a one-time setup; it’s an ongoing process where staying updated and making tweaks will keep your campaigns driving results.
Chances are, the account you’re managing will have more than one PPC campaign. Your campaigns may contain several ad groups, each based on a set of related keyword groupings.
Each ad group may contain multiple ads with similar targeted keywords.
Managing multiple campaigns allows you to set daily budget caps, ad schedules, and select geo-targeted regions at the campaign level. If you're bidding on generic and branded keywords, you’ll want to put these in separate campaigns.
The parameters around these two types of keywords will likely be different.
As you’ll see below, your template reflects these best practices, providing cells for several campaigns, ad groups, and ad variations within those ad groups.
A landing page is the web page where your PPC traffic goes after they click on your paid ad.
Don’t drive PPC visitors to your home page or blog, hoping they’ll see and fill out a lead generation form. That’s the role of organic search. Instead, drive your audience to a landing page with messaging tailored to your campaign goal.
It should contain a form that collects their contact information in exchange for an offer or asset. Be sure to add a tracking token or UTM parameter to the page so you can identify your lead sources.
Pro tip: Keep in mind that the final URL within an ad group will be the same regardless of the keyword or ad. You can create another ad group if you want to drive a keyword to a different landing page.
If you want to get even more specific, create another campaign for that keyword.
Always select keywords that are relevant to your landing page and offer. Relevant keywords are important because they increase the chance of the right prospect seeing your ad, clicking on it, and visiting the landing page.
It’s tempting to want to rank for multiple keywords, but you shouldn’t try to do this using a single landing page. Why? An effective landing page has focused messaging that addresses only a few targeted keywords.
If a keyword is irrelevant to your landing page messaging, you’ll end up wasting your ad budget, as visitors are much less likely to convert.
It’s better to create another offer and landing page that specifically addresses those additional keywords with relevant messaging.
Pro tip: To understand search volumes and costs around keywords you want, use tools like the Google AdWords Tool or the HubSpot keywords tool.
If it’s your first time managing a PPC campaign, I recommend checking out this article on how to design a keyword strategy. For Google Ads, you’ll want to learn more about keyword quality scores, too.
This is the fun part.
Most PPC campaign management software allows you to create one or more ads for each ad group (hence the “group” terminology).
After creating multiple ads, these platforms display the ad variations to your audience to test which version leads to a higher clickthrough rate (CTR). This is called A/B testing.
While running A/B tests is optional, I highly recommend taking advantage of it. I’ve seen time and again that A/B testing insights significantly improve campaign performance and ROI.
Pro tip: One of the most effective A/B tests is testing variations of your ad’s call to action (CTA), the phrase that encourages your prospect to take a specific action, like downloading a resource or signing up for more information.
If you need more detail, read how the HubSpot team A/B tests our own CTAs.
When writing your ad, give special attention to your headline. The headline has the greatest influence on an ad’s CTR. Be sure to include a keyword in your headline to draw a user's attention.
An even better practice is using dynamic keyword insertion to make your ads even more relevant to people searching for what you offer.
Keep in mind that you have 30 characters for each ad headline, 30 characters for the display URL (the URL that's displayed in the ad, not to be confused with the final URL), and 90 characters for each line of copy.
If you're using this template, you can easily keep track of these values.
Finally, there’s the tricky matter of the display URL. You‘re only allowed 30 characters here, but it’s unlikely that your final URL, the actual URL for your landing page, will be that short, especially after adding UTM parameters.
For this reason, search engines like Google allow you to create a display URL, which may not be an actual URL on your website. However, the domain in your display URL must be the same as the domain in your final URL.
This allows users to know they’re in the right place when they click your ad and visit your landing page.
Your completed template needs to align with stakeholders’ expectations and the elements of a productive PPC campaign.
If you’re a PPC campaign stakeholder, this template will help you with two things.
First, the ads planner template gives you a bird‘s-eye view of what the person running the ads is doing. Second, the ad results template shows how much you’re spending on PPC.
With this, you can reallocate and swiftly modify your budget as you respond to changes in the marketplace.
When I first started managing PPC campaigns, I quickly realized that there’s a lot more to it than just setting up ads and hoping for the best. You need to fine-tune every element to get the best results.
Over the years, I’ve honed my approach, and I’m excited to share my top recommendations for effective PPC campaign management strategies that can drive serious revenue, results, and ROI.
Clear, measurable objectives ensure every dollar you spend is working toward driving tangible business outcomes, like boosting sales or generating qualified leads.
When your goals are laser-focused, you’re setting yourself up to maximize ROI by putting your efforts into what truly matters for revenue growth.
By honing in on precise audience segments, you can run hyper-targeted ads that minimize wasted spend and maximize conversions.
When you reach the right people at the right time, your traffic quality improves, leading to more conversions and better ROI.
Keywords are the backbone of any PPC campaign. Choosing high-intent keywords ensures your ads appear when people are actively searching for your products or services.
This not only increases your chances of conversions but also helps drive more sales or leads, giving you the best bang for your PPC buck. If you need help, check out our video on using ChatSpot AI for keyword research.
Developing compelling copy that speaks directly to your audience’s needs can skyrocket your clickthrough rates and conversions.
Effective messaging doesn’t just attract clicks — it persuades potential customers to take action, which means more revenue and better ROI.
When your landing pages are relevant and persuasive, they guide visitors smoothly toward conversion, lowering bounce rates and increasing sales or leads — ultimately giving you a bigger return on your ad spend.
Allocating your spend to the highest-performing campaigns minimizes waste and maximizes ROI. When you manage your budget efficiently, you can scale successful campaigns, driving more revenue over time.
PPC isn’t a set-it-and-forget-it game.
Ongoing optimization is the secret to getting better results over time. Regularly testing and tweaking your targeting, bids, and ad creatives help you refine your campaigns, driving more results and revenue as your efforts compound.
By keeping tabs on what others in your industry are doing, you can spot gaps in the market and seize opportunities they’re missing. This intel helps you outperform competitors, capture more market share, and drive higher revenue and ROI.
Once you’ve found a winning formula, it’s time to scale.
Expanding your reach and increasing ad spend on high-performing campaigns can amplify your results without compromising performance. Strategic scaling leads to substantial revenue growth and maximizes ROI.
PPC campaign management isn’t a one-time thing. You’ll need to adjust your methods continually for optimized results. Keep these factors in mind to maximize the performance of your PPC campaigns.
Geographic targeting, or geotargeting, allows you to focus your ads on specific locations. This can be as broad as an entire country or as specific as a single city or even a particular ZIP code.
Track the performance of your ads by location to identify the most high-performing areas where you may need to adjust your strategy.
You might reallocate the budget to more profitable locations or test new geotargeted ad copy to improve performance.
For example, if you own a bike shop, the ad performance data may show that targeting urban and densely populated areas may be better than targeting rural areas where most folks residents rely on a car to get around.
In my experience, conversion rates can vary significantly by device. Campaigns that are effective for desktop users may not perform so well with mobile users.
Consider targeting each group separately and note any differences in conversion rates, cost per click, or return on ad spend (ROAS) for each device type.
If a campaign works better on mobile versus desktop, allocate funds towards your mobile efforts while you try a different campaign for desktop users. This way, you ensure you’re spending on campaigns that guarantee the highest ROI.
When running campaigns, every keyword you choose won’t prove useful. You’ll need to evaluate and remove the low performers. These could be keywords that:
Remove these keywords and stick with those that are performing well. This allows you to get maximum value from your ad budget.
When bidding for keywords, you’ll want to determine how much you can pay for each conversion and still make a profit. To do this, I recommend using Google Ads tools to optimize your bids, like:
After determining the maximum you can pay for a keyword, these tools will help you make the most of your budget.
Campaign performance will fluctuate depending on the time of day or day of the week. So, observe your campaigns to see when they perform well.
If they aren’t performing during a specific timeframe, adjust your campaign so that you are only bidding on the most profitable times.
Now, let’s explore the platforms available to run your PPC campaigns.
Besides figuring out the ads that work best for your business, understanding where your audience spends most of their time online is key.
That’s why you need to familiarize yourself with the different platforms available for running your PPC campaigns.
Let’s look at some of the most popular ad platforms, like Google, Microsoft (Bing), Facebook, X (formerly Twitter), and YouTube.
Google has been the dominant player in the search engine space for over 20 years, and it still produces some of the most innovative ad experiences in the market.
Google PPC management offers several key advantages compared to other platforms, like larger reach and audience, advanced targeting options like intent-based targeting and remarketing, and native integration with other Google tools.
Here's a look at two of the most popular ways to serve ads on Google.
One of the most popular types of Google Ads is the search ad. These ads appear at the top and bottom of the search results for specific keywords you bid on.
The typical goal for running Google search ad campaigns is to drive traffic to a specific webpage — like a landing or product page.
If you’ve ever visited a website that advertised on the banner, sidebar, or footer of a web page, you've probably seen a Google display ad. These ads are typically visual, featuring colorful graphics, videos, and occasionally audio.
Google display ads are helpful for retargeting customers who visit your website without taking your desired action.
Overall, Microsoft Ads works almost like Google Ads. Both offer similar ad formats, like text ads, responsive ads, and dynamic search ads.
However, Microsoft PPC management can be considered easier to use than Google PPC management for digital marketers starting out, with fewer field requirements and lower thresholds to get to advanced features.
There are a few more distinctions that’ll help you get the most out of your PPC campaign.
The bulk of your PPC efforts will likely live in Google Ads. When you decide to bid on Microsoft Ads, avoid using your Google Ads keywords for your Microsoft Ads.
Google and Bing are different search engines, meaning the search volume for your Google keywords may not be the same in Bing.
Microsoft Bing’s keyword research and suggestion tool provides more accurate search volumes for your keywords.
So, while you can use your keyword list from Google, use this tool to verify whether you should bid on the same keywords versus other variants with more traffic.
One upside of Microsoft Ads is the possibility of having lower CPC, which decreases your ad spend.
A WordStream test of both Google and Microsoft found that the average CPC of running ads on Microsoft was 33% lower.
The implication? Bidding on Microsoft Ads is less competitive than Google, meaning you may likely spend less when paying for Microsoft Ads keywords.
This may be especially true for specific industries, as you’ll see in this table:
For a deeper dive into Microsoft Ads, check out this resource portal.
Facebook Ads Manager is a platform that connects 1.6 billion people to businesses on Facebook.
Where Facebook PPC management differs from Google PPC management is in its ability to target specific demographics and interests, which is great for brand awareness campaigns.
Some of the most popular ads you can use for Facebook campaigns are:
With more users spending time on social media platforms’ story features, these ads are one way to reach your audience.
Like personal stories, you can share story ads as a video with a link. You can also use a series of photos to explain your ad and entice your audience to take a specific action.
Keep in mind: You can only post stories for 24 hours. These ads are best used for promotions like time-limited offers.
Gamification is an innovative way to catch a lead’s attention. Facebook’s playable ads allow you to create a brief interactive version of a game or app so users can get a feel for your product.
You’ll want to keep the functionality simple, so you don’t deter potential customers. And, of course, make it fun.
If you’ve ever used Facebook’s messenger tool, you’ve probably seen an ad in your conversations. Messenger ads are useful because potential customers can decide to connect with your business directly from their messages.
If you have a customer service team that connects with people via chat, this is a great way to establish an instant connection. You can also send a lead to your site or a specific landing page from the ad.
To get a comprehensive deep dive into building Facebook ad campaigns, check out HubSpot’s Facebook Ads Training Course.
X / Twitter Ads Manager makes it easy to plan your X ad while providing reporting on campaign performance.
EMarketer reports that X is still a supportive environment for native brand content, with its ability to connect directly to consumers and interact in real time.
But while you may have an excellent chance of success with X, your ads need to be catchy enough to stop someone mid-scroll. Some ads you can include in your X ad campaigns are:
X’s Promoted Ads can display your message as a single Image Ad, a Video Ad, a Carousel Ad with up to six horizontally swipeable images or videos, or Text Ads for native advertising content.
This approach allows your business to convert users, or gain new followers. That can help build your brand’s awareness.
Grab the attention of your prospect with X’s full-screen vertical video Ads. Vertical video is the fastest-growing segment of X, capturing roughly 20% of viewers’ total time spent on the platform.
X reports that users are up to seven times more likely to follow, repost, like, and click the URLs of vertical video ads, as compared to the same ads on their home feed.
For even more ways to align ads with premium video content, X offers ways to target ad display based on content categories, feed placement on Timelines or the Explore tab, or even livestream content.
Learn more about X Advertising for your business, and get to posting!
Consider adding YouTube PPC to your campaign, especially if you’re already using Google PPC management.
YouTube is one part of the Google Display Network with over 2.4 billion monthly users. This high number of users suggests that including YouTube in your ad campaign strategy makes sense.
If your business can create ads that’ll interest your audience and keep them from hitting “skip” you’re already winning.
Let’s look at some of the different YouTube ads.
These are likely the ads you are most familiar with. These ads have a little button that says “skip.” Clicking the button allows you to start or continue viewing a video on YouTube.
Often, users have to wait five seconds before they can skip. Five seconds isn’t much time to convince someone to stick around, so ensure your ad’s hook can capture your audience’s attention.
However, you shouldn't worry if users skip your ad within the first five seconds. When a user skips your ad in the first 5 seconds, you won’t have to pay for such views or clicks.
Since many people opt to skip ads on YouTube, advertisers have the option of creating non-skippable ads. If you think your creative is captivating enough to resonate with your target audience, this option may work.
Ensure you measure the results from your non-skippable ads to make the best use of your budget. If the results aren’t in your favor, revert to a skippable ad.
Discovery ads are what users see in the search results. As the second largest search engine, people watch over 1 billion hours of YouTube videos daily. You’ll want those ads appearing in search results too.
These ads will include a thumbnail and a few lines of text as a description. Since many people prefer visuals over text, this is an opportunity to get your audience to view your video instead of reading a competitor’s text resource.
PPC campaign management is all about researching, budgeting, testing, reporting, building on what works, and optimizing for the best ROI.
You don‘t have to do it alone. With the right tools and instructions I’ve outlined in this guide, you’ll be able to implement a PPC campaign that yields results for your business.
Keep in mind that there are a few things that will help you make the most of your efforts:
By keeping these tips in mind, you’ll be well on your way to running PPC campaigns that don’t just drive traffic — they drive meaningful growth for your business.
Editor's note: This post was originally published in May 2019 and has been updated for comprehensiveness.
