#And i mean you do get some of that qualitative data from the tags

[doppelnatur]

I just spent the past week reading a whole book that was on part about like triangulating quantitative with qualitative data and that you really can't draw a whole lot of conclusions from quantitative data alone esp when there's the question of how did the people interpret the questions, what motivated them to act the way they did what are other intersecting identities. But that being said this is just interesting.

[stackthedeck]

I made a survey about fanfiction bookmarking habits with the goal of finding out how people save and share fanfiction. I had 107 responses and 9 questions, two of which were completely qualitative, but 7 were quantitative with an option for qualitative responses. This was a rough initial survey and they're biased towards tumblr and tiktok users because those are the platforms I put them out on. This data should not be applied to the whole fan community, but they're interesting nonetheless

I promised y'all graphs so I'm going to throw them under the read more because oh boy

Analysis of the data but I encourage you to look at the results and draw your own conclusions: Fans tend to have some method of saving fanfics that they really enjoy. The bookmark feature on ao3 is the most used but it tends to be a passive action similar to pushing kudos rather than commenting or is used only for fics that are really special. If ao3 bookmarks aren't the primary means of saving a fic, downloading or bookmarking the tab tends to be the most common. Fans seem to be more open to talking about reading fanfic both online and with irl friends although this is still some level of secrecy around it. It seems social media has an impact on what fics get read

What is your primary way of bookmarking fanfic?

As you can see, people went crazy with the other option. I comb through those and sorted their responses into categories so the final data looks more like this:

the bookmark feature on ao3 -74

creating a browser bookmark -11

I don't bookmark fics often enough to think about it -8

writing the title and author down in a list somewhere -7

New tab -4

Download -2

Subscribing- 2

the rec feature on ao3 - 1

2. What are your other ways of bookmarking fanfic?

Similar to the last question, the other option was popular. Because this wasn't the primary way of saving fics, people could select multiple options. Here's how I summarized the data after sorting the other options

creating a browser bookmark -36

the bookmark feature on ao3 -29

writing the title and author down in a list somewhere -27

I don't bookmark fics often enough to think about it -15

the rec feature on ao3 -12

Downloading -6

Mark for later -4

Just keeping the tabs open -3

Ao3 history- 1

creating a collection -1

3. How do you organize your bookmarks?

Same procedure as the other questions

I don't, the tags the author used work for me- 87

I have my own tags such as "read" or "5k words"- 13

Little notes that aren't part of a larger organizational system- 9

I write my own summary of the fic- 8

I copy and paste the summary into the description -5

in my own list, I sort alphabetically- 5

Browser folders- 2

4. If you use your own tags can you give me some examples?

This was purely a free response and for the sake of privacy and brevity, I'm not going to publish what people wrote. I would summarize this by saying that the most common tag people add to bookmarks tends to be some sort of statement of quality like "oh my gosh I love this" or "five stars!" Other common tags are the length of the fic, the completion status and/or where the bookmaker left off while reading, and fandom. Bookmarkers will also add highly specific tags that the author didn't add or aren't filterable on the a03.

5. What is your primary way of finding fanfics?

Same procedure as the other graph questions. (Although I am curious if people know the difference between the search and the browse feature)

ao3 search feature- 53

ao3 browse feature- 39

Start with a specific tag, use filters -5

seeing them on some form of social media-4

fanfic rec lists- 3

other people's collections-3

6. What are your other ways of finding fanfics?

Same procedure as the other graph questions

fanfic rec lists- 71

seeing them on some form of social media- 61

other people's collections- 59

ao3 search feature- 38

ao3 browse feature- 26

Author reader enjoys- 4

Recs directly from friends- 3

google - 1

(yeah one respondent would google the type of fic they were looking for, I did that when I was still new to fandom, and it works)

7. How do you tell other people about the fanfic you read?

I have to acknowledge that I severely fumbled the bag on this question. There were a lot of similar "other" responses that I should have included as an option and so this graph looks really long.

my bookmarks are public- 46

I'd rather die than let other people know I read fanfic- 41

Telling friends through messaging or conversation-32

I make rec lists on social media-13

Discord- 4

I have a collection where I put all my favorite fics-3

Occasional posting-3

8. Do you feel the fandom of the fic you're reading affects your willingness to share it in some way?

This was really supposed to be a yes or no question and most people did have a yes or no response in the other section.

Yes- 72

No- 28

Depends on the person, not the fandom- 6

9. Feel free to tell me more about your fanfic reading habits here and/or suggest other questions that would be helpful for gathering data related to this

This was purely a free response and for the sake of privacy and brevity, I'm not going to publish what people wrote. Fans that don't read fanfic often or haven't been reading fic for a long time tend to view bookmarking a fic as a highly precise thing, while fans that read often and for many years tend to save anything they liked and would want to read again. People are also downloading fics more than I was expecting largely out of fear of deletion, but also so they can read on another device. People report being more likely to read a fic if it is promoted on social media in some form. there is also a significant amount of responses that report a level of shame around reading fanfic or specific tropes, but most that reported that also reported a willingness to engage with fic directly on ao3 to support authors.

[skaldish]

I'm not the original anon, but the infographic does seem quite unreliable. For instance, if in an explanation of how Dutch conversation works you're using "Dutch" as a descriptor of their debate, you've already lost much credibility in my eyes (since that adds no information and clarifies nothing without relying on stereotypes existing in the mind of the reader). Moreover, there is no clear indication of how the diagrams work, they are not consistent (why do some have string or circle parts while others on have rectangles?) and the shapes can lead to assumptions in the reader that don't seem to have an actual basis (perhaps there is a guide to them that I missed, or it is present in the original book, but if there is I haven't found it and the diagrams are quite unintuitive nonetheless). Also the way not all countries seem to be held to a consistent standard/have the same or similar conversation benchmarks accounted for and compared on their different levels just rubs me the wrong way.

Idk, I obviously don't have any sort of definitive proof that the information on the infographic is wrong or anything, I just think it's vague and misleading.

So here's the piece that's probably throwing you: The diagrams are different from graphs. Graphs need standardization because it's how you maintain the integrity of the quantitative data you're trying to express.

But this is qualitative data, because we're dealing with linguistics and language-interpretation. So instead of looking at the diagrams like you would a graph, look at them like you would look at abstract art.

The diagrams are using shapes to express the somatic experience of a conversation-style the same way a dancer uses movement to express the somatic experience of specific emotions. To put it another way, the diagrams are meant simulate what these conversation-styles feel like when you have them.

The point of doing this was to draw attention to the fact there are differences. This lends credibility to the argument the original article was making: That it's important to know there's a difference in how different cultures engage in business, because not only would this help prevent misunderstanding in an emerging global society, it also helps you avoid misinterpreting someone's attitude towards you or the business you're trying to conduct.

(For further clarity, the titles refer to the people associated with the culture/language/country in question, so "Dutch" refers to the Dutch people living in the Netherlands who speak Dutch, "Spanish" refers to the Spanish people living in Spain who speak Spanish, etc.)

I think what the OP was mad about was the tongue-in-cheek stereotyping used to characterize the conversations. They interpreted it as the author being bigoted and insulting.

But just because something can be interpreted that way doesn't mean it's correct. And they would have recognized that had they looked at the international reaction to the post in the notes.

Like...I go through my notifications, y'all, no matter how insane they get. If people from those countries/cultures were tagging the diagrams as insulting, I would have noticed and would have removed it.

However, I left it because the reactions have been positive. The international response is basically "LOL that's accurate," which had been my own reaction to the diagrams when comparing them to my own family's cultural backgrounds and conversation-styles.

I don't know much about the linguist who made these diagrams, but given the nature of his work, I think he probably knew what kind of humor would land with his global audience, at least at the time it was written.

[agencypartnerinteractive]

How To Stay on Top Of SERPs With SEO Split Tests

SEO is always an evolving process However, over the last few years, the practice has transformed more than it has ever been. Search engine rankings are getting more competitive, and Google continually tests new algorithms that make them harder to break. This means that if you wish to remain at the top of SERPs (search results pages of engines) you must have an approach that is quick to adapt and can keep up with the latest changesthis is the reason split tests are essential!

What Is an SEO Split Test?

In simple terms Simply put, the definition of an SEO split test occurs where you test various versions of the same page and then compare the results to determine which performs better. For instance, if you have two different versions of your homepage that are the same, with one exception aspect (such as headlines or an images) You can evaluate how they perform both individually and in comparison to each other.

Make new tests so that you can monitor what's working and what's not.

Make use of proven methods to create pages that rank highly

Why You Should Be Running an SEO Split Test

You've probably heard that the results of Google's search engine change constantly. This can be a bit frustrating as you feel like you're managing an SEO campaign However, there's something thrilling about ityou never know when a changes could help your SEO ranking.

If you are looking to make your website more efficient to get the highest amount of traffic the SEO split test must be a part of your plan. A split test allows you to examine different elements of your site without having to make any changes to the site.

How To Set Up Your First Split Test

Establish your test's parameters. It's the first thing to identify the purpose of your split-test and the metrics you'll employ to determine the success of your test. It could range from adding a few new email subscribers, to growing sales by 10%..

Create your goal-tracking code. You can do this in Google Analytics or another analytics platform you're currently using, or on your own website (in the latter case, it's going to be an JavaScript tag). The ideal is to use both!

Create lists of audience members for each version of your ad, and ensure they're separate campaigns (or in the event that they're not, you should at a minimum create separate groups of ads). It's possible to add different audiences according to location and demographics as well so that if one change over time, others don't be affected accidentally. For instance, if were working for an online shop that sells women's clothing online We could have two distinct audiences "Women 18-29" and "Women 30-59+'. Similar to the conversion goals. Setting them up in two different ways can aid in ensuring accuracy later in evaluating the results, since they will not affect one another directly.

What Makes a Good Topic For A Split Test?

Before you begin creating an exam split, it's essential to have an idea of what you'd like to take the test. Here are some questions to aid you in deciding on the most appropriate subject:

Do I want to try headlines?

It would be more beneficial If I tried different images?

Does I have page's landing page require improvements?

By asking yourself these questions, you'll make sure that the subject you select is meaningful and quantifiable. You'll be able better answer them after you've selected an area for the split-test!

How To Run an Effective Split Test Campaign With Google Analytics & Optimizely?

When you conduct tests There are two kinds of information you can collect either qualitative or quantitative. Qualitative data tends to be more subjective, whereas quantitative data is more objective.

Qualitative data allows you to gather feedback from your customers on their experiences with like and do not like about a particular web page or product. For instance, if you are interested in knowing what users consider the copy on your homepage and you want to know what they think, ask for feedback from them! One method to accomplish this is to include surveys at the end of your page or a chat feature on your website which asks visitors why they left the site without turning into a lead or a sale (and/or whether they were able to find the information they were seeking). In this instance it could be helpful to find out if a user was confused by a specific section of the site--and modify it so that the other visitors don't get confused also!

Quantitative data can be used to determine how your lead generation strategy is doing. For instance, if you would like to know the percentage of your visitors become leads on your website you can provide an opt-in page that requires their email address and name in exchange for a reward.

Conclusion

Split testing is an effective tool for any business, but it's essential to grasp the basics prior to attempting. There are a variety of ways to conduct an effective split test, which is why we suggest starting with a couple of tests before moving to higher levels from to. It is possible to use Google Analytics as well as Optimizely in conjunction to keep track of the results of all your tests, be aware that certain platforms provide more powerful capabilities in comparison to other when it comes to data collection and analysis.

Your website is at the heart in the marketing strategy. Agency Partner Interactive can assist you improve it to rank top of Google in terms of relevant search phrases and bring more customers to your company. The time to begin is now! Contact us today to schedule your no-cost consultation!

[program-800]

Exploring D:BH Fics (Part 6)

I continue investigating the text of DBH fics. Here, I talk a bit more about the word2vec model mentioned here.

Recap: Data was scraped from AO3 in mid-October. I removed any fics that were non-English, were crossovers and had less than 10 words. A small number of fics were missed out during the scrape - overall 13933 D:BH fics remain for analysis.

Part 1: Publishing frequency for D:BH with ratings breakdown Part 2: Building a network visualisation of D:BH ships Part 3: Topic modeling D:BH fics (retrieving common themes) Part 4: Average hits/kudos/comment counts/bookmarks received (split by publication month & rating) One-shots only. Part 5: Differences in word use between D:BH fics of different ratings Part 6: Word2Vec on D:BH fics (finding similar words based on word usage patterns) Part 7: Differences in topic usage between D:BH fics of different ratings Part 8: Understanding fanon representations of characters from story tags Part 9: D:BH character prominence in the actual game vs AO3 fics

Preface Before I start, do note that word2vec models (and the dimension reduction techniques in the visualisation, save for PCA) are still relatively unfamiliar to me versus the other stuff I’ve done. I’ll be writing what I understand so far, but I’m still doing readings and am far from an expert on any of this. Now that’s out of the way -

Relations between words come easy to us. We just kind of know that generally, words like ‘pain’ and ‘agony’ are more similar to each other than ‘pain’ and ‘apples’, for example. It’s not as easy for a computer though - text data has to be preprocessed into a numerical form to do any quantitative analysis; how would you tell a PC that ‘pain’ and ‘agony’ are closer to each other than ‘apples’?

Many applications still work off a bag-of-words model (i.e., some form of word count). It sounds crude but it really still provides a rather solid baseline! But for the purpose of this part (finding similar words), a bag-of-words won’t work at all. For example, the sentences: ‘There was blood, he was in pain and screaming’ and ‘There was blood, he was in agony and screaming’. ‘Pain’ and ‘agony’ would just be counted as different words (as with any usage of ‘apple’) - there’s no information encoded in the word count about their obvious similarity.

Word2vec models can help with this. By working with the assumption that words that share similar contexts (i.e., surrounding words) should have similar meanings, these models represent each word as a unique numerical vector (typically hundreds of dimensions), by either (1) learning to predict a word of interest based on its surrounding words, or (2) learning to predict surrounding words based on a word of interest. With these vectors (word embeddings), we can then perform calculations; for example, calculating cosine similarity to find the most similar words.

I’d like to highlight that an effect of this assumption is that we don’t necessarily get synonyms only in our eventual lists of similar words. The similarity derived from word2vec is far broader - antonyms would also be considered similar under this assumption.

Much code for this part taken from Gensim’s tutorial.

1. Preprocessing. Very simple preprocessing done here. Given that surrounding words are important to the training of the word2vec model, I did not remove names and stopwords. I just removed the chapter/work text and newline indicators.

Then, I tokenised (split) each fic down into its sentences. I then applied Gensim’s simple_preprocess function to each sentence to get word2vec-ready input. The function further tokenises each sentence into individual words, lowercasing them all and ignoring words that are too short/long (at least 2 characters, no more than 15).

There were 6,817,169 sentences for the word2vec model to learn from.

2. Training the word2vec model. I used Gensim for this. I did not set a maximum vocabulary size for the model to work on, but I did set a minimum count of 100 (i.e., the word has to appear in at least 100 sentences to be kept for training). This left me with 18,733 unique words from the original 133189 unique words.

I used the skip-gram model, which learns to predict surrounding words given a word of interest. The window size was set to 10; this affects the size of the ‘context’ that the model’s working with (i.e., look at the 10 words before and after each word of interest in a sentence). I set the vector size to 200 - each of the 18,733 words was thus represented as a 1x200 dimension vector at the end of training. The model was allowed to run for 20 iterations.

3. Visualisation. Since it’s impossible for most humans to visualise at a level of 200 dimensions (please contact me if you can), I used tensorflow’s projector to visualise the 18,733 embeddings in a 3D space.

There are three options for dimension reduction - PCA, tSNE, UMAP. This notebook from the authors of UMAP show how these algorithms differ in their final visualisation output.

PCA is linear and provides a lower-dimension representation that captures the most amount of variance possible from the original representation. It is deterministic and results don’t differ across runs.

tSNE and UMAP (from what I understand) are non-linear, will change across different runs, and are sensitive to hyperparameters. I’ve mostly seen tSNE used as a useful pre-work visualisation tool to check if there is actual separability in the data before going on with clustering, etc. tSNE is focused more on local structure and doesn’t preserve global distances (so you can’t say a further cluster is more dissimilar than a nearer one).

UMAP is a really new algorithm that seems to be a contending alternative to tSNE. I don’t know enough to comment - honestly I went with UMAP for this visualisation just because it ran faster. It does seem to generally put the words that have higher similarity (as defined by cosine similarity) in the same local space.

Feel free to try the tSNE setting on the projector, but do note it’ll take a while for the result to stabilise!

Final notes Regarding model training, I’m not too sure if 100 sentences was too liberally low a count and if a window of 10 was too large. I’d like to continue experimenting with this.

Also, while the model appears to find qualitatively intuitive ‘similar’ words, that’s far from the only way to evaluate it:

1) I read that one way to test the model’s quality is to look at semantic relations, e.g. ‘man’ is to ‘boy’ as ‘woman’ is to ‘girl’, ‘Moscow’ is to ‘Russia’ as ‘Washington’ is to ‘America’. I ran a few checks and they weren’t that great. I (currently) suspect two reasons. Firstly - more data and more hyperparameter tweaking needed. Secondly - fics may just have a rather different focus/relations from regular Wikipedia/news corpora, and it’s being reflected here.

2) Another way to evaluate the model is to see the performance of the learned embeddings on some downstream task like text classification. I haven’t thought of a follow-up task, but it would be interesting to pursue this.

[scifigeneration]

Don't be fooled by fake images and videos online

by Hany Farid

Nope, not a real news report from Hurricane Irma. Snopes

One month before the 2016 U.S. presidential election, an “Access Hollywood” recording of Donald Trump was released in which he was heard lewdly talking about women. The then-candidate and his campaign apologized and dismissed the remarks as harmless.

At the time, the authenticity of the recording was never questioned. Just two years later, the public finds itself in a dramatically different landscape in terms of believing what it sees and hears.

Advances in artificial intelligence have made it easier to create compelling and sophisticated fake images, videos and audio recordings. Meanwhile, misinformation proliferates on social media, and a polarized public may have become accustomed to being fed news that conforms to their worldview.

All contribute to a climate in which it is increasingly more difficult to believe what you see and hear online.

There are some things that you can do to protect yourself from falling for a hoax. As the author of the upcoming book “Fake Photos,” to be published in August, I’d like to offer a few tips to protect yourself from falling for a hoax.

1. Check if the image has already been debunked

Many fake images are recirculated and have previously been debunked. A reverse image search is a simple and effective way to see how an image has previously been used.

Unlike a typical internet search in which keywords are specified, a reverse image search on Google or TinEye can search for the same or similar images in a vast database.

Reverse image search engines cannot exhaustively index the vastly expansive, ever-changing content on the internet. So, even if the image is on the internet, there is no guarantee that it will have been found by the site. In this regard, not finding an image doesn’t mean it’s real – or fake.

You can improve the likelihood of a match by cropping the image to contain only the region of interest. Because this search requires you to upload images to a commercial site, take care when uploading any sensitive images.

2. Check the metadata

Digital images often contain rich metadata that can provide clues as to their provenance and authenticity.

Metadata is data about data. The metadata for a digital image includes the camera make and model; camera settings like aperture size and exposure time; the date and time when the image was captured; the GPS location where the image was captured; and much more.

EXIF data offers clues about this photograph of a flower. Original image from Andreas Dobler/Wikimedia, CC BY-SA

The importance of the date, time and location tags is self-evident. Other tags may have a similarly straightforward interpretation. For example, photo-editing software may introduce a tag that identifies the software, or date and time tags that are inconsistent with other tags.

Several tags provide information about camera settings. A gross inconsistency between the image properties implied by these settings and the actual properties of the image provides evidence that the image has been manipulated. For example, the exposure time and aperture size tags provide a qualitative measure of the light levels in the photographed scene. A short exposure time and small aperture suggest a scene with high light levels taken during the day, while a long exposure time and large aperture suggest a scene with low light levels taken at night or indoors.

The metadata is stored in the image file and can be readily extracted with various programs. However, some online services strip out much of an image’s metadata, so the absence of metadata is not uncommon. When the metadata is intact, however, it can be highly informative.

3. Recognize what can and can’t be faked

When assessing if an image or video is authentic, it is important to understand what is and what is not possible to fake.

For example, an image of two people standing shoulder to shoulder is relatively easy to create by splicing together two images. So is an image of a shark swimming next to a surfer. On the other hand, an image of two people embracing is harder to create, because the complex interaction is difficult to fake.

While modern artificial intelligence can produce highly compelling fakes – often called deepfakes – this is primarily restricted to changing the face and voice in a video, not the entire body. So it is possible to create a good fake of someone saying something that they never did, but not necessarily performing a physical act that they never did. This, however, will surely change in the coming years.

4. Beware of sharks

After more than two decades in digital forensics, I’ve come to the conclusion that viral images with sharks are almost always fake. Beware of spectacular shark photos.

5. Help fight misinformation

Fake images and videos have led to horrific violence around the globe, manipulation of democratic elections and civil unrest. The prevalence of misinformation also now allows anyone to cry “fake news” in response to any news story with which they disagree.

I believe that it’s critical for the technology sector to make broad and deep changes to content moderation policies. The titans of tech can no longer ignore the direct and measurable harm that has come from the weaponization of their products.

What’s more, those who are developing technology that can be used to easily create sophisticated fakes must think more carefully about how their technology can be abused and how to put some safeguards in place to prevent abuse. And, the digital forensic community must continue to develop tools to quickly and accurately detect fake images, videos and audio.

Lastly, everyone must change how they consume and spread content online. When reading stories online, be diligent and consider the source; the New York Evening (a fake news site) is not the same as The New York Times. Always be cautious of the wonderfully satirical stories from The Onion that often get mistaken for real news.

Check the date of each story. Many fake stories continue to recirculate years after their introduction, like a nasty virus that just won’t die. Recognize that many headlines are designed to grab your attention – read beyond the headline to make sure that the story is what it appears to be. The news that you read on social media is algorithmically fed to you based on your prior consumption, creating an echo chamber that exposes you only to stories that conform to your existing views.

Finally, extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence. Make every effort to fact-check stories with reliable secondary and tertiary sources, particularly before sharing.

About The Author:

Hany Farid is  Professor of Computer Science at Dartmouth College and is the author of Photo Forensics.

MIT Press provides funding as a member of The Conversation US.

This article is republished from our content partners at The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. 

[makebecool]

What are the best tips for increasing conversion rate?

If you are reading this page, it means that you have faced the problem of low conversions on your site. You know that there is a problem, but you do not know how to solve it. Sounds so familiar? Be patient and take care of the conversion optimization process. Below you can read: ✓ what CRO is; ✓ why CRO is important for small businesses; ✓ reasons for the conversions drop; ✓ tools and methods of how to improve conversions.

What is conversion rate optimization?

Conversion optimization is an analysis of existing traffic on your site in order to determine user behavior as well as the interface weaknesses and strengths, and also the low conversion rate reasons and how to increase your conversions. This is work with data on your site.

There is more than one conversion rate optimization definition. As for me, CRO is the process of optimizing a site, as well as the income, a number of leads, conversions, based on quantitative and qualitative data through introducing hypotheses by changing UI / UX, text, graphic content, etc.

As the owner of an online store, you should have a basic knowledge of how to increase conversions, even if you are not going to do it by yourself. What for? You should know and understand your client in order to serve him the goods in the form he needs. Satisfying each customer entails the dissemination of information about your product, which affects the increase in the number of new and repeats sales.

Let's clear it at once, conversion rate optimizer is not attracting new customers as a part of marketing. These are related processes, but they have different goals. An advertising expert attracts users to your site, while a conversion rate optimization consultant determines the quality of visitors and their behavior on the pages.

Why is CRO analysis so important for small businesses?

An online store owner is concerned about the issue of attracting traffic to his website. Okay, you got traffic, and Google started to bring it up, but do you know what to do next? Traffic is the users with whom, as in real life, you need to communicate and motivate to make a purchase. How to do it? With the help of high-quality and sophisticated content on the site. To create high-quality and motivating content you need to know the needs, requests of your user and his behavior on the site. You can do it in two ways:

to conduct a survey among your customers;

to use the tools to determine the behavior on the site.

We use different analytics tools and user surveys depending on the client’s budget. Depending on a budget, you can choose the right tool that will cope with the task at the proper level. But before turning to CRO guide tools, let's consider at the reasons why the conversions drop.

Why does your conversion rate drop?

This is a question disturbing all online stores owners. But let's consider it closely. The drop in conversions takes place when the users leave the site.

Here are some factors that affect this process:

1. Lack of confidence. We conducted our own research and identified the top issues that make your customers concerned before leaving your site:

Why should I send an advance payment for the goods?

What are the terms and conditions of delivery?

The site has no reviews, maybe this seller is unreliable?

How to contact the seller?

The customer is looking for this information in your online store. It is important for him to know that you are a reliable seller, so if the site does not have this data, the customer will go to your competitors’.

2. Inconvenient and incomprehensible interface. The site should work correctly on all devices. This rule has been mentioned more than once, but we decided to focus your attention on it again. Otherwise, the client will get tired of adjusting to errors on your site and he will leave. Also, each block in your interface should carry some meaning. If you overload the interface with unnecessary elements, the client will forget why he went to your site and will leave without a purchase.

3. Lack of value. Why are they so expensive? After all, the sites of their competitors are similar, but the products are cheaper. I’d better order from their competitors’ site. You have to understand that every third visitor of your online store has a similar train of thought. This is okay. However, to prevent a number of similar questions, tell your client about the value of your product. Prove that you have the best goods with the help of the content on your site. To achieve the best result, I recommend that you should contact a designer for some help.

In practice, there may be even more problems, that’s why the phase of collecting and analyzing information is so important.

How can Sellers increase conversion rates?

Conversion increase is a phased and carefully planned process which is based on working with website data. Before you solve the problem with low conversions, decide at what stage they are dropping. You can identify the weaknesses in the interface of your site only using data collection and analytics with the help of a number of tools. For example, you can use the basic Google Analytics tool that allows you to track conversion data and users on your site. We also recommend that you should install Google Tag Manager, - with its help you can track events on the site, install heat maps, and record client behavior on the site on video. These actions will allow you to find the main reasons for drops. I describe the whole list of online conversion optimization tools that we use for analytics below. I advise that you should start with the analysis of weak points in your store, otherwise what are you going to optimize?

Methods how to improve conversions

We have described you a conversion-based optimization theory, but let's see how it works in practice. Since 2017 we have been working with an interesting eCommerce project -  zinvowatches.com. Zinvo is a Swiss watchmaking company with a network of offices in North America, Europe, the Middle East, and Asia.

The owner of the company addressed us with the problem of declining sales and poor performance. The task that our partner has set for us was to find out the reason for the conversions dropping and build a strategy to improve this situation.

To quickly solve this problem, we have worked through the following steps:

Analysis of the funnel and the user's path from entering the site up to making a purchase. As a result of the analysis, we found out that the majority of users make a purchase without visiting the product page, but they add the product to the cart from the categories page.

We also identified problems and hypothesized how we would increase conversions.

After conducting the A/B test, we determined that our hypotheses were successful and incorporated the results into the project.

There are no special methods, just collect, structure and qualitatively analyze all possible data. With well-developed hypotheses - the results of A / B tests will be several times more successful.

How can I increase conversions?

Pretty simple. Below I will describe how to monitor conversion rate optimization and the conversion optimization strategy that we use, and you will decide on a sales improvement plan for your online business:

1. Install event tracking tools on your website.

2. Start collecting data - quantitative and qualitative. For a quality report you will need the following data:

traffic sources;

site loading speed;

the effectiveness of the main page: which blocks are clickable and which do not attract the attention of users;

user path after visiting the main page;

on which page you are collecting the most conversions;

on which page the users leave your site;

pay page performance. Make sure that it is working properly and there is no content on it that distracts the user from the key goal.

This is only part of the information that will allow you to build hypotheses to improve the site. Hypotheses should also be generated correctly.

Having found out the main places of drops - collect qualitative data on the behavior of customers on the site.

Basing on the data obtained, generate your hypotheses to improve the site.

Prepare several types of conversion content.

Run A/B testing your hypotheses. Not every test will be successful, but you can formulate useful conclusions from every failed test.

Choose the version of the site that brings the best results.

Tools to improve conversion rates

I have compiled a list of effective tools that I use in the process of work and I advise that you should test them. Not all of them will suit you, but many will be pretty useful.

Tools for collecting quantitative data analytics:

- Google Analytics

- Matomo

- Mixpanel

- Kissmetrics  

- VWO

Tag Managers

These tools are needed to track events that are not basic ones (clicks on buttons and product cards, filling out forms, etc.)

Google Tag Manager

Matomo tag manager  

Tools for installing heat maps, recording screens and user polls.

With the help of these conversion rate optimization services, you will be able to understand the behavior of customers on the site, as well as determine the reason for their leaving the pages.

Сrazy egg

Hotjar

Lucky Orange

VWO  

Matomo

Cryptocurrency website case: how it works in practice

The owner of an online cryptocurrency store contacted our team. The reason which bothered him was low conversions. Like most of our clients, the store owner realized they there was a problem, but still, he did not know how to solve it. To help him, we acted according to the plan described above: we began collecting and analyzing quantitative data from the site. At this stage, our experts have determined the quality of traffic, sales potential, the conversion rate of each channel.

It turned out that a cryptocurrency wallet was the main channel for sales.  At the time of the analysis, the policy of many advertising services, including Facebook, was rather rigid in relation to cryptocurrency, so our client did not receive traffic from advertising.

We found out that 90% of users who logged on to the site instantly left it, that is, the engagement coefficient was almost zero.

At the main drop points, we installed heat maps, as well as some surveys.

According to the surveys, it became clear that visitors wanted to buy cryptocurrency, but not the goods associated with it.

The same problem was found in heat maps, as well as screen recordings. The fact is that the site had two menus: the first was the store itself, and the second was the group of sites with a large button - when it was clicked the uses got to another site.  Unfortunately, we were not allowed to solve this problem. After 50 entries, it became clear that users did not understand where they were and got lost in the menu categories. That is, the site had problems with navigation.

Basing on the most popular products and screen recordings data, we decided to change the design of the main page. The changes also affected the menu: the category names were corrected to clearer ones, we also applied card sorting. We changed the banner to a more understandable one - it became clear what the site is selling. Then we identified two most popular products and one of the important categories - merch (t-shirts, caps, etc.), which was not shown before.

In the end, after a month of work on the site, we received the following data.

The obtained figures illustrate the result of our team’s productive work and an increase in customer sales.

As you can see, it is quite difficult to find a perfect solution that will allow you to maximize the conversion rate. You will have to do a lot of tests and test everything from images and text up to the design of the layout itself. But this is the essence of conversion optimization.

Having thoroughly examined the landing page conversion optimization rate of your online store, evaluating each of its components for how well it meets the needs and characteristics of your customers, you can improve the quantity and quality of leads. You can not only increase your sales and income but also have returns on investment. And the last tip: trust only the numbers and reliable data on customer behavior on the site. Relying only on intuition and untested decisions, you can make mistakes that will cost you a lot. Test and improvise! If you are confused about the steps or you need some help, please, don’t hesitate to contact us. We will find a solution to your problem asap.

[cresconnectuk]

Conversion Rate Optimisation – 5 Ways to Get Started

“How do I generate more leads?” – You must’ve asked this question a million times before. The most common answers you get are increasing your PPC budget, putting more effort into SEO, or investing in social media. But what if you are on a limited budget or if your organic traffic growth is in a rut? This is exactly when you need to focus on Conversion Rate Optimisation (CRO).

Following are some ways in which you can start your CRO process:

Step 1 — Set up for positive outcomes

• Decide what you want – Set KPIs that can be studied at each testing cycle, guaranteeing a measurable way to track your progress.

• Pick the right tools – Analytics tools enable you to form an analysis and design strategies from the data they provide. Google Analytics and Google Tag Manager are well-known and free tools that many people use. Other recommended tools are Google Analytics, Mixpanel, Qualaroo, Optimisely, Kissmetrics, and CrazyEgg.

• Define your expectations – Be mindful of the assumptions you make when it comes to users before you carry out any tests. The expectations you define will serve to act as fundamentals for your propositions further going down the line.

Step 2 — Evaluate before acting

• Study site analytics – Analytics reporting offers you the bigger picture of how well the site is doing, with the addition of user testing reports and qualitative data.

• Get qualitative data – Use analytics tools that give you qualitative information and intend to carry out user interviews to notify about user behaviours and help you get a strong hypothesis.

• Decide what you have to optimise – Studying all the qualitative and quantitative data, you can determine the areas you need to test, and how you should go about carrying this out.

Step 3— Acquire the CRO approach

• Find the key areas to test — This process might contain high traffic pages, buttons, layouts, forms or headlines. Testing these specifics will make testing more correct and worth all the efforts.

• Collaborate with the right people — It’s extremely critical that you team up with the right team members when working through CRO. Right from engineering and marketing to sales and design, each team has some valuable insight to offer in CRO.

• Generate a testable hypothesis — Use the analytics tools to inform and evaluate how users engage with your website enabling you to form hypotheses on how to improve the experience.

Step 4—Keep on Testing

• Stay focused – Keep a systematic and logical approach, altering only one variable at a time for control and precision.

• Document every little thing – For efficacy and best practice, ensure that all stages of the testing process are documented for future references.

• Failures and wins – 82% of all tests fail, which means only 18% of testing is valid.

Right hypothesis but the wrong solution? Glad you tested it beforehand. Wrong hypothesis? Now you have eliminated one probability and can move on to the next. A preparedness to be wrong can mean long-term success.

Step 5—Implement and optimise

• No jumping to conclusions – Make sure you get enough traffic for solid test results — the smaller the project, the longer this process can take.

• Analyse the results – All insights work to notify and prioritise your backlog. They can help you to know which changes are not necessary and which are not.

• Decide on the future – Sit back, take the time to reflect, and analyse every step of the process. If this test didn’t work, find the fault — was the theory wrong, or was it connected to the nature of your testing process?

To optimise is to repeatedly reach for better outcomes, and doing this can be the difference between success and failure.

[clictadigital]

Why Free SEO Audits & Tools Can Actually Cost You More On The Long Run (Part 2)

The Difference Between Paid & Free SEO Audits

A good SEO won’t do website audits for free. They might take a look at your site to make a general impression, but they won’t spend time digging in too deep. Instead, they will make an offer for a detailed audit.

Why?

Audits are at the core of any search engine optimization strategy. They contour where you’re at right now and they dictate where you’re going to.

Let’s go back to the doctor analogy. A doctor has to find out what’s wrong with you right now but also tells you what you have to do to fix your problems. Getting mistreated will usually end up in lost time, more pain and empty wallets.

The problem with free SEO audits is that many people offer them in hope of hooking a client. They ‘discover’ basic issues that most websites have and then use them to enhance the fear factor in order to sell their services.

In the end, the truth is that fixing minor issues doesn’t pay off the bills. Rankings & sales do.

Most free SEO audits out there lack essential things such as direction, goals and target audience. Without understanding that, the chances of your website increasing in rankings are dim.

Even with paid SEO Tools, you’ll still need someone who knows how to analyze the data and recommend specific actions.

But since so many people have started using these free tools and searching for them, it was inevitable that the market would satisfy the demand. A high number of free SEO tools started to wonder around the internet.

The truth is that 99.9% of the free audit offers you will get for your site are probably done using free, one click SEO audit tools. You put in the URL of a website, you click a button and it analyzes your website.

I have nothing against these tools. But if someone gives you for free something that you can get for free anyway… then I have a little problem.

These tools might be useful for a small, freshly created website with very small budget. It’s good for example to know that you need a good server or that you shouldn’t upload big image files. But the owner will usually be more than happy to do the research himself in order to save money. However, I highly believe we should all do what we’re best at, so if you don’t know what you’re doing, you’re better off hiring an expert!

Free SEO audit tools can come in handy. However, on the long run, if you want to do something serious with your business and website, they are often misleading.

Here’s why, specifically:

Let’s say you want to do an SEO audit and you search for ‘free audit tools’. You decide to test multiple ones, because they’re free. Most of them, if not all, will eventually give a result similar to this one:

Free SEO Audit results How Most Free Website Analysis Tools Work

The score usually analyses one page instead of taking a look at the entire site. If you get 30% score, you’ll see 100% as your goal. However, remember that 100% scores don’t pay the bills (at least not for you, but they can pay it for the ones offering you that free audit).

It’s usually the same with all free tools. You might know for example that PageSpeed Insights is often used to determine the technical status of your site. However, the tool often focuses on things that aren’t the most effective for SEO.

For example, caching external sources is not possible, yet the tool still drops your score if you have external resources that are uncached, even from Google itself (such as Analytics Tags). Another popular thing is to use modern file types for images, although many browsers and platforms don’t fully support them yet.

So an SEO might hook you in with a free audit, then tell you your score is 30% and that you need SEO services. It fixes most of the things (which by the way, your niece or nephew can do) by installing some plugins on your site and then shows you a new 90% score, green lights everywhere. That’s one hour of work and it should be paid accordingly!

Having scores to determine a website’s ‘health status’ isn’t all that bad. In fact, we have one of our own:

Technical SEO Audit Tool

However, in the left side you can see how the tool has separate sections for things such as Indexability, Content, Architecture and Performance. There you’ll find detailed explanations on what exactly you should prioritize and how you can fix the issues.

Most free tools out there do the big mistake of simply counting the number of backlinks and rate your link profile after that.

For example, if your site has 0 backlinks, your offsite score might be 0. But if it has 1000 links, it will say that you have good activity and that your link profile is awesome.

That’s very misleading!

What’s actually important is how qualitative those links are. Are they coming from relevant domains? Are they spammy? That’s when a tool like the Unnatural Link Detection tool comes in handy!

unnatural links tool

But analyzing links takes time and resources. You have to crawl the web and use servers and tons of processing power to come up with the results and not have to wait for months to get them. That’s why, unfortunately, you won’t get it for free (only a trial, which you can try).

And even with this tool, you’ll still have to analyze the results and figure out what the issue actually is. What led to this situation? How can it be avoided? Should you disavow the links or focus instead on building more quality ones?. These are all answers no tool can give you directly and accurately.

If someone’s going to give you a free recipe for your site to grow #1, I’d bet they won’t do it for free.

In the future, it’s possible that AI tools and very advanced software will be able to give you the perfect solution to getting to #1. It’s possible that it will choose the right competitors, analyze and compare the rankings, come up with the best keywords and content ideas, fix all technical issues in a blink of an eye and then even give you a massage.

However, I highly doubt you’ll find that for free and, by then, Google will probably be even more advanced and complex.

Why You Should NOT Settle For a Free SEO Audit

Free SEO audits are like Romanian mechanics. They all say something about your car for free, but none of what they say is actually the problem and they end up replacing unnecessary things over and over again. Paid SEO audits are like German mechanics. They won’t say anything until you pay them fairly, but once you’ve paid they tell you the exact problem and fix it.

Here’s why you shouldn’t choose to waste your time with free SEO audits:

You can probably do it yourself in less than 1 hour It distracts you from what’s actually important (better rankings) It wastes you time (you’ll probably end up with 10 free SEO audits) You risk actually harming your site (i.e. removing important * useful JS for 100% score on the tool) It can cost you more on the long run

If you’re settling for the wrong goals, you will waste time hoping for rankings. Meanwhile, you’ll lose all the traffic and sales you could get if properly auditing your site. You will focus on things that are not actually important. You will obsess over getting 100% which means nothing for your site. I could show you plenty of sites that rank high and get traffic and sales but have low scores on free SEO tools.

Most of the time, loading times is what’s important. You can have big images and plenty of JS, as long as your site loads in under 1-3 seconds, you’re probably good go. For example, what would a photographer say if you ask him to compress the images on his site?

Paid SEO Audits & Tools might cost you less on the long run!

There’s something you can do to protect yourself from these free offers. You will easily differentiate people that actually know what they’re doing from people that just want to make a quick buck.

Here’s what you have to do:

Before asking any SEO consultant for an opinion, fix the basic stuff yourself. Even if you do it yourself, is not free. You’ll spend the time, so it’s not actually free.

However, this way you can fix some of the most basic things. For example, image compression. If you get a very low score on tools like Google PageSpeed Insights, GT Metrix or high loading times on tools like PingDom Site Speed Test, chances are high that you’re using big images on your site.

gt metrix performance tool

The fix is as simple as installing an image compression plugin or downloading all your images from your server, compressing them using tools like Tiny PNG and then uploading them back (keep the same file names and also backup your site before you make any changes).

All other problems there are usually fixable with some plugins. Cache issues? Add a cache plugin. Minify issues? Add a code minification plugin. You’ll never get 100% score and you shouldn’t focus on that. For example, sometimes you really need to use external resources, such as JS codes for e-mail marketing or advertising. If they aren’t cached, you’ll still get a lower score, when in fact, your site doesn’t have that issue.

This way you can protect yourself from SEOs that are just trying to lure you in with the Free Audit bone and actually pick a good SEO.

If those SEO tools mentioned above hit scores of 90% plus, chances are you will demoralize them. If your score is 26%, they will be able to say “You need to fix this and that and that and this is how much it hurts your website and blahblah”.

However, if someone offers you a detailed, 40 pages manually written PDF file on which they’ve spent tens of hours of research, then you should probably take the offer. Although I highly doubt that it’s going to be for free.

If you’re an SEO consultant, stop doing free audits! Learn to do a serious SEO audit that will actually help your clients.

Small business owners which don’t have resources will usually take the deal if the audit is professionally made. They need search engine optimization services anyway and you need to audit the site anyway before you know what you should do. As for bigger companies, they usually have their own team for execution so the audit will actually be the only thing they really need.

If you want something to assist you in auditing a website, you can try the CognitiveSEO Package. It contains all the required tools for a good audit, from Keyword Research to Technical Audit, Link Audit and Rank Tracking tools. Not only that, but you’ll also be able to schedule reports directly to your clients’ e-mail to notify them about the progress.

One of our team members will assist you in analyzing your website to determine exactly which steps will actually help you improve your rankings.

Conclusion

SEO Audits are an essential part of your SEO & Marketing Strategy. You should always audit your website from time to time to make sure things are good and going to the right direction.

Free website analysis & SEO audit tools can help you make a quick overview on the website, but they won’t actually help you define your strategy.

What’s your experience with free SEO tools? Do you use them? How much do they help to positively impact the rankings of your clients’ websites in the Google search results? What do you include in your SEO audits? Do you give them for free? Let us know in the comments section!

[iwantunique]

Most Popular Christmas Presents 2019

Most Popular Christmas Presents 2019: Christmas holiday shopping can be a mess and at the same time a headache too; because even after so much of plannings, preparations on your shopping list, there’s no guarantee that your Christmas gift ideas will be a huge hit under the Christmas tree! People who even have everything will admire these latest and chic gift ideas. But why worrying so much when we guarantee you the most popular Christmas presents 2019, this very season!  Without further looking, shop from our picks of the best Christmas gifts 2019 as you won’t be able to deny the uniqueness of these gifts which you’ll be gifting to your loved ones.  These popular selections will still land perfectly to assure that your research and selection for the best gifts to your family and friends were top-notch.  Do direct shopping from your website crowded with the most popular Christmas presents 2019 to witness stylish trendy ideas for your mom, dad, wife, husband, friends, co-workers, and many more people that you love in your life. You’ll be lucky enough if these best unique gifts won’t burn a hole in your pocket and also are the best affordable finds that you’ll ever find.  Check out our gift guide which makes a full-proof memorable day of your special ones with these most popular Christmas presents 2019. About Most popular Christmas presents 2019 1.Women's Printed Tassel Open front Poncho Cape Cardigan Wrap Shawl About This Most Popular Christmas Presents 2019: 50% polyester & 50% acrylic.The fabric is soft and thick. It's reversible, cozy and warm. The generous size to keep you warm, a great alternative to coat or jacket.This Multi Pattern Poncho is Great for Year Round Wear for the Ultimate Fashionist.The painted design will reveal your unique glamour and the original tailoring will show your elegance.Free size:130cm/51.1inchX150cm/59inch.

Promising review: "This thing is absolutely awesome. It looks exactly like the pictures - I definitely received exactly what was described. It’s warm, nice and flowy, a nice long length. I’m 5���9” and in the back, it stops around the back of my thighs (covers my back end perfectly). Which is perfect for me, but I’d imagine if you’re on the shorter side, it may be too long for you. But if you’re a fellow tall girl, you’re in luck (: it’s really soft and cozy! " I immediately put it on and fell in love. I can’t wait to order more in different patterns. And (I ordered the pink-ish colored one with the Aztec print on the back and black and white trimmed edges. It looks identical to the photo) also, I’m wearing black leggings right now and I’m not experiencing any shedding from this material what so ever. Maybe the other commenters just didn’t have the best luck, but, all is well here. --Rachel Get it from Amazon for $24.80 2. Me DNA Test - Health + Ancestry Personal Genetic Service Me PGS test includes health predisposition and carrier status reports. Health predisposition reports include both reports that meet FDA requirements for genetic health risks and the 23andMe Type 2 Diabetes health predisposition report which is based on 23andMe research and has not been reviewed by the FDA. The use of qualitative genotyping to detect select clinically relevant variants in the genomic DNA of adults from saliva for the purpose of reporting and interpreting genetic health risks and reporting carrier status. It is not intended to diagnose any disease. Your ethnicity may affect the relevance of each report and how your genetic health risk results are interpreted. Each genetic health risk report describes if a person has variants associated with a higher risk of developing a disease, but does not describe a person's overall risk of developing the disease.

Promising review: "Excellent, but I would get the $99 kit over the $199 one. Then go to Promethease.com and dna.land.com and import your results (when they're available from 23andMe), For $5.00 they give you loads of medical and other misc. insights from your genetic information. Importing is quick and easy, do it right from the Promethease website (links to 23andMe directly and grabs your data. DNA.land requires you to upload data yourself). Just be sure to download a copy of the final results to your computer for future reference (as Promethease will automatically delete information from their servers after 4 months). DNA.LAND is free (it's a research project) well worth the extra effort and produces some more interesting results."--Ken Get it from Amazon for $199.00 3. Wooden Family Birthday Reminder Calendar Board About This Most Popular Christmas Presents 2019: What You Get:1x Birthday Tracker Plaque, 50x Wooden Circles, 50x Wooden Hearts, 100x Metal Ring Fasteners, 1x Jute Twine, 1x Wall Utility Hook. PLEASE NOTE: Markers are not included.It Keeps All Family Birthdays In One Place! Help Grandmother & Grandfather & Grandson & Granddaughter & Kids & Mother & Father & Mother-in-law & Father-in-law Keep Track of everyone’s Birthdays. Do not worry anymore that they are having trouble remembering the family’s birthdays.Classroom Birthday Display: Visible to remember birthdays. You can use this birthday calendar to track students’ birthdays. Write all their names and birthdays on the wooden circles and hearts, hang it on the wall, and you won’t forget!Funs Gifts of Grandparents & Grandkids & Parents & Children for Mother Day & Father Day & Children’s Day. Also available for Christmas Gifts and Birthday Presents!Visible to Remember Family and Friends Birthdays. If You Have A Large Family, this is exactly what you need to keep track of all the family birthdays & anniversaries & special events & important dates.

Promising review: "Excellent quality, awesome customer service. I had ordered a similar item from a different company and it was basically junk! This one DOES Come with MARKERS, wall hook & hanging rope, heart & circle tags with connecting rings. Makes a perfect & unique gift! Very pleased with this purchase and I'm kind of jealous of the person I'm giving it to now lol"--Tracy Eilts Get it from Amazon for $20.01 4. My Favorite Child Gave Me This Cup An awesome and useful gift to coffee lovers or tea drinkers for Mother's Day, Christmas, Hanukkah, holidays, bday, inexpensive holiday gift, cute gift basket, valentine’s day, father’s day, your anniversary, white elephant gift exchange, secret Santa, work party, retirement, inappropriate naughty humor, 30th 40th 50th 60th 65th 70th 75th 80th gift, funniest creative small gifts. About This Most Popular Christmas Presents 2019: Perfect Novelty Gift：20 oz double-wall stainless steel coffee mug tumbler with the funny message, “ my favorite child gave me this cup” print on the front to remind them that they are celebrating the father's day and mother's day.The Perfect Gift For Mom&Dad: our mom&dad, you're my favorite mom&dad funny tumbler makes a cute present for a mom from her child; reminds her that she is your favorite every time she uses the tumbler.Premium Quality And Double Wall Vacuum Insulated：made only from the highest quality premium 304 18/8 food-grade stainless steel, highly resistant to rust and break, and easy to clean by hand.those funny travel wine tumbler is finished with high-quality printing. our double-wall insulation protects temperature for up to 9 hours cold and 3 hours hot.Durable and BPA FREE: constructed of 18/8 food-grade stainless steel, this travel tumbler is unbreakable and built to last. it is highly resistant to rust and puncture. the BPA free clear lid that seals tightly keeps spills under control and allows you to see inside the package also includes 2 stainless steel straws, 2 tumbler BPA Free lids, a cleaning brush, and a unique gift box.Too Many Uses: this mug tumbler can help maintain your drink’s temperature for a long time, which makes the ideal companion for alcoholic and non-alcoholic drinks, wine, cocktails, mixed drinks, champagne, juice, hot or ice coffee, water, tea, etc.

Promising review: " Nice quality tumbler. Very nice gift for family. It comes with 2 lids and 2 straws. keeps items both cold and hot for certain hours"--Kaur Get it from Amazon for $25.99 5. Grandma Gifts Locket Necklace | Mother Daughter Necklace Floating Charm Locket It is a group of Moms who love jewelry and love their families. Our jewelry is full of messages that express that love between Mom and Grandma, Daughters and Mothers, Sister to Sister and all the rest of our circles of love. We create original quality charms and message plates for you to be able to give a gift that has significant meaning to the one you want to connect with. About This Most Popular Christmas Presents 2019: MESSAGE: "The best thing about having you as Mom is my kids having you as a Grandma" is engraved on the floating message plate that goes in this locket.WHAT'S IN THE BOX? 1- Our Authentic gold etched stainless steel and glass magnetic locket and 22-inch chain 2- All of the charms pictured 3- Message Plate 4- Full set of 12 Birthstone color crystals 5- Birthstone color chartYOU ARE THE DESIGNER: A Touch of Dazzle is the originator of the floating locket theme set. We give you a full set of charms and crystals, more than can possibly fit in the locket at one time. Why? We want you to have fun with your charm locket! Choose as many or as few to put in your locket.CRAFTED WITH LOVE: Each charm and message plate is designed by our artist, Goldie and is hand-painted. You will love the quality and beauty of this charm locket Mother's necklace. Each locket necklace, together with the charms, birthstones, and plates are carefully gift boxed in our signature gold and black boxes. They are a Mom Necklace, Gift for Grandma and Gifts for Mom from daughter.WARRANTY: We are a small US company run by Moms. We love producing quality jewelry for you to enjoy for years to come. We offer an unconditional 60-day warranty, just contact us if you have any concerns.

Promising review: " This was just what I was looking for! It’s well made, easy to fill, and arrived promptly."--Andrea French Get it from Amazon for $19.99 6. Lucky To Call You My Mom Wood Picture Frame Holds 4x6 Inch Photo This picture frame is an ideal gift for any mother. Show your love for mom or grandma with this laser engraved wood picture frame. This picture frame makes a classic gift for years to come. About This Most Popular Christmas Presents 2019: This picture frame makes a classic gift for years to come.The frame fits a 4x6 INCH picture.A GREAT GIFT FOR ANY OCCASION: Mother's Day, Birthday, Christmas, ValentinesDesign is laser engraved into the wood surface. The design will never fade or fall off like printed products.The frame has a folding easel on the back and hangers to hang the frame on the wall.

Promising review: " I ordered this frame after another seller flubbed a delivery twice and am glad I got this particular frame. The wood and glass are good quality and it looks very nice - it helps that I found a perfect picture to place in it. "--xplainer guy Get it from Amazon for $19.95 7. Mom, I Love You to The Moon and Back Engraved 3D Printed Moon Lamp Each individual moon lamp has gone through a rigorous 26+ hour 3D printing process using state-of-the-art technology. The design is made according to NASA satellite images to accurately reproduce the moons actual surface and craters. About This Most Popular Christmas Presents 2019: 🌖 SAFE & RELIABLE: Adopting Low Voltage USB Charging And Energy Efficient LED Light Bulb, The Lamp Stays Cool Even After Long Time Use and Gives Off Fliker-free Soft Light Which Would Not Hurt Eyes. By Using PLA Material Extracted from Corn Stalks, The Lamp is Odorless and Non-toxic.🌖 TOUCH CONTROL & MEMORABLE BRIGHTNESS: Two brightness levels settings of dim to bright, white and yellow lighting color to match your mood or any occasion. Easily adjust brightness and color by taping the smart touch on the button. The touch lamps add lighting memory function to save your last setting for convenience.🌖 RECHARGEABLE NIGHT LIGHT: Built-in rechargeable battery provides 6-8 hours illumination depending on brightness. Standard USB charging port for PC, charger and mobile devices, etc. USB-chargeable for use anytime, anywhere. The cordless table lamps make it easy and convenient for outdoor and home decoration.🎁 UNIQUE PERSONALIZED MOM BIRTHDAY GIFTS & MOONLIGHT IN THE ROOM: A great customized birthday present for stepmom mother in law. Creative decorative night light for home, kids bedroom, living room, dining room, college dorm and create a wonderful atmosphere beyond your expectations. Comes in a box, presenting the real moon surface with 3D Printing technology.

Promising review: " Ordered this for my mother in law’s birthday, I included three pics of it. One with it off, and each of the color settings for the light. Comes batteries in ready to go, the base of it is touch-sensitive so you only have to put your finger on it to turn it on (if anyone’s looking for disability-friendly gifts it’s a big selling point!) really lovely, cannot wait I see her reaction but until then this gets an easy five stars from me."--Sam Turner Get it from Amazon for $39.95 8. Christmas Apron With Pot Holder, Oven Mitt and Kitchen Towel This Christmas with Family, Friends and Magnus Mary Christmas Apron Set! Gift this Cute Christmas Present to Your Mother, Wife, Mother in Law, Sister or Friend Who Loves to Cook. Christmas Kitchen Gift Set includes Christmas Cooking Apron, Kitchen Towel, Pot Holder, and Oven Mitt. Light beige cooking apron with holiday red in-scripture. “Eat, Drink, and Be Merry” printed on chest. 33” L x 27” W. Adjustable neck strap to eliminate the hassle of tying. Two front pockets. Kitchen Towel: Light beige with holiday red in-scripture. “Peace Love Joy” printed on the bottom right of the towel. 28” L x 17” W. Pot Holder: Light beige with holiday red and white. This is Holiday Kitchen Linen Set is # Perfect holiday present for mother, Christmas Gifts, Christmas present for wife,Oven mitt,Towel, pot holder, present for women, Christmas kitchen towels.

Promising review: " This unique gift set brought vibrancy in our kitchen with Christmas colors. Kids love when I cook breakfast wearing this set. Best quality apron ever :-). Definitely superior to what I got from Macy's last month. On Top - gift set came with a cotton towel, mitt and pot-holder....feels like early Thanksgiving, early Christmas!!! "--Victoria Johnson Get it from Amazon for $28.99 9. Funny Wine Glass For Women | Mommy Juice 16 oz Eye-catching text meticulously etched (not printed) into the glass so that it never wears off. This glass is the perfect sippy cup for mommy juice to accessorize your mama on her big day - whether you're celebrating Mother's Day or wishing her a Happy Birthday. Its generous 17-ounce size allows the wine to breathe and fully develop the rich bouquet of flavors from wines you would expect from fine crystal. Yet, this wine glass makes for a great gift under $20! This isn’t a cheap novelty gag gift. This is quality, hand-blown, dishwasher-safe glassware that is perfect for use as your daily wine glass. All Bevvee glasses are individually boxed and protected for safe delivery, no matter how much they're tossed around. The carefully etched text will never wear off with heavy washing. Each letter was engraved by hand by skilled artisans in our small shop in Northern Colorado.

Promising review: " This was the perfect gift for my niece, a mother of 2 little kids. She absolutely loved it, opened a bottle of wine, and started using it right away!"--Joni Get it from Amazon for $15.97 10. Christmas Bracelets Gifts Rose Lover Rose Gold Plated Cuff Bangle Peach roses reflect desire and excitement. The peach rose means that love is anxiously budding, you need to hurry to catch up to romance! Rose gold is a color scheme of gold and copper, elegantly symbolizes the union of two to become one and the promise of a lifetime. About This Most Popular Christmas Presents 2019: ♥ Valentine's Day Gifts for Her ♥ Inspired by the Rose which signifies romantic and love, this cuff bracelet is a great gift of love, perfect Valentine's day gifts for girlfriend wife mom daughter to say "I love you". Search "qianse rose lover" to find the whole set (necklace and earrings).♥ Bracelet Metal ♥ Eco-friendly Rose Gold Plated Zinc alloy, Hypoallergenic, Lead-Free & Nickle-Free, Passed Swiss SGS Inspection Standard. Made with Swarovski crystals: crystals are supplied by Swarovski but used by our own designers and manufactured in our own workshops. This jewelry belongs to QIANSE Jewelry, not Swarovski.♥ Bracelet Warranty ♥ 30-day money-back guarantee for any reason; 12-month warranty for quality-related issues. If there is any problem with your purchase, please feel free to contact us, we will help to fix the problem. Thank you!♥ Swarovski Crystal Bracelet ♥ This is NOT a Swarovski product but a piece made with Swarovski Crystal. Qianse has its aspiring designers in France. We purchased Swarovski Crystals as raw material and skillfully manufactured in our independent workshops.♥ Bangle Bracelet Craft ♥ Stones are inlaid under a microscope by a top-level master. ▲Missing stones sometimes happen when being delivered with many turns and stops. Just contact us and we will assist you in finding a solution promptly!

Promising review: " This bracelet is absolutely stunning. Honestly, it is much prettier than I originally expected based on the pictures. The pink heart makes this a perfect gift for someone special, although I bought this for myself. If you love rose gold (like I do) this bangle is definitely a must-have! "--Skinny Latte Mommy Get it from Amazon for $26.99 Read the full article

[un-enfant-immature]

Siri is now trained to recognize your local, weirdly named small businesses

Getting directions to the nearest Starbucks or Target is a task Apple’s virtual assistant can handle with ease. But what about local businesses with names that Siri has never heard, and might mistake for another phrase or the user misspeaking? To handle these, Apple has created libraries of hyper-local place names so Siri never hears “Godfather’s Pizza” as “got father’s piece.”

Speech recognition systems have to be trained on large bodies of data, but while that makes them highly capable when it comes to parsing sentences and recognizing phrases, it doesn’t always teach them the kind of vocabulary that you and your friends use all the time.

When I tell a friend, “let’s go to St John’s for a drink,” they know I don’t mean some cathedral in the midwest but the bar up the street. But Siri doesn’t really have any way of knowing that — in fact, unless the system knows that “Saint John’s” is a phrase in the first place, it might think I’m saying something else entirely. It’s different when you type it into a box — it can just match strings — but when you say it, Siri has to make her best guess at what you said.

But if Siri knew that in the Seattle area, when someone says something that sounds like St John’s, they probably mean the bar, then she can respond more quickly and accurately, without having to think hard or have you select from a list of likely saints. And that’s just what Apple’s latest research does. It’s out now in English, and other languages are likely only a matter of time.

To do this, Apple’s voice recognition team pulled local search results from Apple Maps, sorting out the “places of interest” — you (or an algorithm) can spot these, because people refer to them in certain ways, like “where is the nearest…” and “directions to…” and that sort of thing.

Obviously the sets of these POIs, once you remove national chains like Taco Bell, will represent the unique places that people in a region search for. Burger-seekers here in Seattle will ask about the nearest Dick’s Drive-in, for example (though we already know where they are), while those in L.A. will of course be looking for In-N-Out. But someone in Pittsburgh likely is never looking for either.

Apple sorted these into 170 distinct areas: 169 “combined statistical areas” as defined by the U.S. Census Bureau, which are small enough to have local preferences but not so small that you end up with thousands of them. The special place names for each of these were trained not into the main language model (LM) used by Siri, but into tiny adjunct models (called Geo-LMs) that can be tagged in if the user is looking for a POI using those location-indicating phrases from above.

So when you ask “who is Machiavelli,” you get the normal answer. But when you ask “where is Machiavelli’s,” that prompts the system to query the local Geo-LM (your location is known, of course) and check whether Machiavelli’s is on the list of local POIs (it should be, because the food is great there). Now Siri knows to respond with directions to the restaurant and not to the actual castle where Machiavelli was imprisoned.

Doing this cut the error rate by huge amount – from as much as 25-30 percent to 10-15. That means getting the right result 8 or 9 out of 10 times rather than 2 out of 3; a qualitative improvement that could prevent people from abandoning Siri queries in frustration when it repeatedly fails to understand what they want.

What’s great about this approach is that it’s relatively simple (if not trivial) to expand to other languages and domains. There’s no reason it wouldn’t work for Spanish or Korean, as long as there’s enough data to build it on. And for that matter, why shouldn’t Siri have a special vocabulary set for people in a certain jargon-heavy industry, to reduce spelling errors in notes?

This improved capability is already out, so you should be able to test it out now — or maybe you have been for the last few weeks and didn’t even know it.

[asfeedin]

Mapping Digital Success & SEO Through Uncertain Terrain

Your data is irrelevant.

I’m sure that sentence is going to rub some of you the wrong way, but that doesn’t make it any less true.

All that data you have gathered on how your audience behaves – their online buying habits, their time-on-site, the typical conversion paths – became relics sometime in the middle of March 2020.

Looking at data before March is like trying to create a map using satellite imagery from 1995.

You might get some of the roads right, but the potential for leading people down a dead-end road is significant.

The Compass Is Broken

There is no doubt that consumer behavior has changed significantly over the past few weeks.

The change has been rapid and is constantly in flux.

Long-term predictions using current data is impossible – at least with any modicum of certainty.

It’s hard enough to predict outcomes when the data is somewhat stable.

When the data is unstable, predicting outcomes is, well, unpredictable.

At my agency, we have clients in many different verticals.

Each vertical is behaving differently in regards to their search traffic.

On average, our clients are seeing impressive increases in overall traffic.

But despite the increases in traffic, conversions over the last 3 weeks are down 30% year-over-year.

The news media and perceptions of the economy are a bigger indicator of site conversion than rankings or traffic at the moment.

And while my observations are based on data, I know that any data we have from years past is mostly irrelevant to the reality of today.

We don’t live in the same world we did just one month ago.

If you have goals and projections for the year, the quarter or the month based on previous data, you need to throw them out the window.

And unfortunately, new goals and projections made right now will most be more guesswork than data science.

Even weekly projections are difficult to make right now.

True North Is Still True North

We may be in uncharted territory, but there is still one indicator that we can use to help us know where to go from here.

We must understand our audience now.

Your audience’s behavior has changed over the last few weeks, but at their core, they are still the same.

As marketers, our “true north” is empathy.

We must be able to put ourselves in our audience’s shoes.

That means understanding what your audience is going through during the “great lockdown.”

You need to pivot from relying on historical quantitative data to a more qualitative approach.

If you don’t have Hotjar installed on your site – or something similar – get it on there.

Dig into your analytics over the last week or so and look at the paths that visitors are taking to navigate.

You can make inferences about what the audience is interested in just by looking at the most common paths of your visitors.

Pay close attention to the path of visitors that are converting.

Again, anything more than a few weeks old is moot now.

You need to see what your visitors are doing now.

Don’t worry so much about where the visitors are coming from, except for top-line numbers.

Search traffic trends right now are going to be unreliable indicators of what is going on.

Your rankings may not change, but your traffic may fluctuate wildly based on changing consumer search patterns.

You need to understand how people are reacting to your site and be willing to make some design changes to accommodate the behavior as it becomes apparent.

Understand that these design pivots may be temporary as behavior changes.

If you have a list of existing customers, it’s OK to reach out and ask them how they want to receive information from you – or even if they want to receive information right now.

In your communication with existing customers, get right to the point.

It seems every company I’ve ever done business with has sent me an email about their operations – leading with a lengthy intro talking about “these trying times.”

Your audience isn’t living under a rock.

You don’t need to tell them about current events that don’t directly relate to your business.

Trust me, your audience is aware of what is going on in the world.

But they may not know how to interact with you during these times – and you may not know what they are going through.

Ask your audience the questions you don’t know.

I am a huge fan of surveying your audience.

You can get a ton of data by asking your audience some questions, and incentivizing them to answer by enrolling them in a contest to win a $50 Amazon gift card.

I would recommend keeping your survey short – no more than 10 questions.

But with 10 questions, you can learn a lot about your audience.

If you have deeper pockets, running email lists through databases at places like Acxiom can provide you with a ton of basic insights about your audience such as:

Demographics.

Political orientation.

Home ownership status.

And much more.

The more data you have about your audience, the better you can empathize with them.

And if you can empathize with them, you can understand how to sell to them.

Orienteering Through Uncertainty

Until we get a new normal, your data is going to be unreliable.

Consumer behavior and search behavior is rapidly changing with every news cycle.

In order to know where to go next, you are going to need to anticipate your audience’s needs based on what you know about the audience.

If you can sell online, you need to understand who is most likely to buy your product.

If you don’t know, now is the time to find out.

If you are a brick-and-mortar establishment that has been shut down, you still need to be monitoring your website traffic to understand what your customers are looking for.

Who knows, there may be a chance for you to pivot some of your services online.

It’s certainly a good time to look into pivoting.

We’re going to have to use our gut and our common sense.

The data isn’t going to tell us where to go.

And if you’re gut is telling you to cut marketing, you’re probably wrong.

Now is the time to be as present as possible in the online world.

That means upping your SEO and content creation efforts.

It means monitoring your paid ads and trying something new that might not have worked in our previous environment.

There are winners and losers in every crisis.

The winners usually push forward, while the losers let fear guide their marketing efforts.

I urge you to understand your audience, trust your gut, and move forward.

More Resources:

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The Coronavirus Made Me Realize How Lucky I Am To Have My Online Friends

Before the coronavirus arrived ― back when I used to be able to leave my house ― I had my “real-life friends” and my “online friends,” two categorically different groups of people in my mind. My real-life friends were the people I didn’t necessarily see every single day, but with whom I had regularly shared physical experiences at some point in my life: dinners, movies, trips to exotic places. These were people who had seen the hardware of my life, so they knew me from the inside out. I measured that qualitatively. For me, time spent together, physically, had equated to a certain brand of intimate knowledge.

Friendships are sacred to me. I have been a close friend with many of the same people for the majority of my life and most of those friendships span decades ― some over 30 years. We have shared in countless joys and losses. We have seen one another succeed and fail. We have watched each other wed and divorce. We have been there for each other as we’ve buried parents.

In addition to those friends I’ve made and kept from childhood, college and my days working in restaurants, I also have a large network of online friends ― people I share political jokes with or with whom I talk about topics as varied and personal as food or parenting. Online, you can curate your passions, separate your individual interests and make choices. You can find the people who are most like you, or who live most like you, and there’s a certain freedom and intimacy that comes with that understanding.

There are all kinds of niche communities on the internet, and some can help us express our true selves in a way that we might not be able to do often — or maybe even ever — in the real world. That’s partly why I love being online: The internet is a place to air grievances, to be funny, to express knee-jerk reactions. It allows me to commiserate with others who are like me and to offer up pieces of my life and myself to people who really get what I am putting out there while sharing parts of myself in ways I might not otherwise in my offline life.

Before the events related to the coronavirus unfolded over the past few weeks, I never realized how important my cyber friendships really were, or what they were actually offering me. Sure, I appreciated, at least in a surface way, what I was gaining from them: They provided a sounding board, for one. When my husband didn’t want to hear me complaining about the primary election anymore, my internet friends were always around to listen. When my friends without kids didn’t want to know about my son’s latest diaper blowout, there was Facebook group specifically for moms that did. When I made a picture-perfect chicken that no one in my offline life seemed all that interested in, someone from my internet community was there to share in my culinary triumph.

Still, I mostly saw these virtual relationships as secondary to my “real” friendships. I wasn’t about to grab dinner with the guy messaging me about how he, too, couldn’t stand Bernie Sanders. But it was nice to hear the voice of someone who agreed and shared my own thoughts. Despite how much I was receiving from my online community, I failed to recognize that I was building genuine relationships, and that I was gaining much more than just an opportunity to blow off steam.

I am now essentially a shut-in, since I am considered high-risk for serious coronavirus symptoms because I suffer from asthma, lifelong respiratory issues, and two recent bouts of bronchitis, from which I am still in recovery, and I also live in a highly infected state and community. And because of the sudden and unexpected inability to socialize offline, I have come to realize how important my online community is ― and always has been ― to me. In short, my online community is my community.

I’m realizing how much of myself I gave to [my online friends], even before most of us were self-isolating, and how much they’ve given me over the years and continue to give me in my current time of need.

I used to think that online life, however immediately gratifying, was nothing but surface tension ― an incomplete or even dishonest version of reality. In truth, I talk to my online friends every day now ― some of them more than my “real life” friends ― because there’s no longer anywhere to go, and because I’m realizing how much of myself I gave to them, even before most of us were self-isolating, and how much they’ve given me over the years and continue to give me in my current time of need.

My online friends and I may not ― and may never — meet offline, but I don’t see my college friends or childhood friends in the flesh all that often and I don’t know when I will again. When you think about it, in a world that we’re now experiencing mostly virtually, is there really a difference between the friends we make online and the friends we once had in the so-called real world? What’s more, as we all look for new and more ways to be intimate at a time when we’re increasingly being sealed off from each other, our virtual friends are even more important than they were just a few weeks ago. These relationships that we’ve formed and grown via our computers and phones may be just the thing that helps us survive this unprecedented and difficult time.

Online friendships, of course, don’t necessarily sprout from the same shared experiences, like childhood or college, that offline friendships do. There’s no physical-world history there, so to some people that might mean these internet relationships are less complex or less worthy. But in the age of the coronavirus, everything is complex, and at the same time so much is simple. I’ve now discovered that what truly matters is being known and seen and understood by someone, and we can do all of that virtually. Sure, it may take a bit more work, and it certainly isn’t the same as being in the room with someone, but connecting online can be amazingly therapeutic and it can offer us some of the things we need right now to be a little (or a lot) less lonely.

And maybe, when we’re holed up with no one but ourselves, the most important thing is truly how well we’re able to connect with others.

I’m also learning new ways to communicate and be vulnerable and to express myself because of my online relationships, which in turn broaden and deepen all of my experiences ― virtual or not. Even better, these are tools that I can use with my “real life” friends, who are now, it should be said, online friends, too.

Ultimately, my online friends are my real friends. I may never go to their weddings or their parents’ funerals. There may never be a long and complicated history, the way there might be with the offline friends who have known me longer and, in some ways, better. But the whole world is changing and strangers are becoming friends and friends are becoming strangers. And I am seeing the evolution myself, as the people I may have once thought of as less important or less intimately acquainted with me become just as relevant as the people who have held a stake and a place in my everyday life.

Except there really is no more “everyday life” ― not for me and not for anyone else. My online community is as real and as valuable and offers me many of the same things as the friendships I’ve had offline for 30 years. It’s too bad it took a pandemic to teach me this, but regardless, I’m glad it did. I’m grateful to have more friends ― no matter where or how they exist ― to offer me comfort, guidance and laughter during these uncertain times.

Hannah Selinger is a freelance food, wine and travel writer and mother of two based in East Hampton, New York. Her work has appeared in Eater, Glamour, The Independent U.K., The New York Times, The Washington Post, Wine Enthusiast, The Kitchn, Slate, Edible East End, Edible Long Island, Wine4Food, The Daily Beast, Heated by Bittman, Al Jazeera, Refinery29, Thrillist, Fodor’s, Business Insider and numerous other national and regional publications. She has work forthcoming in Airbnb Magazine, United Airlines’ Hemispheres, and American Airlines’ American Way.

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[logienicolas1]

What Does Social Graph Game Mean?

A system movement is really a sort of circulation chart. It displays the measures within a workflow and how they relate to each other.

A bar graph is used to compare details across unique categories. Every bar signifies a group of information. The taller the bar, the bigger the range represented.?? The basic idea is you create a wager, and view as multipliers increase significant.|Out-degree is actually a evaluate of centrality that also focuses on a single specific, nevertheless the analytic is concerned with the out-going interactions of the person; the evaluate of out-diploma centrality is how many times the main target position person interacts with Some others.[sixty six]|You get to out to the touch your Buddy's shoulder. Then he touches your shoulder. You all touch each other's shoulders. You are building connections concerning you and Other individuals.|Bustabit stands out from the Levels of competition with its very low dwelling edge prices and remarkable gameplay, even if it provides a fairly very simple game.|Social network Assessment has become applied to social media as being a Device to be aware of habits amongst men and women or organizations through their linkages on social media websites like Twitter and Facebook.[65] In Laptop-supported collaborative learning[edit]|These features all lets the consumer query no matter whether Just about every node is of a certain sort. All of the functions returns a reasonable vector indicating if the node is of the type in concern. Do Observe that the types are not mutually exceptional Which nodes can thus be of various types.|Shockingly, Bustabit includes a license with the similar place as well. There isn't any dilemma with security, but we advise that you simply also deliver your electronic mail tackle when registering to enhance your account protection.|A three circle venn diagram exhibits the similarities and distinctions amongst three sets of knowledge. The overlapping location demonstrates wherever they have one thing in widespread.|This article's usage of external inbound links may not abide by Wikipedia's guidelines or rules. Be sure to improve this post by removing too much or inappropriate exterior back links, and changing useful links the place correct into footnote references. (January 2017) (Find out how and when to remove this template message)|. When two people appeared inside of 15 terms of each other, a hyperlink (or edge?was extra amongst them. The links are weighted dependant on how frequently The 2 characters appeared in shut proximity.|It makes use of graphical representations, published representations, and information representations to help you look at the connections within a CSCL community.[sixty six] When making use of SNA into a CSCL natural environment the interactions in the contributors are taken care of as a social network. The focus of the Assessment is about the "connections" manufactured Amongst the participants ??how they interact and converse ??rather than how each participant behaved on his or her possess. Critical phrases[edit]|The very first algorithm well use in igraph is PageRank. PageRank can be an algorithm originally employed by Google to rank the importance of Web content and is particularly a variety of eigenvector centrality.|Wish to thank TFD for its existence? Notify a pal about us, include a backlink to this website page, or pay a visit to the webmaster's website page free of charge exciting content.|Within this situation, you'd like a listing of consumers from the filter, like many of the people today this user is adhering to or tagged as most loved.|The Examination and visualization was performed using Gephi, a preferred graph analytics Resource. I assumed it would be pleasurable to test to copy the authors??final results using Neo4j.|Xbox social user teams expose what sort of a bunch They may be, which consumers are increasingly being tracked or just what the filter established is on them, as well as the regional person which the group belongs to.|To this point, there remains to be no consensus about what type of application should have what kind of entry to social graph information.|Closeness centrality could be the inverse of the typical length to all other characters inside the network. Nodes with superior closeness centality are often extremely related within clusters within the graph, but not essentially hugely related outside of the cluster.|A further common operation is usually to group nodes based on the graph topology, in some cases generally known as Local community detection dependant on its commonality in social community Assessment.}

If you like relaxed gambling, we suggest you try Bustabit. When you get accustomed to the interface, it can provide a really enjoyable encounter. But it does not do the job effortlessly on cell equipment and results in being unexciting soon after some time, that is the biggest downside.

Looking at and producing graphs is an important ability, not only in math course, but in many school subjects together with careers. Graphs support us signify advanced data in a method that is not hard to visualise and fully grasp immediately. While there are several different types of graphs, and several is often fairly sophisticated, it's in no way much too early to introduce your students to the fundamentals of graphing. In these graphing games, developed by instructional experts especially for kids from initially to fifth grade, your learners will learn the way to navigate info represented with a bar graph in addition to a coordinate aircraft.

When Fb sought to map the social graph it turned the social graph." Information cannot be so neatly break up from motion.

Social community analysis has also been applied to comprehension online habits by folks, companies, and between websites.[14] Hyperlink Examination may be used to investigate the connections concerning websites or webpages to examine how data flows as individuals navigate the world wide web.

If you'd like to view this data after you look for with Google, you simply click on the url that claims Personal Final results. When you simply click that, you?ll see facts that?s distinct to both you and your connections. Engage in the game of thrones, you earn otherwise you die.|An error occured though sending the e-mail. You should test all over again later on. Your account has not been activated nevertheless. Remember to activate it in the gameplay authorization e mail we sent you.}

Sum in the bare minimum factors in all linked components of the undirected graph Verify if two nodes are on identical path in the tree transform to math.|Instead of depending on the social person team filters to offer a fresh new person checklist in the course of the game loop, the social graph is initialized outside the game loop.|Sites can also be dealt with by route by utilizing the SharePoint hostname, followed by a colon along with the relative route into the site.|Neovis.js can take care of pulling the data from Neo4j and building the visualization determined by our minimal configuration.|You could transfer the bits you won to any Bitcoin wallet you wish. Small-scale transfers are done quickly and also a fee of one hundred bits (approx.|Inside the game loop, the do_work function updates all designed sights with the newest snapshot from the buyers in that group.|But the concept of social graph portability squarely addresses among the list of major issues of 21st-century financial policy.|Start with the basics with the bar graph, and perform as much as photograph graphs, accumulating facts from word troubles, and finding factors on a coordinate aircraft in these engaging graphing games!|Hi! I'm Will and this is where I write about application, technological know-how, and startup things. You can find extra from me on Medium and @lyonwj on Twitter.|A bar graph is employed to check information throughout unique types. Each bar represents a class of knowledge. The taller the bar, the bigger the selection represented.|Ought to the game crash at 0x, all bets will be refunded (There may be just a one% prospect of this happening). It might seem basic, but this is really a Understanding game, and there is a quite intricate method behind it, so when You begin enjoying it, if You're not thorough and don?t do your research, you'll be able to be behind instead speedily.|The social network Examination was made use of to research Houses of the network We-Activity.com letting a deep interpretation and Evaluation of the extent of aggregation phenomena in the specific context of Activity and Actual physical work out.|A five circle venn diagram exhibits the similarities and discrepancies involving five sets of data. The overlapping spot reveals exactly where they have got anything in frequent.|Centrality actions give us relative actions of importance inside the community. There are actually a variety of centrality actions and each steps another kind of ??importance|significance|value|relevance|worth|great importance}??|Canva gives a range of no cost, designer-manufactured templates. All You need to do is enter your info to get prompt success. Change between different chart types like bar graphs, line graphs and pie charts with no shedding your knowledge.|As is usually guessed, Bustabit does not present any reward. This is simply not astonishing, as almost no promotions are available at Bitcoin game sites. There may be also no affiliate system.|Even though still at it?s start line this alliance must be the precursor to setting up the administration and flexibility in the Social Graph.|[9][10] These networks in many cases are visualized via sociograms during which nodes are represented as factors and ties are represented as lines. These visualizations give a implies of qualitatively examining networks by varying the Visible representation in their nodes and edges to mirror characteristics of curiosity.[eleven]|They can be found in apps for your personal telephone or pill, or is often performed on the internet without having downloading any program. We also provide totally free math worksheets for offline use! Kids can use these equipment to apply: Knowledge Venn diagrams and interpreting image graphs, tally charts and tables|References in periodicals archive ? social graph." Davidsen stated which the organization "would inquire permission to fundamentally scrape your profile, in addition to scrape your buddies, fundamentally anything at all which was available to scrape.|In-diploma centrality concentrates on a specific specific as the point of concentration; centrality of all other folks relies on their own relation towards the focus of the "in-degree" personal.[66]|A Graph is really a non-linear information framework consisting of nodes and edges. The nodes are occasionally also generally known as vertices and the sides are traces or arcs that join any two nodes within the graph. Extra formally a Graph is usually described as,|A 3 circle venn diagram shows the similarities and distinctions concerning three sets of information. The overlapping place reveals in which they have got anything in popular.}

A site map demonstrates the several web pages with a website as well as their relation to each other. It's a useful gizmo for Web optimization and for on the internet navigation.

Daenerys genuinely represents the future? you can see whats about to occur determined by the individuals she?s connected with,??Beveridge explained.|To get concise, we did not just take account of the symmetrical path, which might indicate far more remedies. The first path will look in red, As well as in another kinds, diverse edges will be marked in blue, to be able to differentiate them quickly.|In its most basic kind, a routing algorithm applied on top of social networks aims to provide a information among two nodes inside the social graph, as highlighted in [24].|Graph games make Understanding about graphs an thrilling and pleasing system for young learners. Graphs classes begin early in a kids education, and they are returned to regularly over the years right up until late in high school.|A three circle venn diagram reveals the similarities and dissimilarities concerning a few sets of information. The overlapping spot exhibits where they have some thing in typical.|Their social gambling game features a multiplier which moves in a short time, and it drops together with rises. Unique bonuses can be dished out to gamers surviving very long ample within the game, and cashing out instantly ahead of the crash, a lot of gamers elect to remain in ??sooner or later losing since the game crashes prior to they withdraw.|And Here's The end result, the graph has actually been simplified just as much as you can??Not so difficult any more, is it ?|Structural holes: The absence of ties among two parts of a network. Discovering and exploiting a structural gap may give an entrepreneur a competitive edge. This idea was developed by sociologist Ronald Burt, and is usually referred to as an alternate conception of social cash.|A donut chart can be a style of pie chart in which the center has long been taken out. The world in the middle can be employed to Show data.|The thing is your Buddy one particular diploma absent, a colleague of an acquaintance as two levels absent and a buddy of an acquaintance? Close friend as a few levels. That? truly receiving distant.|She?continue to vital to the community, although, because the characters on Westeros she's linked to are extremely important, and all figures in essence will have to experience her so that you can connect with others on Essos.|A Song of Ice and Hearth character network across all 5 guides; Learn how I created it by pursuing the code under??Diploma centrality is just the amount of connections that a node has while in the the community. Inside the context of the graph of thrones, the diploma centrality of a character is the quantity of other characters that character interacted with. We will estimate degree centrality using Cypher such as this:|We've been storing the volume of interactions amongst a set of people to be a property bodyweight within the INTERACTS connection. Summing this excess weight across all INTERACTS relationships for the character gives us their weighted degree centrality|Social Manager will also tell you what occurred in the form of situations. You should use All those gatherings to update your UI or complete other logic.|Matt observed that when The scholars were being in a position to bodily knowledge the motion that the graphs signify, they made a significantly further knowledge of slope and y-intercept.|A call tree is usually a diagram that helps you to make a decision among diverse solutions by mapping out the possible repercussions of every option.|The complexity of your conversation procedures plus the myriad resources of knowledge allow it to be tough for SNA to supply an in-depth Examination of CSCL.[71] Researchers point out that SNA should be complemented with other procedures of research to sort a far more correct picture of collaborative Discovering encounters.[72]|Effectively, actually it is feasible to simplify the graph substantially, mainly because it incorporates a great deal of vertex of degree 2. They are a cut price since considering that every vertex will probably be from the cycle, the edges of People of degree two will automatically be Portion of it also !|It is totally efficient but you have to understand that this can be a game in which you can eliminate, that is certainly why we recommend to execute the Script just about every 10 minutes following having received a considerable financial gain and devoid of abusing to reduce the losses.|So then You begin to get hungry. Fortunately, there's pizza in the middle of the circle. But only two of you prefer pizza. You and that other individual become Section of a community for the reason that equally of you expressed your interest in pizza.|We will visualize the complete graph, but this doesn?give us A great deal information about the most important figures or how they interact:|If we look from the result table for interesting outcomes we can see that Robb is a pivotal node for Drogo and Ramsay. Therefore all shortest paths connecting Drogo and Ramsay go through Robb. We are able to confirm this visually by taking a look at all shortest paths connecting Drogo and Ramsay:|A cycle diagram demonstrates the actions of a repeating or cyclical approach. It can help Exhibit how 1 period brings about another.}

We could use the shortestPath perform in Cypher to discover the shortest path among any two figures within the graph. Enable?find the shortest path from Catelyn Stark to Kahl Drogo:

Within our analytical age, being able to interpret and generate graphs is often a very helpful ability. Math Games assists small children grasp this talent, and encourages them to have a good time in the process with our well known, curriculum-primarily based games! Our participating on-line games might be played just about everywhere and for free.

The betweenness centrality of a node inside a community is the amount of shortest paths between two other members within the network on which a provided node seems. Eulerian??mainly because they only comprise a eulerian path and no cycle as weve observed), each graph of the 2nd aspect is Hamiltonian.|A 4 circle venn diagram shows the similarities and differences involving four sets of knowledge. The overlapping place exhibits where they may have anything in frequent.|Given that it is a solo-venture, a person must be immensely amazed with the design of Bustabit. It isnt an internet based casino, and the one game it is possible to Perform could be the titular one particular; but, In case you are during the mood for one thing wholly new, and thoroughly unique, then shelling out your bitcoins on Bustabit could possibly be an excellent afternoon in your case.|Graphs and charts can be employed in more than simply math class! Use these timeline and drawing routines to attach graphing to art and songs.|Scatterplots are accustomed to symbolize a lot of knowledge details. They may be handy when There's a large amount of facts, showing patterns inside the chaos.|Other periods, a graph or chart helps impress individuals by receiving your place throughout immediately and visually. Here you will discover four distinct graphs and charts in your case to look at. Maybe it will help explain what you are attempting to point out. Use homework troubles, stuff you Possess a Unique interest in, or use some of the quantities you find elsewhere on this site. Have fun!|If you are at an Business or shared community, you'll be able to inquire the community administrator to run a scan through the network searching for misconfigured or contaminated units.|Whenever a graph has even and odd diploma vertices, it isnt Eulerian. But if it's precisely two vertices of strange degree (no additional and no a lot less), then one can start out at one of them and move by all edges once to finish at the 2nd a single. We then have a eulerian path.|A five circle venn diagram shows the similarities and variations in between 5 sets of data. The overlapping place exhibits where by they've anything in popular.|You could optionally transition back again to addressing the useful resource model by putting A different colon at the top.|A site map displays different webpages on the website as well as their relation to each other. It is a useful tool for SEO and for on the internet navigation.|External networks: Leverage your staff??networks exterior the corporation ??for their interactions on social platforms. If workforce participate in the organizations social outreach, they're able to support the organization get to new persons.|Community detection algorithms are utilized to obtain clusters during the graph. Well utilize the walktrap system as carried out in igraph to locate communities of characters that regularly interact in the Neighborhood, but not A great deal interaction occurs beyond the Neighborhood.|I am making use of igraph to plot the initial community. To do so, I to start with make the graph from the sting- and node-desk. An edge-desk includes source and concentrate on nodes in the 1st two columns and optionally added columns with edge attributes.}

This is a fanciful application of community science,Beveridge informed Quartz. ??But it|However it|Nevertheless it|Nonetheless it|But it surely|But it really}s the type of obtainable software that exhibits what mathematics is focused on, which is locating and outlining styles.|Graph games seize small children?interest and enthusiasm, and channel these useful methods in the direction of knowledge and working towards graph lessons. Interactive graph games also watch how perfectly learners have comprehended graphs by acquiring them to answer a variety of questions about graphs and providing them points for right answers.|Other measures, like PageRank (exactly the same algorithm that Google utilizes for its online search engine), really puts the figures into a suggestions loop, rewarding them based upon how critical the men and women that they?relinked to are while in the network.|Flowcharts are accustomed to document the steps inside of a course of action. They can be beneficial for training and troubleshooting.|One of many items I like about Neo4j is how properly it really works with other equipment, things such as R and Python information science resources. We could carry on to work with apoc to run PageRank and Local community detection algorithms, but Enable? switch to working with python-igraph to determine some analyses.|A five circle venn diagram reveals the similarities and variances between five sets of data. The overlapping space exhibits where by they have anything in popular.|The nodes needs to be colored based on the price of the propety Local community which identifies the clusters within the network|A approach stream is a kind of movement chart. It displays the techniques inside of a workflow And exactly how they relate to one another.|Socialbet.io is the main peer to see Bitcoin On line casino with genuine odds. The 0% dwelling edge makes this a new technology Bitcoin On line casino for that individuals.|A central aspect of tidygraph is that you could directly manipulate node and edge facts from this tbl_graph object by activating nodes or edges.|cycle : one can « operate by » the graph from any vertex, passing by just about every edge and end on the starting up vertex.|We don't quit at graphs. Canva offers a huge choice of templates for infographics, displays and reviews, so you can place your stunning custom made charts specifically in which you require them.|The cultural trivia game 6 Degrees of Kevin Bacon utilizes the thought on the social graph. Within the game, you have to backlink from Kevin Bacon to another person in 6 methods according to your connections to one another.|A line graph is a valuable way to document improvements as time passes. It may be used to point out adjustments in quite a few various knowledge sets in the a single diagram.|A choice tree is often a diagram that lets you determine between distinct selections by mapping out the possible implications of each selection.|Flowcharts are accustomed to document the measures in the approach. They can be handy for schooling and troubleshooting.|Duplicate the inexperienced edges in the purple path from the graph to acquire the final solution. Notice that two edges are lacking as the simplification was performed various moments in excess of (in phase 4), Those people are definitely the blue edges.|The game has the provably good function and each consequence might be verified working with 3rd party scripts. You can also access the game's supply code 그래프게임 by way of GitHub. The very best bet you may area is one BTC. There's no Restrict on the minimal bet volume.|Mom and dad will see on the web graph games very handy in acquiring kids to apply graph issues ??a vital step as a way to grasp graph classes!|Have confidence in was an issue for rather some time. The moment the website released, gamers have been fearful that the game could have been rigged to crash early upon massive bets. In response, the administrator at the time decided to make Bustabit open up-souce, indicating that the internal code is visible to the public.|A head map is utilized to show the various Concepts affiliated with a particular notion. It truly is a great tool for brainstorming.|Community Investigation can e.g. be utilized to take a look at interactions in social or Experienced networks. In such instances, we would typically inquire concerns like:|five BTC. Betting boundaries In this particular game range between a very low of 0.000001 BTC, as many as 1BTC, and gameplay is barely available in English, but is accessible to players based almost any place in the world. So, While using the introduction away from the best way, what can we tell you with regards to the Bustabit game by itself?|To incorporate the calculator.com version of your graphing calculator on your World-wide-web site duplicate and paste the subsequent code wherever ever you want the calculator to seem.|The home edge ratio of the game is involving 0% and 1%. This is the very very low value and indicates you do have a great prospect of successful. However, Just about every game has an "quick bust" chance of 1%. If this happens, no one will get a acquire and all bets placed goes to Bustabit.|The time period social graph refers to the networks of connections amongst persons. The idea is that every one folks in the world are connected by 6 levels. Comprehending what the social graph is and how it? plotted is key to comprehending social interactions and the way to leverage them for Social CRM.

[mikemortgage]

Ford government’s plan to put ‘Open for Business’ stamp on capital markets raises eyebrows

Ontario Premier Doug Ford’s government is seeking to put its own business-friendly stamp on Canada’s biggest capital market, but some fear the measures being proposed push too far onto turf usually reserved for arm’s-length regulators.

Ford and his governing Progressive Conservatives put forward a five-point plan in last week’s provincial budget that they said was aimed at “creating confidence” in Ontario’s bond and stock markets.

Among the steps being proposed are putting the Ontario Securities Commission’s already launched “Burden Reduction Task Force” to work, setting up a new “Office of Economic Growth and Innovation” inside the OSC, requiring the regulator to provide more of an economic justification for the rules it makes and improving investor protections and competitiveness in the industry.

‘Our engine is sputtering’: Ontario PCs bank on business investment incentive to spur slowing economy

Two new commissioners with Progressive Conservative ties appointed to Ontario’s market watchdog

OSC looking to lighten regulatory load on companies — and it wants suggestions

So far, the financial industry appears to be supportive of the government’s policies. The Investment Industry Association of Canada said last week that it “welcomes the Ontario government’s efforts to cut red tape, reduce business costs and support Ontario’s capital markets,” calling the latter plan “credible.”

But the government’s approach is raising some eyebrows among others who follow the industry.

“I find it concerning and problematic to see the Ford government step into the regulatory agenda of an arm’s length regulatory agency,” Anita Anand, a professor of law at the University of Toronto, said in an email.

Anand, who also holds the J.R. Kimber Chair in Investor Protection and Corporate Governance at U of T, said she was concerned about what reducing regulatory burdens could mean for investor-protection initiatives, two goals that are often at odds with each other.

The OSC’s Burden Reduction Task Force already has a mandate to target “unnecessary” requirements, but the budget states that, “in alignment with the government’s priority,” the task force would focus on finding ways to save businesses time and money.

Ontario Premier Doug Ford.

Similar-sounding goals would be set for the OSC’s new Office of Economic Growth and Innovation. According to the budget, the office’s objectives would include supporting capital formation in the province (“to ensure that Ontario is Open for Business and Open for Jobs within the capital markets space”) and promoting greater use of technology to cut costs and increase competition.

Meanwhile, the element of the plan that will see the OSC take steps to “improve the investor experience and investor protection,” also states that the government is set on working with groups such as the Investment Industry Regulatory Organization of Canada (IIROC).

Having government officials go around a regulator and deal directly with a self-regulator, such as IIROC, is unusual and could lead to confusion and problems, according to Ken Kivenko, an investor advocate and president of Kenmar Associates.

The two organizations, for example, may have opinions that differ on certain subjects, he said.

“If it was just the only thing with the budget, we’d say, ‘Well, it’s probably well-intentioned,’” Kivenko said. “But in terms of the overall context, of all the little things they’re doing, it’s worrisome.”

The requirement for “economically focused rule-making” is being met with some skepticism as well. While the OSC is already supposed to lay out the expected costs and benefits of a proposed rule, the Ontario Tories are looking for a “qualitative and quantitative analysis.”

“This approach will ensure there is a more robust cost-benefit analysis provided with the OSC’s rule publications that would enhance transparency and better inform industry stakeholders and investor advocates of the impacts of new proposals,” a spokesperson for Finance Minister Vic Fedeli said in an email.

Anand, however, noted that the OSC is an independent regulator with a “very precise” process for making rules.

“Provincial governments do not typically weigh in with their views regarding how an independent agency fulfills its statutory mandate,” she said. “This is why it is incredibly concerning to me to see the Ford government insert itself into the purview of an independent regulatory body.”

Kivenko said the analysis could also throw up roadblocks to any new rule, such as ones geared towards social policy-making that may be harder to put a price-tag on.

“It becomes an endless debate and things which should be reformed over 18 months could take five years, six years,” he said. “Or the OSC just get exhausted, the regulator just get exhausted, and you say ‘We’re not going to fight with Bay Street anymore, let’s move on to another topic.’”

While Kivenko called the overall plan “disappointing,” the Ford government says the changes are part of making Ontario a more attractive destination for investment.

“Critical to this is creating a globally competitive, efficient and strong capital markets regulatory system that attracts investment from around the world, streamlines capital raising for businesses, and protects investors from financial system risk and misconduct,” Fedeli’s spokesperson said.

An emailed statement from Maureen Jensen, chair and CEO of the OSC, said her organization is “excited” by the opportunities for updating regulations.

“In particular, we welcome our government’s support for more rigour and transparency in our rule-making process and service standards — both areas we continue to engage with stakeholders on as part of our wide-ranging consultation on ways to reduce regulatory burden and improve the investor experience,” Jensen said.

The budget said the government plans to make further legislative changes, such as “clarifying the payment of awards under the OSC whistleblower program.” In February, the OSC said it had awarded approximately $7.5 million to three whistleblowers, the first-ever such payouts by a Canadian securities regulator.

Also included in the province’s fiscal plan is a vow to put forward legislation that would “protect titles” for financial planners and financial advisors. Individuals who want to use those titles would have to have an “appropriate credential,” the budget says.

FP Canada, the former Financial Planning Standards Council, hailed the move, saying it would provide clarity and help consumers make “informed decisions” about who to ask for financial advice.

• Email: gzochodne@nationalpost.com | Twitter: GeoffZochodne

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[sempiternalsandpitturtle]

Does your business need a content strategist?

I’m going to go out on a limb here and bet my bottom dollar that your business’ current five-year plan doesn’t simply read “we’ll see how it goes”.

No, It’s much more likely that you’ve taken a considerable amount of time to establish where you want to go, and how you plan to get there. In other words, you’ve developed a strategy.

Well, guess what? You need one for your content too. You can throw out blog posts, social media updates and infographics until the sun goes down, but if these aren’t all serving a common goal you may as well not bother.

And whom, I hear you ask, can you entrust with this responsibility? Ladies and gentleman, I give you… the content strategist!

In this article we’ll define web content strategy, along with the roles of a content strategist (CS). We’ll then look in depth at how a CS can benefit your business, and the skills they need to possess.

What is web content strategy?

Fortunately, I happen to sit opposite a CS who, for the princely sum of three Tim Tams, gave me the following definition:

“Content strategy is making sure your content is ticking the boxes that Google has defined whilst also giving relevant information to human users. It also ensures that your content marketing efforts align with, and succeed in achieving, the business’ overarching goals.”

In practice, this means careful direction, management and analysis of all the content your creative teams put out – from graphics to Tweets, and everything in between.

#InboundMarketing has digital folk all in a tizzy because it’s apparently so cost-effective for generating #leads. But how do you do inbound marketing, anyway? https://t.co/LV2Zo0j8EA pic.twitter.com/JGevzRUUv2

— Castleford Media (@castlefordmedia) 5 March 2019

What does a content strategist do, and how can it benefit your business?

Okay, so how does a CS make all of this happen?

In this section we’ve boiled down the key aspects of the job description into two main sections:

1. Creating a content inventory and audit:

As you’re probably realising, content strategists often have many balls in the air at a time.

Therefore, they need to know what content you currently have available for public consumption, and be able to evaluate how this content is performing.

The former is achieved through the creation of a content inventory, and the latter by auditing it to see if it meets your marketing objectives.

Content audits are qualitative assessments of all of your published content.

From here, your CS can then identify any gaps in your content offering that, by filling, you can use to help you capture more interest from your audience in the future.

How do you audit content?

Content audits are qualitative assessments of all of your published content. During this process, there are five useful questions to keep in mind:

What content is performing best? Success here is defined according to your marketing goals. Taking the example of a blog post, key metrics could include the numbers of people clicking through to landing pages, or taking actions such as signing up to a newsletter. Google Analytics is a free tool that allows you to gather information on user behaviour in relation to your content.

Is my content optimised for search? This is part of evaluating performance, but deserves its own shoutout. Doing this involves analysing keywords, word counts, and HTML elements such as titles and meta tags.

What is your audience connecting with? Google Analytics also shows you how long people are spending on different posts and pages. Even if they’re not taking the actions you desire, the fact that they’re finding your content is good for meeting top of funnel, thought leadership goals.

What isn’t working? You may see an old post that continually outperforms newer content. Knowing what isn’t working is as useful as finding success stories when it comes to informing future strategy.

Where are the gaps? Keyword research is a big part of your auditing process. Tools like Moz Keyword Explorer are brilliant for identifying what searches people are conducting around your industry, allowing you to create relevant content to match.

2. Improving user insights

A content strategist also allows you to learn more about your target audience.

Integral to this is creating user personas– research-based profiles that provide vital information on the people you’re aiming to engage with your content.

Core elements of a user persona include:

Age.

Gender.

Location.

Income/education.

Values, ethics and pain points.

Why are user personas helpful?

Let’s take this article as an example.

My primary audience here is digital marketers, and this informs every stage of my article’s production. Our strategist has stress-tested keywords, found a gap in the query market that we could fill and created an article brief that should allow us to do that.

From there, I’ve adopted a tone and style that (I hope) you find engaging, researched reputable industry sources (Hubspot, for example) and formatted the article to hit as many of the brief notes as possible.

Our marketing team will then share this piece on social channels that our research shows you’re likely to frequent – Twitter and LinkedIn, to name a couple.

If we were a fashion brand, the decisions we’d make would be very different, but this all comes down to knowing who you’re trying to reach – a core responsibility of your content strategist.

User personas may sound like an unnecessary process, but they are the key to good quality content. Don’t believe me? Check out our reasons why. https://t.co/HLd89bVlvj pic.twitter.com/G2NEuyczlo

— Castleford Media (@castlefordmedia) 18 January 2019

What skills do content strategists have?

So, what makes a great CS? The following attributes are needed to fill this multifaceted position:

Organisation and presentation: Keeping track of so much content requires strong prioritising and administration skills. They’ll be creating more spreadsheets than you can possibly imagine, so being able to present their findings in an engaging and clear format is also crucial.

Creativity: Despite the strong emphasis on data collection and analysis, this is still a creative role, and your CS should thrive on finding new and exciting ways to engage your audience.

Delivery decision-making: Based on their research, your CS should be making calls on what mediums to use (eg. is a topic best suited to an infographic, or a video?) and where it should be promoted.

Calculating ROI: Part of the auditing process is calculating the extent to which your content is serving your business goals.

Campaign experience: While technically not a ‘skill’, a CS should ideally have several years’ experience in campaign execution. Project management (PM) roles serve as a great springboard to becoming as a CS due to the hands-on involvement in delivering content.

#SocialMedia is a valuable #marketing tool, but only if it is directed by a good #contentmarketing strategy. Here’s why. https://t.co/iAAl2iMHGq pic.twitter.com/8ANtCxwSEK

— Castleford Media (@castlefordmedia) 18 February 2019

The benefits of an agency content strategist

Content marketing agencies live and breathe strategy creation, and can be a useful guiding hand if you’re new to this sometimes confusing world.

Here are four things that an agency CS brings to the table that might be lacking in your current department:

Experience – Many agency CSs have a huge portfolio of clients. Not only does this mean that they’re veterans of multiple campaigns, there’s a good chance they’ve already created winning strategies for businesses like yours!

Technical know-how – Tools like Google Analytics and Google Search Console are brilliant, but take some time to master. A good agency CS can use these in their sleep, providing you with the insights, minus the time and effort on your part.

An outsider perspective – When you’ve lovingly created a strategy and it hasn’t worked it can be hard to murder your darlings. An agency CS will wield the editorial pen without mercy, cutting the fat off your strategy to ensure every element is serving your overall strategy.

Multiple insights – There’s a good chance that an agency CS is surrounded by writers, graphic designers and social media gurus. With a simple tap on the shoulder, they can access a wealth of content knowledge to help construct an innovative and effective strategy.

Your content strategist should be a campaign-hardened veteran.

In summary

A content strategist is the person who provides focus for your content marketing efforts. They ensure that your output is addressing the right people, using the right platforms on subjects that they care about.

Through their quality testing and ROI calculations they’re also an important champion for content marketing in your business – proving to any lingering doubters that quality content can provide tangible value and improve your bottom line.

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