How to Hire (and Keep) Digital Marketing Talent in 2014

It's a seller's market. That is if you're selling digital marketing services in the form of social media, content marketing, analytics, or email marketing. Today those are the buzzwords that sell. But the buyers fishing in the digital talent pool are suffering from a case of buyer's remorse!

It's true; executives reveal they're unhappy with the skills of digital and social media team talent, and there's a large talent gap hurting sales, employee retention, and marketing ROI. New research by OMI, in partnership with ClickZ and Kelly Staffing, reveals Fortune 500 companies and global agencies face a serious digital marketing skills shortage.

Digital Talent: Not What They're Cracked up to be

Is it a case of growing up too fast or tying to be something you are not trained to be?

Thirty percent of large companies and 24 percent of agencies are unable to adequately distinguish between individuals with the right skills, and those without.

"There is a glut of practitioners who think that they're way cooler than they are. Everyone and their brother has hung a social media shingle, including unworthy PR firms," said aimClear CEO Marty Weintraub, who has specialized in digital marketing since 2006. "We meet very few highly talented individuals."

Social media "gurus" are a dime a dozen. Take off the masks and you might find a traditional public relations professional, agency, or marketing firm.

PR and marketing firms are morphing into digital marketing experts regardless of the actual experience. Traditional marketing departments and agencies are throwing staff in the digital world and expecting them to just "figure it out," only to find out that the same skills don't translate and result in poor performance and execution.

The irony: with the proper training and experience, traditional public relations and marketing pros can actually make the best digital marketers. The problem is that it's not an automatic switch and almost like a balanced diet, it requires constant exercise and nutrition. Something Fortune 500 companies and agencies need to realize when they are selling and buying digital marketing services.

"Many of the digital marketing concepts and activities are relatively new. We've hired people that we thought could do all of these digital marketing 'things' and they come into the business and begin executing tactics," said Ron Antevy, CEO of ebuilder, a cloud-based software company. "The problem is that the tactics are not executed well, or they don't produce a business outcome so we can't measure the return on our investment." 

Having a social media page is not necessarily a qualification.

"We see far too many people want to get into social media, but have no B2B experience," said Erin Everhart, director of digital marketing at the digital agency 352. "Having a personal Facebook page and Twitter page is good, but that doesn't make you qualified to run a business' social media account. Just focusing on social media is also extremely limiting because it's only a small piece of the integrated digital marketing puzzle."

Hire Smart, Avoid Firing Later

Rigorous and methodical hiring, ongoing training, and twice a year reviews (especially facing the pressures of entitlement with the millennial generation who are looking to quickly move up the digital ecosystem) are critical in any organization's hiring process, but with digital marketing being a life blood of today's business world, the stakes are higher.

"Hiring criteria and systems that include a detailed job description, years required, distinguish between paid or organic talent, make sure there is more than one interviewer, possibly include a series of tests and make sure that you are not only asking the right questions but the person asking the questions understands what the right answers should be," said Melanie Mitchell, digital strategist and executive coach.

Digital marketing is laced with lingo, technical terminology and acronyms with new words being entered into the Webster's Dictionary on a regular basis.

"If human resources or a recruiter is given a list of questions to ask, they also should have a script of the expected answers," Mitchell said.

Digital marketers can easily outsmart HR or recruiters unfamiliar with industry slang. Answers can be packaged in a way that might sound good to a novice or even a senior marketing executive not in the day-to-day digital marketing trenches. But it might be that the answers don't reflect the appropriate skill-sets important to fit the job requirements.

"Be very clear on the outcomes you expect once you hire the person. Then look for people who have done it. Also, find ways to 'put people in the job' before you hire them," Antevy said. "Before we hire a software developer we sit them in front of a computer and require them to write code. Figure out how to do this with your digital marketing talent before you hire them in."

Training and Staying Fit in Digital Marketing

Like weightlifting makes you stronger, training a digital marketer as if you are training for a marathon, not a sprint, is the way to go according successful digital marketing agencies:

"Training is critical, but it's not a typical three-month training curriculum where they ease their way into the process and digital marketing. Since everything in the industry moves so fast, we feel the best way people learn is to learn by doing," Everhart said.

"We're structured in 3-person teams so when a new team member comes on, they start working directly, in the same office, with that team. If there's a particular skill they're weak at – SEO, PPC, social, content – we go through a one or two hour training meeting to walk through that tactic, then give them a real hands-on tasks for a client where they can practice it," said Everhart who heads up the agency's digital talent staff in Atlanta, Tampa, and Gainesville.

Regular Reviews, Raises and Promotions – I Deserve it!

Leaving your ego at the door is a tough call for today's younger workforce who basically grew up online. There is a broad sense of entitlement among young employees and employers are reporting a widespread attitude of entitlement among young hires. Seventy percent of respondents say new employees expect to advance or be hired for upper-level positions before proving themselves.

"Conducting performance reviews two times a year is a best practice for an agency or marketing department to follow," said Mitchell, former Search Marketing Practice Lead at Digitas. "One review being a 'check in' and the other one looking at moving up with a raise or possible promotion but always processed with quantifiable and measurable review systems."

Idea: Performance reviews can also be conducted with an agency-client relationship! If you are on the client-side and this is not in place, initiate it as part of the requirement with your agency.

How Can You Close the Digital Talent Gap?

"There won't be standardization in these roles (digital marketing) any time soon. We're not talking about doing brain surgery here or selling pharmaceuticals. Heck, even universities can't keep up because things change so quickly. It's like turning a battleship around in a bathtub. By the time most educational programs have caught up, things have changed again," Weintraub said.

Inside Out and Top to Bottom – Always Educate

Digital agencies give themselves a taste of their own smart medicine by using things like custom targeting and psychographics as part of the digital marketing talent outreach and retention programs.

Weintraub notes the best answer is to be part of the solution and always educating. Here's what aimClear does to keep current employees and future hires qualified:

• Foster close ties to academia in the region by developing relationships with professors who teach marketing programs.
• Use advanced LinkedIn search filters to maintain its awareness of online marketing professionals of all disciplines within 10, 20, 50, 100, and 200 mile radius of aimClear's two offices.
• Seek out pros from its area at national conferences.

What Can You do if You're a Digital Marketer Trying to Make it?

The question remains what is better, to be a specialist or generalist? According to the Digital Marketing Talent study, there is evidence that hiring trends are shifting towards those with experience in certain areas with 35 percent report looking for both generalist and specialist, 22 percent say the need for specialists is growing.

"One of the biggest things I see is that people are too specialized. It's great, and you definitely need, something to hang your hat on, but we're at a position where I can't hire someone who's only going to do PPC or only going to do social," Everhart said. "We look for the 'general specialists' – people who have a broad sense of the industry but specialize in one area. Basically, we look for good, creative marketers, who can come up with creative ideas across any medium, even if they've never worked in that medium before."

There is a need for solid, measurable and accurate digital talent education. Close to 80 percent said they would value an on-demand library of digital marketing classes, with almost 70 percent interested in some sort of eLearning or in person workshops or training.

So if you are in the market to buy or sell digital marketing talent, credentials and certifications matter; even at a higher executive level to have a high level understanding of the basics of SEO terminology, reporting and best practices will help identify the right talent.

Formal, casual and online training is at your digital fingertips through programs such

• ClickZ Academy brings a whole library of crash courses, webinars, and courses designed to improve digital marketing skills and ROI.
• Conferences such as ClickZ Live and Pubcon offer onsite workshops, clinics, boot camps and certification programs in addition to the conference panel session.
• The University of San Francisco offers online certification curriculums focused on Internet marketing and
• It's now possible to get a master's in social media in just 18 months in a 100 percent online format. The University of Florida is the first of its kind to offer a Masters of Arts in Mass Communication with a focus on Social Media.
• If you're a senior executive trying to stay in the loop of SEO on a need to know basis; there's help. Bruce Clay offers marketing executives everything they need to know about SEO in a free online training course specifically designed for CMOs and executives to learn the best practice methodology for SEO so they can recognize a song and dance when they hear one.
• If you are looking for a social media 101 jumpstart program or more advanced digital marketing courses, Boot Camp Digital offers online training, live training and specialized corporate training headed by Krista Neher.

"For years the SEO industry has outpaced new SEO talent, creating a wide talent gap. Today we're still struggling to fill that gap. In fact, Catalyst is looking to fill close to 20 new hires by the end of the year. However, I believe we'll start to see that gap close over the next 3-5 years as the SEO tasks that used to require a specialist get filled by web developers, social marketers and more advanced content management systems," said Dan Cristo, Director of SEO Innovation for Catalyst Online.

Baidu to launch Thai search engine in 2014

Baidu will launch a search engine next year customized for Thailand, which features among its priority markets for overseas expansion.

Thailand's Internet business has high potential for growth, fuelled particularly by the availability of high-speed broadband service, said Baidu's global marketing director Richard Lee, in a Bangkok Post report.

"We are committed to continue investing in Thailand with no concerns about the current political uncertainty," Lee told the news agency. He pointed out up to 65 percent of Thailand's 25 million Internet users used Baidu products and services, which it is looking to monetize through online advertising.

The Thai-language search engine has been almost three years in development, according to Lee. There will also be Thai versions of eight of its other popular products including anti-virus and PC performance boosters, he added.

The company will also next year provide search engine marketing and optimization free to firms that want to expand to the Chinese market.

According to Lee, Thailand, Indonesia, Brazil and Egypt are the four emerging markets where Baidu is expanding. The company also has a presence in Japan, South Korea and Western Europe.

Baidu is the most dominant search engine in China with over 75 percent market share. It has recently also been diversifying into new spaces such as wearables, mobile operating systems, and smart TVs.

Will 2014 Be An SEO Or PPC Year For Marketers?

In the battle for marketing dollars, many businesses are torn between search engine optimization (SEO) and pay-per-click (PPC) advertising. In 2013, the tide seemed to turn toward PPC as concerns about the death of SEO prompted businesses to slow down their SEO spending. The changes to Google GOOG +0.37%’s algorithms meant marketers must shift their focus from keyword-heavy copy to relevant content linked with Google authorship, many experts said.

2014 Budgets

As businesses plan their 2014 marketing budgets, many are wondering if these death knells mean they should move completely away from SEO. But businesses shouldn’t move so quickly. Google’s changes were designed to stop those who were trying to work the system. For honest businesses, keywords and backlinks can still improve search results, especially when those tools flow naturally throughout a business’s well-crafted, informative copy.

Meanwhile, PPC seems to be just as popular as ever with marketers. In its report, The 2013 State of Paid Search, 72 percent of businesses surveyed reported they plan to spend more on PPC in 2014, up from 70 percent who increased spending in 2013. Google AdWords was by far the area where businesses planned to spend the most money on paid search, followed by Bing Ads, display networks, and Facebook.

Analytics Issues

One force driving businesses toward paid search is Google’s decision to limit analytics. In recent months, marketers have begun noticing the words “not provided” under many areas of their results. Security is a top concern for many search engine providers and as a result, they’re masking keyword referral data.

Paid search customers don’t have this problem. Google gives its AdWords customers access to keywords, helping them learn whether their current SEO efforts are working. But do customers have to pay? Kissmetrics came up with a few ways to get around the “not provided” issue, although the more instances a business has, the less these methods will work.

This alone could serve as an incentive for businesses to move marketing dollars toward PPC advertising in 2014. The lack of feedback on SEO efforts can lead a marketer to feel as though he or she is operating in the dark and with no insight, it will be difficult to plan future campaigns.

Economy Improving

One major difference between SEO and PPC is that PPC requires money. Marketing budgets have been locked down for the past few years, as businesses struggle to survive tough economic times.

Economists predict the financial outlook will improve slightly in 2014, with manymarketers stating that they’ll increase their social media and content marketing budgets for the year. This cautious optimism could be a win for PPC as businesses become more comfortable with spending money on marketing.

Along with the benefits of improved analytics, PPC advertising is popular because of its immunity from search engine algorithm changes. Businesses must struggle to keep up with changes affecting their search engine marketing efforts, but when major changes happen, they’re also required to update existing content to ensure it stays visible. Paid search results remain viable for the duration of a business’s paid campaign.

SEO Takes Time

As anyone who has ever deployed an SEO campaign will attest, an SEO campaign requires patience. New content can take weeks, even months, to begin appearing in search engine results and as new content comes along, it may be bumped lower until it disappears from the first page of search results.

With PPC advertising, businesses receive quicker results, which may pay off if it results in bringing in new income. Google’s Keyword Planner can help AdWords customers come up with the best keywords for their campaigns. It can also provide traffic estimates to help marketers create a budget for their campaigns.

2014 is the year many experts predicted mobile devices would eclipse PCs in the consumer market, but PC World said the devices have already exceeded desktops. Therefore 2014 will be the year laptops will be outsold, as well, if predictions are correct. This means local search will be more important than ever. Customers are more likely to search for “best restaurants” while on the road, for instance, rather than while at home or the office. Since Google recognizes these search habits, businesses must adjust their marketing efforts to accommodate this new method of search.

In 2014, businesses will also be required to determine whether their PPC campaigns are addressing mobile devices. It’s important that you use the call and location extensions when setting up your campaign, which gives customers the ability to call you or get directions by clicking on a link.

SEO Still Matters

While there are definite incentives to move from SEO to PPC in 2014, businesses can’t neglect SEO altogether. Search engine placement is still very important, especially since many consumers have grown used to scrolling past “featured results” to the beginning of organic results. While past SEO tactics may not work, there are still ways to craft SEO campaigns that work.

Link-building will be more important than ever in 2014, but it’s important businesses create organic links. This has ignited an entire industry of guest-blogging, with sites like MyBlogGuest helping connect businesses with influential sites looking for content. It’s a win-win for both parties—the host site receives keyword-heavy content with a backlink to the guest blogger’s site, while the guest blogger receives extra clicks. By linking to the posted blog on its own blog, the guest blogger can also increase search engine exposure.

One major change businesses will notice in 2014 is that a presence on Google+ will be more important than ever. Google has been gradually shifting preference toward Google+-linked content, and since Google remains by far the most popular search engine. At the end of 2013, Google still claimed 67 percent of the search engine market, so even if Bing improves its 18 percent market share in 2014, Bing and other search engines have a long way to go before they catch up with Google.

SEO and PPC are both crucial elements in today’s marketing campaigns. Chances are, many businesses will incorporate both into their plans for 2014, but attention may be shifted off of SEO in favor of PPC. By experimenting, businesses can work toward finding a formula that works for them.

Automate Your SEO Reporting by Exporting Your Leads into Excel

For any SEO who collects email leads from web forms, the dreaded part of their existence tends to be the end of the month, when it comes to reporting conversion results to clients—verifying, re-verifying, downloading, and exporting them to generate the all-important month-end reports. It can take hours and can be very tedious, but the information gleaned from this process is well worth it. There are, however, ways to optimize your workflow to the point that it almost feels like cheating your way through the process.

By using standalone programs or macros (mini scripts within a program), a project that would normally take hours turns into minutes, and I want to take this opportunity to teach you how to do this on your own. I will use a standalone program and a macro that I found through my research to demonstrate the process so you can get a better idea of what is involved.

How to scrape leads from your Gmail (or almost any other email client)

There are a wide variety of ways to scrape leads from Gmail. You can spend the money to get a program like UBotthat will help you automate the task without much effort. You can get a program like iMacros, and spend the time learning how to build proper macros that will scrape from your email box. You can spend the time to learn how to program scripts using Grease Monkey, or you can program your own stand-alone scripts. Whatever you do, you will want a solution that is as quick and easy as possible and helps to automate the task without adding much effort. I found a program on Black Hat World that is made to work on Windows, so you Mac users will need to install Windows to use it. You can download the program here.

While I am aware of the hesitation involved in downloading anything from black-hat websites, my own tests of this tool have worked out well. There are comments and reviews about this tool around the web, and it seems to work well for many users. My own research has not found an instance of this tool doing anything nefarious behind the scenes, and I would not hesitate to use it in my own email scraping.

How it works

This program works by accessing the Gmail account that is added to it and exporting the To:, From:, Body:, and Date: fields from each email. Here is how to use it:

1. Select the email settings you wish to use to download your emails. You can select To:, From:, Subject, and Date. The "Body" export is disabled; according to the tool's creator it would end up scraping all of the HTML.
   
   
2. Enter your username. This is your full email address (username@domainname.com).
3. Enter your password.
4. Enter the server and port number you wish to use. By default, it's set to pop.gmail.com and port # 995.
5. Select whether or not you wish to use a secure connection. This will allow the program to access Gmail whether or not a secure connection is available. If your email does not actually require a secure connection, be sure to uncheck the box.
6. Once these settings are selected, it will save a file in the email extractor folder with a name that looks like this: 10-1-2013-1-00 AM_Username@gmail.com.

This program is quite useful for those who either do not have or just don't use Microsoft Outlook. If you have Outlook but are not comfortable with downloading and using this program, you can set Gmail to send your messages to Outlook, and then set up Outlook macros to to export all messages to Excel (covered later in this article).

Be sure you don't violate your host's terms of service

This program can also work for other email hosts. Try it! Be sure to put in your applicable login details, and you should be able to scrape your emails without any trouble. However, be sure that you are actually allowed to scrape email from your host. Not all hosts will allow you to do so. Before using egregious scraping on your email account, just double check your terms of service (ToS) so that you don't accidentally get yourself banned from your email service. Why would an email service not allow scraping? Well, it can cause bandwidth issues if you have hundreds upon hundreds of thousands of emails to export. If this becomes an issue, you may raise an eyebrow or two at your email provider. So, be sure that you really want to do this if you want to place such a large load of use on the email services. The author of this article is not responsible for things that may happen if you do not follow specific terms of service regulations. For your reference, here are the terms of service from several common providers:

Gmail ToS: Gmail does not have any terms that specifically prohibit scraping emails. While Gmail does state you may not access it using a method other than the interface, this is a very gray area that does not provide examples. If someone is collecting lead information for a valid reason like monthly reporting for their own use, there shouldn't be an issue. If, however, someone is using access via another method in order to take down the Gmail service, then I would imagine this is where the Terms of Service here comes into play. And this is why I mentioned the large bandwidth usage that downloading thousands of emails can cause to a server, for example. Be sure you really want to proceed before doing so and make sure you won't be somehow banned from your email service as a result. We are not responsible for egregious misuse of a service with intentions to cause interference of the service through significant bandwidth use.

MSN ToS: Does not have any terms that ban exporting emails using any of these methods to export emails. (Be sure to read your own ToS).

Yahoo! ToS: Does not seem to have any terms that prohibit exporting emails. (Be sure to read your own TOS).

Hostgator email limits: While ToS doesn't specifically seem to limit scraping or exporting of emails, there are policies and limits in place. According to Hostgator's mail policy and limits page, "Each connecting IP is limited to 30 POP checks per hour." Possible interference issues with Hostgator services and this software can occur if you are using the software 100s of times per hour, for example. However, because it uses at least one pop check in order to download your emails, you shouldn't have too many issues unless you continue multiple downloads of emails from your account per hour. In which case, you will "likely get a password error indicating that the login is incorrect." Such an issue corrects itself within an hour and the email checking will automatically unlock.

Also according to their mail policy and limits page, their VPS plan and Dedicated do not have the same restrictions as their shared accounts do, so you will probably have more success with high-volume scraping on your own private servers.

A fair warning, however: I haven't specifically tested this with Hostgator, so be sure to use caution when exporting too many times.

Importing your scraped file into Excel

Once you have scraped your email and it saves it as a text file, it shows up all garbled. What we want to do now is import it into Excel so it displays all of the tab-delimited items as columns, so that we don't have to manually copy and paste every single one. To do this, let's open up our file in Excel by clicking on File > Import.

It will ask you: What type of file do you want to import? By default it has selected the CSV format but let's select the text file format since our program saved this to a text file.

Now, click the file that you want to open and click on "Get Data." The text import wizard will pop up showing you settings to choose from. Select the "Delimited" option unless it is already checked by default. Then click on Next.

In this step you can set the delimiters that your data contains. Remember when we selected the semicolon back while importing our file? Select the semicolon option here. Then, let's click on next.

Here, we can set up our columns and set the data format. For our purposes, however, let's just go with the default options.

Now, it will ask you where you want to put the data. You have a choice of Existing Sheet (which starts at =$A$1), new sheet, and pivot table. For the purposes of this article, let's just go with the default and click on OK.

Here, you see we have perfectly aligned columns and data without much work. Now you can move forward with formatting these columns and data in whatever orientations or pivot tables you like.

How to download leads from Outlook to Excel

For those who use Outlook, depending on your version, it can be cumbersome to get the data out of the program and can take longer than in just about every other program. Thankfully, Outlook features macros which can be used to export all of your data in the span of just a few seconds!

Step 1: Find or create the macro script you want to use

There are a ton of options and configurations available for this task. For our purposes, we will use modified versions of the scripts located here.

Before we get started, we will need to get the basic code from the very first code snippet, shown below. This code only exports the Subject, Received Time, and Sender of the email message. Our goal is to modify this script so that our new code will extract the entire body of the message and output it to the spreadsheet as well. Don't worry! I am going over each line of code that we modify in this tutorial! This way, you will understand exactly what we are doing and why.

Sub ExportMessagesToExcel()
  Dim olkMsg As Object, _
     excApp As Object, _
     excWkb As Object, _
     excWks As Object, _
     intRow As Integer, _
     intVersion As Integer, _
     strFilename As String
  strFilename = InputBox("Enter a filename (including path) to save the exported messages to.", "Export Messages to Excel")
  If strFilename <> "" Then
     intVersion = GetOutlookVersion()
     Set excApp = CreateObject("Excel.Application")
     Set excWkb = excApp.Workbooks.Add()<br>  Set excWks = excWkb.ActiveSheet
     'Write Excel Column Headers
     With excWks
        .Cells(1, 1) = "Subject"
        .Cells(1, 2) = "Received"
        .Cells(1, 3) = "Sender"
  End With
  intRow = 2
  'Write messages to spreadsheet
  For Each olkMsg In Application.ActiveExplorer.CurrentFolder.Items
     'Only export messages, not receipts or appointment requests, etc.
     If olkMsg.Class = olMail Then
        'Add a row for each field in the message you want to export
        excWks.Cells(intRow, 1) = olkMsg.Subject
        excWks.Cells(intRow, 2) = olkMsg.ReceivedTime
        excWks.Cells(intRow, 3) = GetSMTPAddress(olkMsg, intVersion)
        intRow = intRow + 1
     End If
  Next
     Set olkMsg = Nothing
     excWkb.SaveAs strFilename
     excWkb.Close
  End If
  Set excWks = Nothing
  Set excWkb = Nothing
  Set excApp = Nothing
  MsgBox "Process complete.  A total of " & intRow - 2 & " messages were exported.", vbInformation + vbOKOnly, "Export messages to Excel"
End Sub
Private Function GetSMTPAddress(Item As Outlook.MailItem, intOutlookVersion As Integer) As String
  Dim olkSnd As Outlook.AddressEntry, olkEnt As Object
  On Error Resume Next
  Select Case intOutlookVersion
     Case Is < 14
        If Item.SenderEmailType = "EX" Then
           GetSMTPAddress = SMTP2007(Item)
        Else
           GetSMTPAddress = Item.SenderEmailAddress
        End If
     Case Else
        Set olkSnd = Item.Sender
        If olkSnd.AddressEntryUserType = olExchangeUserAddressEntry Then
           Set olkEnt = olkSnd.GetExchangeUser
           GetSMTPAddress = olkEnt.PrimarySmtpAddress
        Else
           GetSMTPAddress = Item.SenderEmailAddress
        End If
  End Select
  On Error GoTo 0
  Set olkPrp = Nothing
  Set olkSnd = Nothing
  Set olkEnt = Nothing
End Function

In order to get started, fire up your version of Outlook. I'm using a relatively old dinosaur version (Outlook 2003), but the steps can easily be found online for all versions. Most Windows versions should allow you to use Alt+11 to open the Visual Basic code editor, which we are going to fire up next. To do this, follow these steps:

Step 1: Click on Tools.
Step 2: Click on Macro.
Step 3: Click on Visual Basic Editor.

Next, we are going to copy and paste our code here into the editor window. Now, I used the revision 1 script and modified the original version to extract text from the body by coding the following lines. One after line 19, and one after line 29:

.Cells(1, 4) = "Message" <-- This line tells the macro program to add another column to the first row that is labeled "Message". This will add a new column that displays the text extracted from the email. This one was added after line 19.

.excWks.Cells(intRow, 4) = olkMsg.Body <-- This line tells the macro program to extract the message text from the Body of the email. This way, we have an extremely easy and fast method of verifying all of our important conversion emails that we are going to be using in our reporting.

Now that we have our script ready, let's go to the Visual Basic macro editor.

In the project window underneath the project, right-click within the window, click on insert, and then click on module. This will bring up a VbaProject.OTM file that you can add your code into, as shown in the following screenshot:

Once you have made your desired modifications (or if you desire to use the original script and copied and pasted it, just click on the floppy disk in the upper left hand corner and save the file. Or you can use Ctrl+S to save it. Then, close the Visual Basic editor.

Next, we're going to run our newly modified macro! First, make sure the folder that you want is selected and all the leads you want to export to an excel spreadsheet are in that folder. Then, let's click on Tools > Macro > Macros.

Next, you will see a Macros window pop up. We need to click on the macro we want to run, and then click on run.

True to the nature of the script, you will be prompted with a dialog box that asks you what you want to name your file. Let's call it "ExcelExportTest". It will save it into your My Documents folder. Fire up Excel, and open your brand new spreadsheet. Here is the final version of our example, complete with all extracted elements of that folder:

Wrap-up

By using these methods, it is possible to greatly reduce the time that you spend on manually verifying and copying/pasting leads from your email box. It will be completely automated! Once you get the hang of using these methods, most of your time will be spent in the formatting phase that comes next. So, it will be necessary to spend this time adding some proper formatting that will help make your reports beautiful and impactful.

Google Adds Big Change To Display Bidding: Pay By Viewable Impression In AdWords

In a significant move, Google rolled out CPM bidding by viewable impression in AdWords this week. Advertisers will only be charged for ad impressions that can actually be viewed in-screen by users, rather than on the traditional served impression basis.

New reporting metrics are also available, all powered by Google’s viewability measurement solution, Active View, which received MRC accreditation earlier this year.

Viewable CPM bidding is available to all campaigns running on the Google Display Network, including remarketing campaigns.

The Brave New World of SEO: Beyond Websites

We hear it regularly – the death knell tolling for SEO. In the past several years, we’ve been bombarded by a barrage of change in organic search, from Penguin to Panda to Hummingbird, from inbound link penalties to [not provided]. Let’s face it: the only constant in search is change.

But I propose that SEO isn’t dead by far. In fact, the role of SEOs is expanding rapidly, and the reality is that we now have to look beyond just the company website. Let’s review some of the ways search has changed in 2013 and take a look at how those changes have impacted the role of search marketers.

Mobile Search

Just how important did mobile become this year to organic search? The most recentresearch from Walker Sands indicates that mobile traffic now accounts for 28% of website traffic, up a whopping 67% year-over-year. At his Pubcon keynote in October,Matt Cutts shared the statistic that YouTube’s mobile traffic had grown from 6% of total site traffic in 2011 to 40% in 2013. Clearly, mobile’s importance is growing dramatically.

But what does this mean for SEOs? Mobile presents unique new challenges for us. Google has made several key points about how mobile search will differ from desktop search, indicating that some sites will be essentially “penalized” on mobile SERPs if they are not well configured for mobile:

To improve the search experience for smartphone users and address their pain points, we plan to roll out several ranking changes in the near future that address sites that are misconfigured for smartphone users.

What the growth of mobile means for SEOs is that we can no longer just focus on website optimization from a single angle — now, we must also consider additional criteria (or sometimes an entirely different set of criteria) to ensure that same site ranks in mobile search as well.

Mobile Apps

Just a few weeks ago, Google also announced that they now have the capability toindex information housed within mobile apps just as they do for websites.

To index mobile apps, similar to websites, you must create and submit an XML Sitemap to Google Webmaster Tools.

Google then indexes the pages in the Sitemap and reads and ranks that information appropriately, allowing searchers to deep link directly to that information within the app. Great!

But what that now means is that SEOs need to be involved with the app developers as well, ensuring that the content created is optimized appropriately and that the XML Sitemap is being updated as app data is updated.

App Discovery

In a story last year, Inside Mobile Apps estimated that the iTunes App Store and Google Play each contain nearly 700,000 apps. Apps certainly can be expensive to develop, so once you create one, you’ll want to ensure that mobile device users can find the app and download it.

Mobile app discovery could essentially be considered another area of search engine optimization, both with the addition of app indexing in Google mobile organic search and within the search platforms of the iTunes App Store and Google Play themselves. As apps continue to be developed and added to these platforms, searches get more crowded — how can an app be found in the clutter?

The greatest challenge that mobile app discovery within the app platforms presents to SEOs is that the algorithms work completely differently than the Google and/or Bing search engine algos. It’s something SEOs may need to embrace as app development continues to grow and even expand beyond typical mobile devices such as smartphones and tablets to wearable technology such as Google Glass and smartwatches.

Hummingbird & Conversational Search

When the Hummingbird algorithm was announced back in September, SEOs everywhere were wondering what the algorithm change meant for the future of SEO. Hummingbird’s foundation lies in conversational search, in which searchers ask search engines questions rather than enter short keyword phrases, and Google interprets the query and processes it accordingly (also known as Ask Jeeves circa 1998). Conversational search has long been a goal of search engines, but the rise of mobile in the past year has made conversational search even more important.

In a study from last year from Google, researchers determined that because it is more difficult to type on mobile devices and the keyboards on mobile devices aren’t as easy to use, users won’t spend indefinite time searching for something specific; rather, they would simply try some other means of getting the information they want.

With the addition of voice search to mobile devices, however, searching became faster and easier than typing on the mobile device. Microsoft has also taken up voice search and even applied it to other devices, like the Xbox One, which features voice search for Bing. While the searches are focused on entertainment results such as movies and games, it does open the Xbox up to become a search device, like Google TV.

Hummingbird simply makes better use of conversational search and the relationship between words, which means that SEOs must now think more holistically about how information (and the relationship between pieces of information) is presented for indexing. No longer are we optimizing for a keyword phrase — now we optimize for words and relationships.

The Knowledge Graph

I would be remiss in mentioning the Hummingbird algorithm update without mentioning the Knowledge Graph in the next breath. If there’s anything that might impede SEO, it’s not Hummingbird — it’s the Knowledge Graph. Why?

Google’s mission states:

Google’s mission is to organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful.

Notice that nowhere in that mission statement does Google state that its mission is to provide websites with clicks. Google’s mission is “information-based” — not website-based.

For the past three years, every study I could find reported that visitors spend nearly double the time on Facebook as they do on Google. But to be fair, that makes sense. Facebook is designed to be a place of sharing whereas Google has traditionally been a site where you find the information you need and leave. And for years, Google tried to make your searches even faster, through improvements such as Google Suggest/Autocomplete, and Google QuickScroll.

Both improvements were designed to help searchers find an answer faster, in turn ensuring time on site would likely be shortened as searchers found their answers and clicked away from the search engine.

Why does Google care about the time-on-site statistic? The faster that you find an answer in organic results, the less likely you will be to click on an ad in paid search results. Google AdWords is the financial engine that keeps Google alive. In Google’s 3Q2013 SEC filing, Google AdWords accounted for 93% of the company’s total revenue.

But what if Google could provide the information you search for — your answer — directly on Google.com? Would it mean you would stay on Google.com longer? Would you use Google as your “information resource” versus clicking to another site?Knowledge Graph accomplishes this goal.

But what does the Knowledge Graph mean for SEO? On the one hand, there’s a great opportunity to be a resource in the Knowledge Graph — to be the site that the Knowledge Graph links point to.

On the other hand, as in the example above, searchers who queried “Marie Curie” who might have normally visited the Wikipedia entry listed first may find their answer instead in the Knowledge Graph box. This saves the searcher a click but also robs Wikipedia (and the other sites on this results page) from having  a potential visitor.

As the Knowledge Graph continues to evolve, SEOs will have to be very strategic about how to incorporate this reality into optimization efforts.

What It All Means If You’re An SEO

All the changes mentioned throughout this column suggest that SEO is becoming a much more holistic practice than ever before.

Now, SEOs will need to have a hand in all things marketing (if they didn’t before) to ensure that all of the hard work and investments a company makes — from websites to apps to content — can be found. Otherwise, what’s the point in creating it?

There’s a brave new SEO world out there. Go grab it.

Hummingbird Update, Google Says Goodbye to Keywords and Low Quality Content

At the beginning of October, Google introduced a new update to their algorithm. While Google updates their search algorithm on a regular basis, there are certain changes that stand out from the rest. Over the past few years, the Panda and Penguin updates have been Google’s most significant shifts. And as most people involved in the search industry agree, Google’s latest update, which is being referred to as Hummingbird, will join the ranks of those truly significant algorithm rollouts. In fact, many individuals are saying that this is biggest change to the way Google works of the last decade!

So, What Exactly is Hummingbird? 

Because Google’s algorithm is so complex, you could easily fill an entire book diving into it and exploring the technical details of this update. However, the basic gist of this change is that Hummingbird is Google’s big shift away from strictly keywords and towards having more focus on semantics and intent. Now, even if you only casually keep up with the search engine marketing and optimization world, this concept probably doesn’t sound revolutionary. The reason for that is it’s something that’s been talked about for several years now. What is a big deal is Google is finally rolling this concept into their actual search engine technology. One of the reasons Google is at a point where they’re able to make that jump is because they’ve collected a huge amount of data from both Google Voice and Android.

How Should You Deal with Hummingbird? 

As Matt Cutts has explicitly stated, the biggest concept to remember is that Google’s future “is about things, not strings.” So if piling keywords into your content has been a major part of your SEO strategy, it’s time to seriously reconsider that approach. In fact, heavily relying on keywords may not even be much of an option too far in the future. The reason is the company’s other big change is that they’re going to start encrypting all organic keyword data. That means if you had hopes that the percentage of “not provided” searches in your Google Analytics data was going to decrease, it’s time to accept that. Google isn’t going to switch course on that issue.

Although changes like this one can be very frustrating to marketers, getting mad isn’t going to help you maintain or increase the amount of organic traffic your site receives. Instead, it’s simply another piece of evidence as to why SEO shortcuts just aren’t worth it. Because this change really boils down to delivering exactly the type of content that humans (and not search engine robots) want to read, that’s what you need to be publishing. And in order to spread the word about that content, the best approach is to utilize natural channels like social media in order to engage in organic outreach. If you emphasize ensuring that each piece of content that your business produces is the absolute best it can be, that content will be able to drive results regardless of Hummingbird or any other changes Google may make in the future.