7 Content Personalization Tools That’ll Boost Your Sales

Digital marketing relies heavily on content personalization to be effective.

While expanding the reach of your marketing strategy helps you gain new leads, the quality of your content is responsible for their conversion.

Personalized content helps potential customers identify the value of your business that is relevant to them. By customizing content dynamically, you can reduce the time it takes each person to find exactly what they’re looking for and make a purchase.

Content personalization is greatly enhanced by a vast variety of tools. Both businesses and web development agencies integrate these software solutions into their products to improve customer experience.

Without any expertise, it can be difficult to find the right content personalization tools for your business. In this article, we’ll take a look at seven reliable, effective, and popular services that present a good start for developing your content personalization techniques.

1. RightMessage

RightMessage is a platform that allows you to analyze your visitors’ online behavior prior to landing on your website. This tool considers which advertisement each user clicked, what site they were previously browsing, and what actions they have already taken on your site. RightMessage then adapts the content on each page accordingly.

The platform can display menus and pop-ups differently for each visitor, as well as present your customers with varying pages and suggestions depending on what each person is seeking. For instance, visitors who have already subscribed to your newsletter will never see the prompt again.

RightMessage is also incredibly easy to pick up. It offers a collection of pre-written personalizations and enables you to create new ones by simply choosing the required elements in the builder.

Overall, RightMessage automatically segments your audience, provides graphical representations of a person’s behavior on your site, and suggests the most fitting offer for each individual.

2. Bunting

Bunting targets primarily eCommerce companies with a broad selection of products in rapidly changing market segments. This platform provides personalized product recommendations powered by the service’s machine learning algorithms.

Bunting also features a builder to create specific personalizations for different categories of visitors. For instance, your website can display different messages and content to first-time and repeat visitors. Bunting can also be useful in email marketing and analytics to determine which of your marketing strategies work best.

3. Evergage

Evergage focuses on analyzing how visitors interact with your website or mobile application and providing insights into their buying decisions. The solution comes bundled together with a native platform to create and store profiles of the users. Evergage then uses machine learning to find patterns in these users’ behavior.

Evergage allows you to adjust product recommendations and improve personalization. The platform is incredibly useful to boost the customer experience on your site by offering targeted messages and recommendations at the relevant moment.

4. OmniConvert

OmniConvert is a more sophisticated toolkit that enables you to analyze your visitors’ behavior and tailor the content for them in virtually no time. This platform utilizes A/B testing, surveys, and audience segmentation to give the most comprehensive and accurate results. This service focuses on increasing conversion rates, and it is most suitable for eCommerce and retail brands.

In terms of content personalization, OmniConvert offers more than 40 optimization points, including each visitor’s location, their local weather, their status regarding your business, how many times they have visited a certain page, and the source of traffic, among many other aspects.

Overall, OmniConvert grants you the ability to create a unique version of your store for each visitor. This personal touch relies on segmentation analysis and requires little time while helping you earn loyalty points from existing customers and attracting new clients.

5. Attraqt

Attraqt analyzes what visitors of your website spend the most time looking at. The platform then begins customizing each user’s experience by offering them relevant visual content.

This type of behavioral targeting can be immensely beneficial your conversion efforts. Attraqt is also one of the best options for companies who plan to expand globally, as the platform offers search services in more than 40 languages.

6. Emarsys

Emarsys is a product recommendation platform that aims to increase customer engagement across multiple marketing channels. It delivers content personalization and a tool for analytics in one package, topping it off with the remarkable ease of use and an interface designed with non-technical salespeople in mind.

The platform can deliver personalized content across the web, and you can also integrate the tool into your email marketing campaigns.

7. Barilliance

Barilliance is an all-around tool that offers customer retention and cart abandonment functionality, as well as content personalization, live notifications, and analytics.

This platform focuses on improving customer experience through many channels. Since Barilliance also takes into account when some items were dropped after being added to the cart, it’s a powerful tool to supply users with relevant content.

Barilliance is also quick and easy to set up, and it offers real-time shopping notifications.

How to pick the content personalization tool that’s right for you

In most cases, you won’t know how well a specific tool works until you try it out. But spending some time researching the available software beforehand can help you reduce wasteful expenses and start reaping rewards from your campaigns faster.

Before you search for tools, identify what your primary needs are. Services like OmniConvert are built to help you increase conversions, while Evergage and Emarsys focus on improving customer engagement. Determining what kind of tool you require will help narrow the search.

After you have identified the desired features, look for platforms that offer them. Reach out to brands that are known to use the tool that you are considering and request a demo from the service provider if possible.

Also, keep an eye on the features that each platform offers. Often, the bundle will include functionality that you already have. In this case, opting for a cheaper and more specific option can be a good solution.

Guest author: Anastasiya Rashevskaya – Anastasia is a Content Marketing Specialist with 6+ years of experience. She uses the power of words to create content strategies that help businesses grow and prosper in such a saturated digital environment.

The post 7 Content Personalization Tools That’ll Boost Your Sales appeared first on Jeffbullas's Blog.

source https://www.jeffbullas.com/content-personalization-tools/

Human vs Machine

I experience robots and machines every day.

And sometimes I feel there is a war going on that I didn’t sign up for.

My computer doesn’t behave itself and I need to reboot it. Annoying but it mostly works.

My smartphone throws a tantrum and I power it off and turn it back on. The solution to most tech problems.

My car dashboard displays a warning light and tells me I have a fault. The tire is flat. But on looking with my imperfect human eyes at its flatness, that is just not true.

Again, it involves a reset!

But most of the time I don’t even notice robots as they don’t look like the ones we see in science fiction movies. Ironman, WALL-E, Robocop and Terminator to name a few. Humanoid machines that replicate the homo sapien form.

The real robots

The real robots sit quietly in the background.

Applying the rules and algorithms that have been programmed by humans to perform a specific task. They sometimes seem like a ghost in a machine. Invisible and just doing their thing.

Some of the robots perform very simple tasks. Multiplying two numbers, or more complex, like guiding you in your car to your destination, or even helping you make a stock trade. These all work because intersecting technologies come together to make it possible.

Google Maps wouldn’t work unless multiple tech is combined to mix into the pot and create a hybrid of magic. It requires satellites, software, mobile devices with screen tech, the internet, and Wi-Fi to all come together to deliver the working solution.

Often the result feels like Alchemy.

As described by the science fiction writer, Arthur C. Clarke, “Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.”

Robots in plain sight

Today these intelligent machines are everywhere.

Smart fridges. I am not sure how this works but if they can order more food without leaving the house or having to think when I have run out of milk, then I am all for that.

Robotic vacuum cleaners that park themselves and self-charge when their job is done. Love that. I hate vacuuming.

Self diagnosing fault finders in cars. Lifting up the hood of the car to find a problem is like peering into the abyss. I don’t want to poke that bear. 

Planes that land and fly themselves (mostly). Pilots that had a fight with their partners before taking control of the lives of 400 passengers are maybe not the best people to have in your corner if you want to survive the adventure of flying. 

Collision detection. Better than humans who sometimes get emotional or distracted by an SMS when lane changing. 

Hands-free and voice-controlled home hardware like Amazon Alexa that can control smart home devices and lock your house behind you. But I still like having a physical key in case the robot locks me out. Or the power goes off.  

Most of these time-saving and convenience enabling devices are designed to make life simpler. But some robots are still a work in progress.

The rules

But robots may need some rules.

Isaac Asimov in the book “I, Robot” (written in 1942) made up three simple rules to guide their programmed behavior. 

1. A robot may not injure a human being.
2. A robot must obey orders given to it by a human. (Except where such orders conflict with the first law).
3. A robot must protect its own existence as long as it does not conflict with laws one and two.

This was a good start but it has become murkier since then. And I am afraid that we may be losing control.

And another paradox is that technology can be used for good or evil.

In 1860, Alfred Nobel invented dynamite. It was first used to dig mines deeper and more quickly and mining at scale helped drive the rapid growth of the industrial revolution. Then it was applied to industrial killing as it was brought onto the battlefield.

Nuclear technology is used for energy and big bombs.

Even social media is not immune from the paradox of the “evil vs good” paradox. It’s great for sharing your creation and communication with the world. But it also comes at a cost. Bad actors are using it to bully individuals at a distance, influencing democracies and spreading disinformation and fake news.    

As entrepreneurs we are also not immune from the machines.

Once we start using the intelligence we have created we sometimes find that the machine has taken over with no humans in sight. The humans abdicate and let the machines run the show.

And that is a problem.

The challenge?

Recently I have been banging my head up against misbehaving algorithms on Google and Facebook. Machines running amok and making most of the decisions.

The digital ads we are running to promote the podcast “The Jeff Bullas Show” on our YouTube Channel or advertise a partner’s business and tools have sometimes been rejected by the machines. The rulings have been unusual, to say the least, and one of my favorite reasons is “sensitive issues”. It almost sounds like I need counseling! A nice catch-all cry for a machine that is getting it wrong and often. The solution is to “Appeal.” Then you are still fighting the algorithm.

And I can’t speak to a human.

There are other issues for many other people. Get your Facebook page or “Ads” banned or closed down on Facebook and try to speak to a human for some reasonable judgment. I know of quite a few friends and colleagues that have butted up against that immovable object.

These platforms are often wasting my time, my teams’ brains and my emotional energy. I feel like I’m Google and Facebook’s slave as I spend time and money fighting their machines.

The solutions?

More machines to fight the machines.

Maybe we need to take on the platforms at their own game. Create multiple accounts and use other tech that bypasses the gatekeepers. But that feels like bringing a knife to a gunfight. Google and Facebook have 10,000 software engineers that can beat you into submission. 

Have other options?

Sign up and have in your arsenal alternative platforms or have more tools in your toolbox.  The challenge here is that Facebook and Google are really the only show in town. So it’s good luck with that.

Patience.

At the moment we are using tech that is new and largely untested and still evolving. And the machines are getting in the way. Maybe it is just patience that we need. But we are being tested.

We need to get humanity back into the game.  Over time these issues will be resolved but evolution has its drawbacks and at the moment we are seeing at times an abdication by humans to an imperfect machine.

The response is often a veiled answer of, “Sorry I can’t help you as the robot is running the show.” 

If we don’t get more human intervention involved then technology will not be our servant and we will just be its slave. That’s not the scenario I signed up for.

And…sometimes I just want to speak to an imperfect beautiful human.

The post Human vs Machine appeared first on Jeffbullas's Blog.

source https://www.jeffbullas.com/human-vs-machine/

How to Integrate Motion Graphics in Your Content Marketing + Examples

When was the last time a YouTube ad or a social media post caught your attention?

What was it about the content or information that stopped you from skipping the post on your feed or clicking the Skip ad button?

If you’re wondering whether our attention spans have shortened as often reported, the jury’s still out. Some say that equating our attention span to that of a goldfish is a myth.

One thing’s for sure, though – the way we’re processing information online is changing.

YouTube UK industry manager Paddy Collins writes that our attention span is like a muscle. With the deluge of data and information, our attention span muscles have developed this reflex of diverting itself elsewhere if it knows what will happen next and doesn’t like it.

In short, your audience has learned to shut off their attention muscle if your information is irrelevant to them.

A 2018 survey from Salesforce Research also supports this idea. According to the survey, 80 percent of customers say that the experience a brand provides during marketing and sales interactions is just as important as its products or services. In short, low-quality content could kill your chances of getting new customers.

The good thing is there are motion graphics!

Keep reading to learn why you should start using motion graphics in your content marketing efforts pronto and the different ways you can integrate them into your existing content.

Why use motion graphics in content marketing

Motion graphics, in a nutshell, are animated graphic elements.

Motion designers create rich and vivid images with movement to catch people’s attention. Whether it’s for explainer videos or a Twitter gif, motion graphics make your visual feel more life-like, which engages and delights your audience.

Ryan McLeod writes in Invision’s Animation Handbook that animation is like umami in creating tasty, nourishing food. While a dash of umami can transform bland food into a delicious meal, motion graphics transform content into a more satisfying experience.

Here are 5 reasons you should start using motion graphics as umami for your existing (or new!) content marketing efforts.

1. Motion graphics make your content memorable

As a marketer, you want people to engage with you and share your content. It could be a challenge if you have a lackluster brand recall.

When you see a video that resonates with you, you share it with your friends. It’s human nature.

Adding motion to your visual content aids in information retention and brand recall.

With motion graphics, you can grab your audience’s attention and make it easier for them to recall more details about a topic, a product, an event, or even a brand. As a result, the motion graphics in your content can help prospects consider your product or services.

2. Motion graphics highlight the most important parts of your content

Adding motion graphics to your content marketing arsenal can help highlight your unique value proposition.

Catching your reader’s eyes with animated graphics can also help potential customers decide whether or not your business or service is precisely what they’re looking for.

3. Motion graphics make your content entertaining and easy to understand.

It’s one thing to catch someone’s attention, but it’s another for the person to look at your content and stay interested.

With motion graphics, animators can tell a story in the quickest, most straightforward way possible. The digestible chunks format of motion graphics can pique reader interest, which can lead to more engagement.

4. Motion graphics are versatile pieces of content

Another benefit of using motion graphics is that they’re versatile. Use them in an explainer video to highlight your product’s benefits or use them on social media and encourage people to share your content. From serious, academic topics to fun, lighthearted beats, motion graphics always bring out the best in your content.

5. They can be used more than once

Motion graphics are easy to repurpose. You can cut an explainer video into 10-second gifs or transform an animated infographic into a static infographic.

How to use motion graphics in content marketing

Now that you’re aware of the motion graphics benefits to your marketing campaigns, here are 5 ways you can use them. Give them a try and watch your engagement soar in the next few months!

1. Logo animations

Adding motion in logos is a great way to spruce up your branding materials, event booths, and email signatures. An animated logo will not only pique your audience’s interest, but it’s also a great brand awareness tool. Spotify Live’s animated logo below is a great example!

Source: Michael Brekka

2. Social media GIFs

GIFs, or animated images, have become a huge part of social media and popular culture and it would make perfect sense to add them to your content marketing arsenal.

Not only do they capture attention, but they also come in a form that most people recognize and enjoy. Plus, animated gifs help your brand seem more approachable, relatable, and memorable!

3. Explainer videos

Do you want to share the origin story of your business? Or would you like to highlight how your products are manufactured?  You should consider explainer videos!

Whether you want to upload it on your YouTube channel or have your sales team use it every time they’re interacting with a potential customer, explainer videos translate complex ideas in a fun, more engaging way.

4. Facebook ads

Instead of paying thousands for a full-length video that you can feature on social media such as Facebook, motion graphics for your Facebook ads are a good alternative. The good news is that video content can bypass the text amount restriction on Facebook ads because only the thumbnail image counts.

5. Animated infographics

An infographic is already a great way to present various types of information, but adding motion and movement creates a whole new content experience.

An animated infographic’s moving elements will draw the reader’s eyes to details that need the most attention. Plus, animated infographics are inexpensive to produce in contrast to videos.

The takeaway

From banners to Twitter GIFs to explainer videos to animated infographics, motion graphics in your content are the perfect tool to share an exciting brand story, communicate product value in less than a minute, and engage your audience. Most of all, thoughtful movement and motion in your graphics makes your content more human, authentic, and relatable.

Guest author: Kai Tomboc is the resident wordsmith for Easelly, makers of a simple infographic maker tool, and an information design service studio. When not engrossed in a book, she’s most likely taming tardigrades or trying really hard to perfect her one-handed kettlebell swing.

The post How to Integrate Motion Graphics in Your Content Marketing + Examples appeared first on Jeffbullas's Blog.

source https://www.jeffbullas.com/motion-graphics/

A 5-Point Plan for Blogging Success in 2021 and Beyond

Are you blogging? If not… someone else likely is!

The world of blogging continues to grow in massive leaps and bounds. And the moment someone says the world of SEO or blogging is dying, the blogosphere continues to prove them wrong time and time again.

And when it comes to blogging, WordPress (WP) is leading the way in terms of what solution site owners and bloggers are using. In fact, WP now powers more than 30% of all sites on the internet today, and their business has moved way beyond just ‘blogging’.

Whether you have a blog or not, “blogging” deserves more attention today than ever before. And who knows… you might even be able to change your life as a result of it!

If you are completely new to the concept of blogging, don’t worry… it’s extremely fast, simple and affordable to go live with a blog of your own. On the flip side, if you’ve already tried blogging and haven’t seen the success you’d been hoping for, you will also find great value in this step by step reference guide.

Let’s get started.

1. Start your WordPress blog right from day one

First things first, you need to prepare for the launch of your new blog. This will require a few different things, but before getting started, you should read through this whole resource guide to make sure you are completely prepared and heading in the direction you want to go.

Before getting started, you will need to consider the following:

• Why are you blogging, and what are you blogging about?
• What will the name of your site be, and is that domain available?
• Where will you host your website and have you compared plans?
• Is the goal to make money with your blog, or just to create a site?
• Are you familiar with WordPress, and have you looked at other CMS?

No matter what you answered to the questions above, it’s just important that you read through each and consider what direction you might want to go in. Whether it’s your first blog or your 100th, the important thing to know is that there are no technical or design skills required, and the process of starting a blog is easy – but creating a ‘successful blog’ is where it takes some serious time, work and effort.

With all of that being said, if you are completely new to the concept of blogging, it’s recommended that you read through Neil Patel’s blogging guide to starting a blog as soon as possible. What makes this reference guide different from others, is that it’s loaded with step by step actions to take, along with visuals and proven examples of each.

If you are already familiar with the process of registering a domain name, setting up your WordPress site and creating content, perfect! You will now be ready to move onto the next step in the process, which is audience engagement and understanding how to provide real value to your audience.

2. Know your audience and write to provide value

With more than a billion active websites and blogs on the internet today, pretty much every topic or question you could think of has already been discussed several times over. If that’s the case, why are individuals and brands still going live with websites and blogs, and writing about the same stuff?

There are a few good reasons for this, but the main one is that everyone has their own way of writing and sharing content, while also providing their own expertise. This is also why Google provides so many organic results when you search for something, thus giving the end user something to search through to find the best answer or experience.

With all of that being said, before going live with your blog, it’s important for you to understand your audience and how they can get the best experience and engagement out of your site – and one of the best ways to accomplish this is by niching down your audience.

A perfect example of this can be seen in this reference guide, as it breaks down how you might want to niche down your target audience from ‘sports’ to something like ‘jump training’. The way this works is quite simple, and just a matter of breaking things down.

• Sports
• Basketball
• Basketball Skills
• Jump Training

As you can imagine, if you start writing a blog all about sports and basketball, the audience focus and topics can be all over the place. However, if you were to create a blog on just basketball skills and jump training, the focus would be extremely niche and relevant.

This will also help with the monetization of your blog content, which I will cover later on.

In summary, the more niche-focused your site content and audience is, the easier it will be for you to create content, provide value and also market to your exact audience time and time again.

3. Create a content marketing strategy that works

Once your content is written and live on your site, then the content promotion aspect should be where the majority of your time and effort is spent.

When it comes to content promotion methods, there is a whole world of options out there to choose from. You can see a list of 76 content promotion methods here, which include everything from social promotion, email marketing, PR/outreach, and more.

However, before we even jump into a few of these different methods, it’s important to make sure you have a solid marketing plan in place, and a promotion cycle that you can follow each time a new blog article goes live.

A perfect example of this can be seen through the visual below.

The truth is, most people aren’t going to read through all of your written content, and the title and visuals are going to get the most attention. With the massive amount of time you’ve already spent on writing your content, much more of it should be spent on the promotion.

So, when your latest blog post goes live, be sure to do at least the following:

• Internally link to your new article from other blog articles
• Share it across all social media platforms
• Use hashtags and re-scheduling to keep it active
• Reach out to other sites for link building and references

By performing these quick and simple actions every time a new article goes live, you will ensure that your content is immediately being found and also indexed by Google.

And lastly, don’t forget to continually promote your older content for many weeks, months, and years after it originally goes live. This is especially true of evergreen content, as it will always be useful, no matter when it is originally published.

4. Monetize your blog without sacrificing site experience

Most people start a blog because they want to see if they can make some money in the process. As mentioned earlier, ‘it’s easy to start a blog, but not easy to make a successful and profitable blog’. However, if you are willing to put in the work and effort, there is no reason to be discouraged.

To truly make money with your website or blog, you need to know exactly what your audience wants, and how to deliver it to them in a way to make you money as well. And even better, if you can promote different services and products that you actually know and trust, you will likely see even better numbers.

This is something that was pointed out in great detail in this make money blogging article.

Of the many different ways to make money through the use of a website or blog, the following are most sought after and proven to be successful.

• Affiliate marketing
• Google adsense
• Amazon associates program
• Paid banner ad spots
• Selling ebooks and courses
• Offering private access to premium content

With so many different options to choose from, it’s always best to choose one that not only relates to your existing site content and audience needs, but also one that pays out as well.

5. Turn your blog and expertise into a brand

Last but not least, we need to discuss the topic of turning your blog content and expertise into a brand. As mentioned earlier, it’s one thing to start a blog, it’s another to actually make money with a blog… and it’s a whole new level when you can flip your site content and traffic into brand loyalty and a business of its own.

This is something many of the world’s top bloggers have done with their brands and following over time. Since anyone can start a blog and build a following, this tends to happen more often than not.

• 

Some well-known examples of famous bloggers who went on to become brands and businesses of their own include Gary Vaynerchuk, Harvey Levin, Michael Arrington, Tim Ferriss, Timothy Sykes, Darren Rowse, and more…

In order to make this leap, you must have an online following through both your site and social media, while offering a service of value that people are willing to pay for. It’s an exciting journey, but also one that happens over the course of several years.

How to get the most from your blogging efforts in 2021 and beyond

It seems like we’ve all been talking about blogging for well over a decade now, however, it just doesn’t seem to go away. In fact, the blogosphere just keeps on growing!

It’s not a question of how big and how far blogging will go in the coming years, but instead if you are going to be a part of it. If you already have a blog or are just looking to get started, be sure to follow through on each of the actionable steps highlighted above to get your blogging journey into full gear!

Guest author: Zac Johnson is a world-renowned blogger and entrepreneur with nearly 20 years of experience in the online marketing space and has helped his readers generate millions of dollars online. He shares his story and guidance at ZacJohnson.com

The post A 5-Point Plan for Blogging Success in 2021 and Beyond appeared first on Jeffbullas's Blog.

source https://www.jeffbullas.com/blogging-success/

Google’s New 2021 Ranking Factor: Core Web Vitals

In May 2020, Google announced it would add more user experience (UX) signals to its ranking algorithm.

That’s why next year, Core Web Vitals will become ranking factors.

But what exactly are these Core Web Vitals?

Well, they’re three metrics:

• Largest Contentful Paint (FCP)
• Cumulative Layout Shift (CLS)
• First Input Delay (FID)

In this article, we’ll talk about what these metrics represent and how you can improve them for your website.

Let’s get started.

Largest Contentful Paint (LCP)

The LCP metric represents the load time of a page. It measures how long it takes for the largest above the fold content element to load. That largest element can be a picture, video, or a block of text.

According to PageSpeed Insights (PSI), your LCP should occur in under 2.5s.

As this is the biggest element, it’s usually the most important one. That’s why Google pays so much attention to how quickly it loads.

While other speed metrics like FCP track the beginning of the loading experience, LCP tracks its culmination.

It’s also important to note that only above the fold content can affect this metric. If a user taps on the screen or scrolls down, the browser stops looking for another LCP candidate.

Here’s how you can check which element triggers the LCP metric on your website.

Checking LCP with Chrome’s DevTools

First, open the page you want to inspect in Chrome. Right-click and select “Inspect.”

From there, go to “Performance.”

Click the “Reload” button.

Chrome will analyze the page for a few seconds and give you a report.

In the “Timings” section, you can see a small LCP icon. When you hover over it, it will paint the largest element of the page blue.

Image Source: Amazon.com

You can use this technique for all of your pages.

Here are a few optimizations that can help with your LCP score:

• Optimize images: Image optimization includes techniques like compression, format conversion, and adding width/height descriptors to your images. As images are often the biggest problem for slow websites, it’s essential to optimize them.
• Implement Critical CSS: Critical CSS is a technique that involves finding the CSS that’s responsible for styling above the fold content and inlining it in your page’s header tag. It’s a great way to improve perceived performance.
• Minify CSS and JavaScript: Code minifications means removing all the unnecessary parts from your website’s code. These include things like comments, whitespace, and line breaks.

Cumulative Layout Shift (CLS)

CLS represents the visual stability of a page. It measures how significant the unexpected layout shifts on a page are. Unexpected layout shifts occur when content on the page moves around without user input or prior notification.

A CLS score below 0.1 means a page is visually stable.

Image Source: web.dev

To get this score, Google calculates the impact fraction and distance fraction for each unexpected layout shift. As these fractions grow, the CLS score gets worse.

Put simply, the CLS score is the sum total of all individual layout shift scores for each unexpected layout shift.

Again, it’s important to differentiate between expected and unexpected layout shifts.

An expected layout shift is just what it sounds like. You click on something that should change the layout of the page and it does.

For example, if you click on a search icon and a search bar appears.

That’s exactly what should happen.

But, if you try to click on something and an ad gets in the way, that’s an unexpected layout shift.

In that case, we could also say that the layout shift is terrible from a UX standpoint. When users try to click on a button, they don’t expect (nor do they want) to be interrupted and misclick on an ad.

The point is: not all layout shifts are the same.

Fortunately, Google differentiates between user-initiated and unexpected layout shifts.

They flag shifts that occur within 500ms of user interactions with a hadRecentInput attribute. These layout shifts don’t count towards your CLS score.

That’s why you shouldn’t worry about your CLS score if your website only has user-initiated pop-ups.

How to check for layout shifts

Chrome’s DevTools can help you find layout shifts easily. Right-click on a page you want to analyze and select “Inspect.”

Go to “More Tools” and select “Rendering.”

At the bottom, you’ll see a “Layout Shift Regions” option with a checkbox next to it.

Now every time a layout shift occurs, the shifted area will be highlighted.

Image Source: forbes.com

Here are a few optimizations that can help with your CLS score:

• Avoid inserting ads and pop-ups above other content: Inserting content above other content causes everything below to shift, resulting in a bad CLS score.
• Add width and height attributes to images: That way, the browser knows how much space to allocate for each image in advance. This makes its job easier and reduces layout shifts.
• Optimize font delivery: Preloading fonts can help them meet the first paint, in which case they don’t cause layout shifts. Using font-display optional can also help with font delivery.

First Input Delay (FID)

FID represents the interactivity of a page. It measures the time it takes for the browser to respond to the first distinct user interaction – like a tap or a click.

If you keep your FID below 100ms, you’re good to go.

Now, FID tracks the delay after only the first input. In a way, that’s the most important delay on your website.

Here’s why:

First impressions are everything on the web. Users will instantly leave and most likely won’t return if a website frustrates them on their first visit.

That’s why keeping a low FID is crucial.

FID is also a field-only metric (LCP and CLS both can be measured in the field and in the lab). It requires a real user to provide input at a specific time. 

If there’s no input, there’s nothing to measure. And a user clicking on the same button at different times will produce a different result.

That’s why you might see different FID results on various tests.

How to check your FID

You can easily check your FID with Google’s PageSpeed Insights. It’s one of the first things you see in the “Field Data” report.

Here are two optimizations that can help with your FID:

• Break up Long Tasks: Long Tasks take up over 50ms on the main thread, making it unresponsive to user interactions. By breaking them up, you can significantly improve the interactivity of your website.
• Use web workers: Web workers make it possible to run scripts in the background without affecting the main thread. In general, moving non-UI operations to a background thread is a good idea.

Now let’s see how you can audit your entire site for Core Web Vitals and general site speed issues.

Using the new Google Search Console (GSC) report

Recently, Google introduced a new report in the GSC.

When you click on “Core Web Vitals” in GSC, you’ll get a Mobile and a Desktop report.

In these reports, you can learn how many poor, decent and good URLs your website has.

Unfortunately, this report won’t show you each individual URL with a specific problem (for example, a bad CLS).

Instead, GSC will give you one example URL that has this issue.

It does that because the system assigns problems to a group of URLs. In this report, Google assumes that pages with similar content and resources have similar performance issues.

For example, let’s say you have an eCommerce store with hundreds of identical product pages. If the product image for one page isn’t optimized, the images on other product pages probably won’t be, either.

And if the product images are the largest elements on the product page, they’ll trigger the LCP metric.

As a result, you have a group of pages with the same problem – a slow LCP.

Once you have this general idea of your website’s problems, you can start locating specific issues.

For example, if you find that a group of pages has a bad LCP score, you can find the elements that trigger the metric with Chrome’s DevTools. If it turns out that the largest element is usually an image, you’ll need to optimize your images.

You can (and should) run all problematic pages through PSI.

Get more info with PSI

Go to the PSI page, enter the URL you want to analyze and Google will give you an assessment of the Core Web Vitals right at the top.

You can get specific improvement suggestions from the “Opportunities” and “Diagnostics” sections.

From there, you can tackle each problem one by one.

How to implement website optimization strategies

Now that you know how to find problems with your site speed let’s talk about how to solve them.

Here are the two main ways that people improve their site speed:

• Install 5-6 different tools and do some manual optimizations
• Use a complete speed optimization service

You can absolutely do everything by hand or get a developer to do it for you. But it ‘s time consuming and expensive.

On top of that, the web is always evolving. New best practices emerge all the time and you have to constantly be on top of your game.

And with so many tools, including free ones, it makes no sense to go about it this way.

Free tools/plugins that optimize each part of your website can work fine. There are tons of solutions out there that do a good job. And you can find them with a simple Google search.

But there are downsides to this approach as well.

First, finding, installing and setting up each tool can easily take a couple of days.

Second, there’s no guarantee that a free tool will be updated when a new best practice is introduced. You’ll have to monitor that and act accordingly.

Finally, these tools don’t offer support. When something breaks, you’re on your own.

Working around all of these downsides isn’t impossible, but it’s not efficient.

If you want to take care of your business and still have a fast website, the final option is your best bet.

Using a complete speed optimization service like NitroPack makes your life so much easier. It’s easy to set up, it requires no monitoring and most importantly – it produces instant results.

For example, here’s the PageSpeed Insights score for jeffbullas.com minutes after installing NitroPack.

Of course, you can also test other tools and strategies. And your choice will depend on how much time and effort you’re willing to spend on site speed.

But regardless of that, you should start fixing your website’s performance issues right away.

The post Google’s New 2021 Ranking Factor: Core Web Vitals appeared first on Jeffbullas's Blog.

source https://www.jeffbullas.com/core-web-vitals/