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31.3.17
SearchCap: CRO tips, local search proximity & paid search analytics
Below is what happened in search today, as reported on Search Engine Land and from other places across the web. The post SearchCap: CRO tips, local search proximity & paid search analytics appeared first on Search Engine Land.
Please visit Search Engine Land for the full article.
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Daily Search Forum Recap: March 31, 2017
Here is a recap of what happened in the search forums today, through the eyes of the Search Engine Roundtable and other search forums on the web.
Search Engine Roundtable Stories:
- Search Buzz Video Recap: Google Confirmed Fred, Never Denied An Update, Won't Use Machine Learning & More
This week in search, I covered how Google confirmed the Fred update and cited quality several times as the issue. Google also said they never denied an update to the algorithm. Google said machine learning wonât take over the search algorithm... - Google: Our Duplicate Detection & Clustering Is Stable
Paul Haahr, a lead search ranking engineer at Google, said on Twitter that there haven't been many changes to Google's algorithms around duplicate detection and clustering in the search results. He said "we make improvements to our code over time... - Google Search Snippets Showing "Tags"
I think I found something new myself that Google is testing or maybe have launched in the mobile search results snippets. A new line called "tags." I can't click on them but they show above the description/snippet block and below the title and breadcrumb URL... - Google Tests Breadcrumbs At Top Of Search Results Snippets
Yet another Google user interface test to add to our list. Google is testing placing the breadcrumb/URL at the top of the snippet... - Meet Gary Illyes Of Google In Boston Next Week
Gary Illyes, the Googler we cite here way too often, is going to be in Boston part of next week. He posted on Twitter that he is open to chatting with folks about "internet things" over coffee, lunch and/or dinner. So if you are in town... - The Google Nooooooodle Cafe
Google's Hong Kong office has a cafe named "Nooooooodle" - I assume they serve noodles and accessories. This is in the Hong Kong office and the Nooooooodle logo is Googley as you can see. This was
Other Great Search Forum Threads:
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Marketing Day: April Fools pranks, Snapchat story search & Reddit ads
Here’s our recap of what happened in online marketing today, as reported on Marketing Land and other places across the web.
Please visit Marketing Land for the full article.
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Google Optimize, the free website testing solution, is out of beta
Google’s A/B testing and content personalization solutions, Optimize and Optimize 360, are both out of beta. The free version, Google Optimize, is available in 180 countries.
Optimize debuted in beta last fall, several months after Google introduced Optimize 360 last spring as part of the new a la carte Google Analytics 360 Suite.
Optimize is designed for small to mid-sized businesses. It ties in with Google Analytics, and that data is used to inform website tests. A visual editor lets users drag and page drop elements and it’s also possible to edit raw HTML or add JavaScript or CSS rules in the editor.
Source: Google
Tests can be targeted at specific user segments, and URL rules determine which pages a test runs on.
Initial demand for a free website testing solution from Google that’s already integrated with Analytics has been solid. Google says over 250,000 users had requested access to the free version since the beta opened. It’s impact on mid-market paid solutions remains to be seen. It could pull some paying customers away from other solutions. Or longer-term, it could open up a new realm of demand for more advanced testing capabilities from sites that hadn’t employed testing previously.
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Countering header bidding, Google drops its ‘last look’ advantage
Google may have taken away header bidding’s best reason for being.
The increasingly popular practice of header bidding arose largely because publishers were unhappy that Google gave its own DoubleClick Ad Exchange (AdX) a “last look” on auctions for ad impressions. Only AdX was able to bid on every impression, and it could always outbid others.
But Google posted this week a new support document — first noted and confirmed with Google by AdExchanger — that describes an open beta phase for a new procedure that eliminates the “last look” practice.
Called Exchange Bidding in Dynamic Allocation (EDBA), it was first announced as a test in April of last year:
Exchange bidding in Dynamic Allocation will allow publishers to invite trusted third-party exchanges and SSPs to submit real-time prices using industry-standard RTB calls. These prices will be considered along with bids from the DoubleClick Ad Exchange and the publisher’s reservation campaigns to pick the highest-paying ad.
In other words, Google’s AdX doesn’t get a preferential bidding position where it can outbid the winning offer. EDBA currently only supports display ads, not video or native ads.
In the increasingly popular header bidding, a tag on a publisher’s web page does an end-run around Google by directly calling bids from exchanges and preventing AdX from getting a last bid. In its new document on Exchange Bidding, Google argues that Exchange Bidding works better than header bidding:
Exchange bidding versus header bidding
Exchange Bidding lets the DFP [Google’s DoubleClick for Publishers] ad server communicate directly with third-party ad exchanges in a server-to-server connection, rather than communicating through custom header bidding code implemented in a publisher’s mobile app or webpage. This direct method reduces page load latency and eliminates the complex publisher configuration required by header bidding. Eligible inventory trafficked in DFP can take advantage of Exchange Bidding with no additional technical development required for publishers.
Header bidding advocates like ad exchange AppNexus have contended that header bidding does not cause page latency (slower page loading), but Google has disagreed.
But, as pointed out by AdExchanger, EDBA could give Google an informational advantage over other bidders, since its ad server is also directly connected to the publisher’s server. For instance, it might be able to better understand than other ad bidders which page impressions are more valuable because of where they are in a website.
However, Google Director of Product Management Jonathan Bellack told AdExchanger that his company doesn’t intend to maintain such an advantage, although it’s not yet clear how the informational field will be leveled.
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Keep your marketing campaigns organized across media platforms
This white paper from Atomized shares tips and tricks to help you stay consistent and organized.
Visit Digital Marketing Depot to download “Modern Marketing: How to Keep Campaigns Organized During the Explosion of Media Platforms.”
About The Author
Digital Marketing Depot
is a resource center for digital marketing strategies and tactics. We feature hosted white papers and E-Books, original research, and webcasts on digital marketing topics -- from advertising to analytics, SEO and PPC campaign management tools to social media management software, e-commerce to e-mail marketing, and much more about internet marketing. Digital Marketing Depot is a division of Third Door Media, publisher of Search Engine Land and Marketing Land, and producer of the conference series Search Marketing Expo and MarTech. Visit us at
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Getting the most bang for your buck: 11 CRO opportunities
Improving marketing performance often involves a lot of spot treatment: you spend some time working on your paid search campaigns, then you spend some time working on your organic search, and so on and so forth. One of my favorite things about conversion rate optimization (CRO) is that so much of it is channel-agnostic. How often do we get the chance to work on one central project that stands to improve the performance of all of our channels at once?! Not often enough!
Plus, no matter how well your channels are already performing, there’s always opportunity to generate more business by facilitating conversion. Check out the suggestions below to uncover pain points and actionable tips for increasing conversion rate.
Put your best foot forward
The likelihood of conversion begins before a prospect even reaches the website. We all know that different keywords are likely to perform differently; that’s why advertisers bid differently on different keywords. But this understanding isn’t often translated to conversion optimization, though it should be. For example:
Understanding keyword intent can have an impact on conversion rate. Why? Because understanding keyword intent provides insight into where the prospect is in the buying cycle and, therefore, the type of information that they are looking for. Aligning conversion actions with the prospect’s stage in the buying cycle allows advertisers to provide the right content to increase the likelihood that the prospect will take action.
Depending on marketing strategy and profit margins, some advertisers may want to go as far as to align conversion actions with keyword intent — but that could be a whole post in itself, and it is understandably not feasible for all advertisers, either due to profit constraints or marketing nurture resources.
Ads play a role in conversion optimization, too! Ads help manage the expectations of visitors. This is one of the reasons I like to look at ad performance by analyzing conversions by impressions instead of click-through rate (CTR). The fact is, CTR can be misleading. It’s still a valuable health metric, but if the visitors don’t ultimately take an action, then it isn’t such a valuable KPI in the grand scheme of things.
On-page optimization tips
This is the most commonly discussed part of conversion rate optimization. In fact, when CRO comes up in conversation, it seems like the discussion typically goes straight to landing page layouts. That’s because landing pages play a huge role in conversion rate — and therefore provide some of the biggest opportunities for improvement.
Prioritize your conversion actions and create a hierarchy. Doing so helps facilitate conversions by making it clear and obvious what the visitor should do next in order to continue the buyer journey.
To do this, consider what your primary goal is for each page that you create. The action that you require from the visitor in order to achieve this goal is considered your highest priority. They won’t always be quite ready for the sale or the demo, or whatever your highest priority action is, but that’s a great reason to provide micro-conversions, which allow them to continue to engage with you in the meantime, all while you are tracking their behaviors and providing useful content.
Micro-conversions could be things like downloads, video plays, email subscriptions and more. Determine which of these are most relevant to your goal, or otherwise most valuable, and prioritize accordingly.
As you lay out your landing page, you should place appropriate emphasis on the calls-to-action (CTAs) and where they fall on the page, based upon the hierarchy that you’ve created. The key to micro-conversions is to ensure that they aren’t competing against your highest priority CTAs. This brings me to my next point.
De-clutter & keep it simple. One of the ugliest things in the worldwide web is a cluttered website. Cluttered websites are overwhelming and hard to follow. In some cases, they lack credibility because they look unprofessional. In other cases, even when they are known to be professional, they lose visitors among all of the options.
For example, think about a government site. Whoa. Talk about a house of glass — and I’m not talking about the glass houses that people throw stones at! I’m talking about the carnival glass house mazes that are so hard to walk through because right when you think you’re headed down the right path, you run into a window.
We’ve all been there: At least 10 links seem semi-relevant to what you are looking for, so you choose the one that you think is most relevant. The page loads, and it isn’t what you were looking for, but there’s a link on it that reads like it may have the information you need. You click on it, and it wasn’t what you were looking for, either, and the cycle repeats until you realize that you’re back to where you started.
Cluttered sites can occur for various reasons, but try to keep in mind that sometimes less is more. Providing too many options can create a frustrating experience for visitors. Instead, stick with providing the few that are most relevant.
Consider all devices. Every year, this gets closer and closer to being an unwritten rule, but we’re not quite there yet — so it is still written! As you build your landing pages, and ultimately your site, keep in mind that different devices are used, well, differently. Elements of a page that might be perfectly reasonable on a desktop could be very challenging or frustrating on a mobile device — like a long form or clickable links that are close together. Being without a mouse or a keyboard changes the experience drastically.
In addition, consider the mindset of the consumer when on desktop vs. mobile. Depending upon your business, a consumer may be more likely to take certain actions at certain times of the day, which may or may not coincide with certain device usage. For example, some B2B companies may find that long-form content is more likely to be consumed during the day (and therefore on a computer), whereas those using a mobile device in the evening may just want a short synopsis or a video, and the ability to submit a quick form with questions.
Want to get a second opinion on whether or not your page is mobile-friendly? Check out Google’s free mobile-friendly checker. Although it can’t give you a comprehensive breakdown of tips around intent, it can help you to ensure that the structure of the site facilitates a positive mobile user experience. For more information, dig into the mobile usability section within Google Search Console, which will provide tips for improving mobile-friendliness.
Establish credibility and develop trust. One of the best lessons I’ve ever learned was from a paid search client. They said, “We don’t include the word ‘trust’ in our ads because we don’t believe that we can simply tell someone to trust us.” While I won’t make a case one way or the other for using the word in your ad copy, there is something to be said for the sentiment.
When visitors arrive at your site, they have no reason to trust you beyond your word. Trust symbols can help give them peace of mind. There are plenty of ways to portray trustworthiness: display testimonials, offer references, provide (and maintain) satisfaction guarantees. Displaying awards and badges of trustworthy organizations (such as the BBB) can help, too.
Even beyond the symbols, there are a few things that can help a business look credible at first glance. One is a modern, clean website. Rightly or wrongly, a good-looking website portrays more credibility than an outdated site. In addition, certain secure payment options can also provide a level of trust simply because the visitor can be confident that even if the site is not legitimate, they have a way of refunding their money through a source which they already trust.
Know your audience and write for them. This one ties in nicely with some of the other considerations, but it warrants the individual mention. When you write your copy, use words and language that are relevant to your consumer. As product experts, we sometimes write over our consumers’ heads, which isn’t good.
Write content in a way that is most meaningful to your audience. If you aren’t sure how to do this, start by writing with them in mind. After it’s written, read it and make sure these questions are easy to answer from the consumer’s standpoint:
- Why should I care?
- Does this solve a problem that I have?
- What are next steps to obtain more information or purchase?
Look at site speed. Slow load times can lead to a frustrating user experience. As consumers, we want to find information quickly. If a site takes too long to load, we’ll look elsewhere. You can easily test your site speed with this free Google tool. The tool will test both desktop and mobile site speeds. Bonus: it not only gives you a score but provides suggestions for improvement.
Strategically leverage images. Well-placed, relevant images can transform the appearance of a text-heavy landing page. I recommend testing new images, as well as the placement of the images on the page.
Test, test, and then test some more! I contemplated whether I should put this bullet first or last. It’s arguably one of the most important, but it’s also the most often stated. Everyone knows that landing pages should be tested, but developing tests can still be tough. Hopefully, the above points have provided some inspiration.
Continuing the conversation
Think of the buyer’s journey as a cycle — not a linear trajectory. What difference does it make to view it in this way? The fun doesn’t end after the conversion — the cycle just starts over! After the conversion (or the sale), there are often immediate opportunities to upsell, cross-sell or continue engagement through blog posts, content and social media. A few suggestions:
Cross-sell and upsell. With every sale’s end comes a new beginning. Now that you know more about the types of products or services that the consumer is interested in, you are well positioned to provide recommendations about complementary products. Don’t miss out on the opportunity to provide them with suggestions while they are in the buying mode.
Provide opportunities for them to join in conversation. There are truly endless opportunities for doing this. Here are a few examples: invite them to follow your social channels, invite them to share content, engage them with user-generated content, share your blog or tips, or even facilitate discussion with other customers through the use of a shared hashtag or group.
Some opinions expressed in this article may be those of a guest author and not necessarily Search Engine Land. Staff authors are listed here.
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Search & social integration: Takeaways from SMX West
Below is a roundup of key lessons learned across various sessions last week.
1. Prioritize team integration
Team structure is crucial in integrating search and social in an organization.
Justin Freid, in the session on “Using Paid Search & Social Together to Deliver the Ultimate Knock-Out Punch,” laid out his team structure, in which a director of search and social runs the team, with support from supervisors for SEO, SEM and social that lead their distinct disciplines while working closely together.
For organizations where social experts and search experts are not on the same line in the organizational chart, seating the two teams in close proximity to each other fosters accessibility and idea-sharing (and camaraderie, which builds trust).
Standing in-person meetings, either weekly or biweekly, help the disciplines share data and execute cross-channel testing. These standups provide opportunities to share real-time insights and test ideas across both teams, and to follow up on previous tests and learnings.
2. Share social and search data to make cross-platform decisions
My colleague, Maggie Malek, in the session, “SEO & Social: A Match Made in Marketing Heaven,” laid out several sources to look for insights that can help inform search and social efforts.
- Search informing social — In social media, people tend to post content that reflects the best version of themselves, which can make it difficult for marketers to get a sense of their true pain points. In the privacy of a Google search box, consumers tend to be more honest, asking questions they may not pose in public. Use this as inspiration for content to address these questions and needs.
- Social informing search — Look at social to determine what people are saying about your product to their friends, what customer service issues they are experiencing, how they are interacting with your competitors, and what types of content they are engaging with. Social can also be a powerful tool for looking at what words people use to describe your product and competitors, which may inspire keywords and content.
- Other channels — Don’t forget other search boxes outside of search engines. Consumers search YouTube, Twitter, Instagram and Facebook, each in a slightly different fashion. Amazon reviews are also a great way to understand the questions your audience has about your product.
In the presentation “Bridging the Data Gap With Social,” Hannah Thorpe broke down some of the ways social can help fill in the data gaps that cause issues in search efforts:
- How are people finding my content? — In a world where keyword data can’t always indicate which queries are driving visits to the site, social can provide data around related posts; use hashtags and popularity of topics in online conversations to help fill in the gaps in content your audience cares about and learn which words they use to get to your brand.
- What content should I be making? — Search volumes used to tell us which keywords we should be targeting, and that data is getting more difficult to determine. Social data can reveal activity on content topics and themes, and searching forums and Q&A sites can give us an idea of what questions people are asking. This helps marketers create content better targeted for our users.
3. Craft messaging based on where the user is in the funnel, not which platform they’re using
Brands and agencies often plot out marketing messaging by channel, but consumers frankly don’t think in terms of channels. Our always-connected, modern consumers expect consistency and relevance with brands at every touch point.
Michael McEuen, in his presentation, “How to Reach Ideal Customers Using Advanced Search & Social Tactics,” recommends diving deep into identifying your ideal customers and their conversion paths in order to chart your strategy at each stage of the journey.
For example, sample tactics to consider at each stage:
- Awareness — Video ads, display ads
- Engagement — Sponsored content (e.g., Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn)
- Consideration — Search text ads (based on keywords around price, reviews, competitors, top-rated or “best” in your category), promoted-only social content
- Decision — Brand keywords, search text ads based on high buying-intent keywords (specific product line, service, offering keywords), direct response social ads
4. Don’t forget that social content is indexed by Google
Yes, Twitter content is indexed in Google search results. Mark Traphagen’s presentation, “Google and Twitter: Singing a Duet for Your Marketing,” reviewed the specifics of how this content indexing has evolved over time.
Not all tweets are indexed, and Traphagen laid out several factors that may affect how tweets get indexed. The more favorites a tweet gets, the more likely it is that it will show up in Google search results. Retweets and number of followers tend to affect indexation as well, although the correlation is not as strong.
Wrapping up
Search and social are powerful tools that help marketers connect to consumers. When leveraged together in an omnichannel digital strategy, they complement each other to provide even more powerful results.
Some opinions expressed in this article may be those of a guest author and not necessarily Marketing Land. Staff authors are listed here.
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Google Chrome SSL certificate proposal could affect millions of websites
Last year, the developers behind Google’s Chrome browser began taking steps designed to protect users and encourage companies to use HTTPS.
But now, potentially millions of websites that use SSL certificates issued by Symantec and affiliated resellers could find that their certificates are effectively worthless as far as Chrome is concerned, after a member of the Chrome team published a proposal that would make them untrusted over the next 12 months.
The reason? According to the Google Chrome team, Symantec has not properly validated thousands of certificates. In fact, the Chrome team claims that “an initial set of reportedly 127 [misissued] certificates has expanded to include at least 30,000 [misissued] certificates, issued over a period spanning several years.”
Ryan Sleevi, the Chrome team member who wrote the announcement, elaborated,
“This is also coupled with a series of failures following the previous set of misissued certificates from Symantec, causing us to no longer have confidence in the certificate issuance policies and practices of Symantec over the past several years.”
Under the proposal he put forth, the accepted validity period of newly-issued Symantec to nine months or less, and an “incremental distrust” of currently-trusted certificates and removal of recognition of Extended Validation status of Symantec-issued certificates.
A nightmare scenario?
Symantec is the currently the largest Certificate Authority (CA) and by some estimates, has issued a third of the SSL certificates in use on the web.
So if the Google Chrome team moves forward with its proposal, it will have a huge impact on Symantec and its customers. Symantec would have to reissue potentially millions of certificates, creating a huge headache for customers, who would have to go through the validation process and install replacement certificates.
What’s more, under the Chrome team’s proposal, Chrome would immediately remove the status indicators for Extended Validation certificates issued by Symantec.
These certificates, which require companies to provide greater verification that they are who they say they are, are often used by companies running websites that absolutely need to use HTTPS, such as those that handle payments and financial transactions.
Extended Validation certificates are more costly, and one of the justifications for the greater cost is the fact that most browsers display indicators for websites that use them. If those indicators go away, it could theoretically harm companies that have relied on these indicators to signal trust to their users.
Not surprisingly, given the gravity of the situation, Symantec is disputing the Chrome team’s claims about certificate misissuances. In a response, it called the Chrome team’s proposal “irresponsible” and said the allegations leveled at it are “exaggerated and misleading.”
Symantec is open to working with the Google Chrome team and while it’s reasonable to hope that both parties will identify a satisfactory resolution that averts disruption, companies with certificates issued by Symantec will want to monitor the situation as it develops.
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The marketing automation generation: Fulfilling the mandate for customer life cycle marketing
Nearly a decade into the marketing automation (MA) revolution, we’ve developed a crop of B2B marketing professionals who have built successful careers on the use of tools to nurture and develop qualified leads. “I am Eloqua- (or HubSpot- or Marketo-) certified” appears boldly on B2B marketers’ LinkedIn profiles.
With all the progress around developing data-driven and automation-equipped pros and processes, unintended consequences are beginning to rear their ugly head. We’ve developed a generation of marketers whose lens of the world starts with an inquiry and stops with an opportunity (or, in the best case, a net-new customer). It’s understandable. This is what marketing departments have coveted — the ability to generate qualified leads for sales.
Today, however, revenue expectations require that B2B marketers have complete command of the entire customer life cycle. This means developing strategies and sharpening skills related to every stage — from early engagement efforts to driving inquiries to converting prospects and accounts down the funnel to expanding business with existing customers.
In fact, word on the street is SiriusDecisions, one of the leading authorities that has risen to prominence during the marketing automation era, is recognizing the mounting problem. They’re rumored to be expanding their oft-cited B2B “Demand Waterfall” to include all the work required before an inquiry and after a new customer is secured to help marketers capitalize on the bigger business contribution.
Whether you’re a B2B marketing pro whose world revolves around your marketing automation skills or a marketing exec leading a team of marketing automation experts, it’s time to take a step back and make sure your marketing efforts are focused on a complete view of the customer revenue life cycle. Below, I’ve outlined core areas B2B marketers can concentrate on to address the unintended challenges created by the marketing automation era.
Marketing starts with awareness and credibility-building, NOT an inquiry
We simply can’t keep reaching out to inquiries and contacts in our MA database. We must constantly identify, engage and generate new prospective buyers.
The challenge is that it’s much harder to develop customers if prospective buyers aren’t familiar with your company, your solution or the problems you solve. Marketing’s job starts with building awareness and credibility. This can be done not just by advertising “awareness” campaigns, but by sharing useful information that helps prospective buyer(s) transform their organization, fill a requirement or solve a problem. Many successful marketers refer to this effort as “brand generation.”
Creative programs and educational, content-driven campaigns can be deployed to identify, engage and generate an inquiry. It can take several touches and engagements before they end up in your MA system as an inquiry or lead. This requires knowledge and creative ideas about how to effectively and efficiently generate new prospects not yet in our MA database, be it within targeted accounts or those that fit your customer profile.
Today’s B2B marketers must think beyond their marketing automation platform tools and develop programs that inject educational content out into the communities where their target buyers go for information. This top-funnel engagement effort — leveraging channels such as webinars, events and content marketing syndication — can fill marketing automation-enabled databases with targeted, prospective buyers to generate the inquiries. Consequently, this serves to amplify the effects of the powerful MA skills marketers have developed.
Marketers must be accountable for revenue, not just MQLs
Once individuals and accounts are in your database, there’s an understanding of their needs and consumption. Marketing automation-enabled strategies and tactics can then be applied to generating marketing- or sales-qualified leads (MQLs, SQLs). This is the process of identifying those leads ready to engage with your sales and/or consulting team to better understand their specific requirements and needs.
However, marketers’ work shouldn’t end with generating a qualified lead. While sales pros may be the primary driver at this later stage in the customer journey, there’s plenty to be done by marketers — often without marketing automation tools — to help advance the opportunity and close the deal. Working with sales, marketers can deliver timely information, such as business case examples and ROI tools, or personal invites to events to talk with other customers who are dealing with similar issues.
The bottom line is that marketers can’t just generate qualified leads and pass them over to sales — a common, myopic byproduct of marketers steeped in marketing automation.
Marketers must contribute to growing existing-customer revenue
We’re not nearly done yet. Revenue generation is not just about “net new” customers, despite many MA-driven marketers establishing their reputation around this capability.
Depending on your business model, the biggest revenue growth opportunity may be in serving, cross-selling and/or upselling your existing customers. This requires a set of tactics that goes beyond today’s MA systems’ thinking. This means applying the right mix of top-funnel engagement education and targeted communications around new products, services and capabilities and how they can benefit your existing customers’ business. Customer events, educational content and how-to-get-more-type of information all can be deployed across a mix of channels to turn existing customers into bigger customers (and often increase company profitability).
This customer-revenue mandate is accelerating as executives’ expectations of marketing shifts beyond qualified leads and pipeline to generating revenue via “land and expand” customer strategies.
B2B marketers’ opportunity is around knowledge of and contribution to customer life cycle revenue
The reality is that long-term customer-revenue success requires a 360-degree view of both the customer and marketing-plus-sales processes. Marketers — especially those who have benefited from the marketing automation era — can easily become too focused on the inquiry-to-qualified-lead process. B2B marketers must master the art of initial engagements, brand generation, winning a customer and continuously earning customers’ business via advocacy and upsell/cross-sell. This is the big win for B2B marketers from any era.
Some opinions expressed in this article may be those of a guest author and not necessarily MarTech Today. Staff authors are listed here.
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Reaching users wherever they are
Picture it: Boston, 2017. You’re sitting in the crowded airport waiting for your flight, trying to kill some time before your flight to New Orleans by playing around on your phone. First you search for some of the top restaurants in your destination to map out your ever-important Cajun meals. Once that’s settled, you pop over to Instagram to see what everyone else is up to.
Then, an ad for a restaurant app ends up in your feed. Might as well download it, since you’ll be searching for places all week. Fast forward to Friday night, and you get an email from the app for discounted happy hour drinks. You take advantage of the offer — you eat, you drink, and you are happy.
These various brushes with Louisiana’s finest eats were no coincidence. There are many channels that influence a person’s path to purchase, and each should hold importance for a marketer. In fact, an astounding 92 percent of people utilize more than one channel when they browse — from apps and websites to ads and old-fashioned trips to a store.
The case of the Southern cuisine is a prime example of omnichannel marketing, which hits from all angles and engages people wherever they are. It may already be a buzzword you’re growing tired of hearing, but it’s here to stay — and mobile is a really important part of it. Since people frequently hop between channels while interacting with a brand, omnichannel marketing allows marketers to pick up on where a user has left off and keep them moving through the funnel.
[Read the full article on MarTech Today.]
Some opinions expressed in this article may be those of a guest author and not necessarily Marketing Land. Staff authors are listed here.
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How to decide ‘Should I bid?’
One age-old question that often comes up when I chat with new prospects or new clients is, “Should I bid on my brand terms or generic terms where I rank in the top three organically?”
This question is hardly trivial. It matters a great deal because PPC search budgets are generally constrained — and now, with other enticing options available from Facebook and other programmatic channels, we need to demonstrate that our search advertising budgets are being allocated optimally.
Six key questions to ask before you begin
The best way to answer this question is by using a multi-stage process of evaluation, followed by experimentation. Let’s start by evaluating brand keywords. Before you start your evaluation or experiment, you need to answer six important questions:
- Do you have a distribution channel that also bids on your keywords but carries competitive products or services?
- Does your name or product/service lend itself to a lot of broad match terms/phrases which may trigger competitive ads (unless your brand terms are negative-matched)?
- Are competitors bidding on your brand required to pay a lot (due to low Quality Scores on their ads)?
- Do you typically get organic sitelinks on a brand search?
- For paid search brand queries, are you using a landing page that is different from your home page (a popular tactic that is usually undertaken after testing shows higher conversion rates)?
- What percentage of your traffic AND impressions are on smartphones (vs. tablet/desktop)?
[Read the full article on Search Engine Land.]
Some opinions expressed in this article may be those of a guest author and not necessarily Marketing Land. Staff authors are listed here.
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Snapchat makes it possible to search for Stories by keywords
Want to find Stories about particular places or topics being shared on Snapchat? The company has announced a new search feature that it says will make this possible.
In a post today, Snapchat shared that the ability to keyword search for matching Stories — which are collections of Snaps over a 24 hour period — is coming to its app.
The feature is going live today in selected (but unnamed) cities and seem only to search through “Our Stories,” those that have been created by Snapchat based on user contributions. Individuals can also share there own Stories to the public, but the feature doesn’t appear to search for those — we’re double-checking on this.
Snapchat also says that along with the search feature, it’s also hoping to create many more stories related to places and events in part through the use of machine learning. Previously, creating stories like this depended on a human curation team, which Snapchat said was getting overwhelmed.
Here’s a video of how Snapchat says the new feature will work:
Not up on Snapchat stories and how it all works? Don’t worry. We’ve got you covered here: Marketing Land’s guide on how to use Snapchat.
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Google Maps ad traffic steadily growing
Over the last couple of years, Google updates have shown the company’s growing focus on monetizing searches with local intent and navigational queries. From local inventory ads, which are a version of Product Listings Ads that feature information on when a product can be picked up at a local brick-and-mortar store, to ads featured in the Local Pack, it’s clear that Google sees local searches as fertile ground for more ad interactions.
This strategy has extended to Google Maps, where ads derived from location extensions now populate for searches. These ads are steadily growing in importance, as shown by a rise in the share of traffic attributed to the “Get location details” click type.
[Read the full article on Search Engine Land.]
Some opinions expressed in this article may be those of a guest author and not necessarily Marketing Land. Staff authors are listed here.
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Baidu becomes Google’s biggest ally in mobile page speed
The breaking news came on March 7, 2017, that Baidu is now supporting Google’s mobile framework, AMP. The tech leader of Baidu MIP, Gao Lei, gave a speech at Google’s first AMP conference in New York. He confirmed that Baidu is working hand-in-hand with Google to accelerate the faster web globally.
Gao Lei at Google AMP Conference, New York, March 7, 2017
Baidu MIP, which stands for Mobile Instant Pages, is Baidu’s own version of Google’s AMP. The technologies of MIP are very similar to AMP. In fact, coding an MIP page is just like coding an AMP page, except MIP pages are more customized and optimized for the browsers in the market of mainland China.
Baidu says that a Mobile Instant Page can reduce the rendering of above-the-fold content by 30 percent to 80 percent. Moreover, the tap-to-open rate will increase by 5 percent to 40 percent. And similar to Google, Baidu has been considering potentially giving the MIP pages a ranking advantage in search results.
Mobile Page Accelerator – MIP Components: Core Parts
The two search engine giants are collaborating for the first time to tackle the problems of slow pages and unfriendly user experiences on mobile devices. Lei says that they are trying to avoid websites investing redundant resources to adopt both AMP and MIP. This implies that the future of AMP and MIP may look even more identical; that said, a one-for-all global mobile framework could be in the making.
Baidu certainly is not going to abort its MIP project and replace it with Google’s AMP, as there have been over 1 billion MIP pages indexed by Baidu already.
We have yet to confirm with Baidu exactly what they have aligned with Google, and how. They say that there are still technical issues to solve. However, Baidu has confirmed that users can eventually open an AMP page from a Baidu SERP. We don’t know how they plan to do this, whether by opening the AMP pages directly from the SERP or translating them into MIP pages.
At Merkle China, we’ve already seen Google and Baidu taking the first steps. Prior to the announcement, the AMP Project website could not be loaded successfully in mainland China. I could only dial on a VPN to check the reference on www.ampproject.org. However, all ampproject.org links are now accessible. When we check the CDN, we see Google enabled the CDN for China, and it loads extremely fast!
Google enables a CDN node for China
Given that most AMP traffic originates from Google organic SERPs, it wouldn’t have make sense for AMP documentation to be available in mainland China prior to the announcement. But now developers within the Great Firewall will be able to view and implement this documentation in preparation for Baidu’s support of this framework.
This collaboration will certainly benefit mobile internet users, who will be able to enjoy hyper speed on their devices. Of course, it will also benefit brands that want to build a larger presence in mainland China.
It is unclear whether users out of the Great Firewall can open an MIP page from a Google SERP; that will depend on whether Google decides to provide support MIP in its search results or accept the customized MIP pages as AMP pages.
To be continued… !
[This article was originally published on Search Engine Land.]
Some opinions expressed in this article may be those of a guest author and not necessarily Marketing Land. Staff authors are listed here.
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Google AdWords Testing URLs Above Title on Mobile Search Results
Yesterday we posted about Google testing the breadcrumb version of the URL above the title tag in the mobile search results. It appears that this same test is also implemented for AdWords ads too, which could significantly affect the CTR of these ads, especially those whose landing page URL might not seemingly match the query, […]
The post Google AdWords Testing URLs Above Title on Mobile Search Results appeared first on The SEM Post.
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The newest addition to the marketing mix’s Ps: Proximity
Any marketer worth their salt, or at least one who has managed to stay awake during Marketing 101, can rattle off a long list of marketing mix “Ps.” You know what I’m talking about: product, price, place, promotion, people, processes and physical evidence.
Unfortunately, those old pillars of marketing don’t quite hold up under the weight of today’s digital marketing needs. Our aging mnemonic sorely needs a renovation. It’s time we add proximity into the mix.
Digital puts you in the center of the map
Long gone are the days of unfolding a paper map to find out where you are and where you want to go. Back then, when you ran off the edge of the map, you either got a new map or assumed that “here be monsters.”
You’ll find no edges on today’s digital maps. You are limited only by the power of your zoom and the reach of your click. By default, you are the center of the digital map. The world fills in around you, depending on the whim of your search.
Proximity — the distance from the user to any given location — is a heavily weighted ranking factor for all “near me” searches. Only when you specifically move the focal point from yourself to an area without you in it does proximity seem to loosen its grip on rankings.
And it makes sense that digital maps should be organized this way. Something closer to you is usually easier to get to than something farther away. For marketers, the further a potential customer is from a store, the less likely it is that the customer will visit the location.
Since most people find businesses through local search and digital maps, proximity needs to be a major aspect of every marketing strategy. If you get everything else right but fail to optimize for proximity, you’ll have a hard time leading customers to your brick-and-mortar locations.
Local SEO: Tipping the scale of proximity in your favor
You can’t control where your customers are when they search, but you can put a finger on the scale of proximity to help you rank above another similarly distanced location in your business category.
How? You have two options: You either purchase a higher rank with PPC, or you optimize for organic and hope that the user is searching in an area wide enough that the map needs to filter out locations.
Google and the other major search platforms are making it harder to win the organic hustle with each passing year. But there are still things you can do that will help you improve your rankings on the map.
First, give yourself a chance to show up in local search results by doing the basics. Make sure that your location information is accurate and properly distributed to all the major location data aggregators. Specifically, your name, address and phone number (NAP) need to be accurate, and your geocoordinates for each location should lead customers to the right place.
But the bare minimum doesn’t really cut it anymore. It’s 2017, after all. If you’re relying on the incompetence of your competitors to win at local search, you’re in trouble.
So how do you tip the scales in your favor?
You increase the weight of your local credibility and authority.
Local citations, reviews and Google My Business attributes
Proximity’s influence diminishes as the map zooms out. The more area within your field of vision, the more important it is to filter out locations on the map to avoid clutter. If you’re only looking at the area covered by a city block, good luck trying to shake proximity’s influence. However, if you zoom out just a little, other ranking factors increasingly come into play.
Recently, Andrew Shotland and Dan Liebson gave a presentation about local search ranking factors at SMX West. Some of the most important factors they uncovered outside of proximity were local citations, reviews and optimizing for Google My Business (GMB).
Local citations are important in that they give Google a strong indication that your location is where you say it is and that you have enough clout to attract backlinks.
Meanwhile, reviews help establish the local authority of your brand. The more people vouch for your location with positive reviews, the more comfortable Google feels about sending customers your way.
Finally, Google My Business is critical for helping your cause in local search. This is especially true for filling out your GMB attributes. We’ve begun to see the proliferation of Google My Business fields for each business type. For example, a restaurant will have the opportunity to fill in fields ranging from payment options, takeout, delivery, patio seating and anything else you’d want to know about a location.
You can expect GMB attributes to become a significant ranking signal going forward, thanks to digital assistants and voice search. Why? Because digital assistants and voice search are allowing for much more discerning answers when it comes to helping us find locations.
Voice search and digital assistants
The way we ask questions is changing. Thanks to digital assistants and voice search, when we talk to Google Assistant, Amazon Alexa or Siri, we give these search engines much more information than we typically do with a typed search.
We’re often terse when typing in search queries, mainly because we grew up having to do precise keyword matching if we wanted to see relevant search results.
But Google and the other search engines are getting much better at understanding the meaning of words. More importantly, they’re getting better at interpreting user intent. As a result, exact keyword matching is no longer as important — much to the chagrin of advertisers. However, this allows questions and answers to be much more nuanced.
The growing intelligence of search engines is fueling the rise of voice search. Instead of typing a simple query on Google like nearby Mexican restaurants, we’re much more likely to get long-winded with voice search and say, “Okay Google, where’s a good nearby Mexican restaurant with patio seating and a short wait?” Thanks to the blossoming artificial intelligence of search engines, these nuanced questions are becoming much easier for digital assistants to answer.
But just because Google can understand the intent behind more complex questions, it doesn’t mean that Google has the data to answer them. It’s no mystery why Google is crowdsourcing business attributes through Google Maps by asking users about their recent trips to a location. Google is gathering as much information about a location as possible to have the data to answer more nuanced questions.
This presents marketers with an opportunity. If you meet the nuanced criteria of a user’s question by filling out as many applicable attributes as possible in GMB, your location can leapfrog businesses that might be closer but fail to meet the search criteria.
After all, there may be only be a handful of restaurants in an area that meet the criteria of my previous voice search question. Proximity is still a factor, of course, but you at least lessen its tyranny and raise your odds of ranking higher organically.
Final thought
No matter what marketers do, thanks to the way digital maps are organized, it’s hard to escape the influence of proximity on search results. That’s why, even though our list of marketing mix Ps is growing long, it’s time that proximity joins the list.
Some opinions expressed in this article may be those of a guest author and not necessarily Search Engine Land. Staff authors are listed here.
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39 questions with Google at SMX West
It always attracts a lot of attention when Googlers are up on stage and open for questioning. The Ask Me Anything (AMA) with Google Search at the recent SMX West conference was no exception. This panel, moderated by Danny Sullivan, featured two prominent Googlers: Webmaster Trends Analyst Gary Illyes and Webmaster Outreach Specialist Mariya Moeva.
In this post, I’m going to recount the bulk of the questions asked, and the answers from Illyes and/or Moeva. Please note that responses have been summarized rather than directly quoted. Let’s get started!
1. Does Google maintain any metric along the lines of a “Domain Authority” concept?
Gary Illyes: This is something that Google feels does not really work. For example, on blogspot.com, the user blogs created there really shouldn’t inherit the authority of the main domain. All ranking is page-specific.
2. What about subdomains?
Illyes: No such thing as subdomain authority.
Mariya Moeva: Before we get asked, I’ll add that there is no similar signal for folders, either.
3. Can you talk about the update called Fred?
Illyes: We make tons of updates all the time, and this is not something we would have thought to name or announce. It only got a name because of an interaction on Twitter with Barry Schwartz.
Google won’t communicate about what this particular update did, but you can find the things that it targeted if you carefully read all of the Webmaster guidelines. Unfortunately, we can’t say which particular ones.
Moeva: One of the issues with naming updates is that people start attributing all sorts of things to those updates, even though they aren’t actually related.
4. When will Google stop ranking internal search pages? Why does this still work?
Illyes: We do frown on these pages getting indexed, as they are not that useful for users. We do have algos that try to get rid of them, and for that matter not even crawl them, but sometimes these don’t catch everything, and we may have to manually intervene.
Moeva: If you’re trying to get these pages out of the index for your site, you can use the parameter handling feature in Search Console to say, “Don’t look at these pages.”
5. What data does Google use to see the “also try” info in a Knowledge Panel?
Illyes: Maybe we leverage the Knowledge Graph categories to find similar pages, but that’s just a guess.
6. What if your site does not get a Knowledge Panel? How do you get one?
Illyes: There is no way to do that really. Google does consume Wikidata, so that could get you in. Google also uses the CIA World Factbook. Anything that gets in requires multiple sources of data to support the need for it to be in there.
7. How do I control the picture that shows up for my business in the Knowledge Graph?
Illyes: If an incorrect image comes up, report it. Note, though, you need many people to report it for it to get looked at, and they have to come from accounts that have not previously abused the system.
(Illyes then mentioned the example of Stone Temple Consulting, which shows an incorrect image of a Chinese temple, and explained that sometimes the problems are hard to fix, but they are working on it.)
8. Can you bring back the link operator?
Illyes: No.
9. We heard you say that Baidu uses AMP, but we thought they had their own thing.
Moeva: Baidu started with mobile instant pages (MIP), which they still support, but more recently, they have expanded to support AMP pages as well.
10. Do you plan to expand the Google Posts feature? (Note: This is a feature where people can post information directly into the search results, but it’s used in a very limited way today. You can read more about it here).
Moeva: This feature was used during the US elections, and we are looking at future potential uses. Of course, for this to work it has to be high-quality info. The target groups are usually not really savvy on the SEO side, so the feature is good for the website-challenged. So we don’t know how we’ll expand it, but we’re trying to see what kinds of groups it makes sense for.
11. In Search Console, when we see links from hacked sites, should we disavow them?
Illyes: Do you trust the links? If you don’t, then disavowing them makes sense. Our algorithms do their best to auto-discount these, but these algorithms are written by humans and sometimes subject to error.
12. Should I have my exact keywords in the domain name?
Illyes: Exact match domains (EMDs) are not inherently bad, but some people do things with them that makes them bad. If you see someone else that’s ranking and you think it’s because they have an EMD, our advice is to not worry about it and try to figure out the other reasons it ranks.
13. If we have an EMD, but it is really the company name, do we need to worry about EMD algos?
Moeva: Unless you have really poor content on 50 EMDs simultaneously, don’t worry about it.
Danny Sullivan: If you have an EMD that matches the really good solid content you are already doing, you’re on the right side of history, and you’ll be fine.
14. Is a subdomain or subdirectory better for targeting different countries?
Moeva: Our site has a good post on this. It shows a table for when/how to pick which variant.
15. How does Google deal with the new domain names (such as .SHOP).
Illyes: These are treated the same as any other TLD.
16. Is it true that Google won’t crawl a URL that has more than two folders?
Illyes: No.
Moeva: There is a limit to the characters in a URL, though.
17. Does folder depth make a difference ranking wise?
Illyes: No.
18. If we launch a subdomain, and it gets penalized, will the domain be impacted?
Moeva: It depends on the reason why. If a blog got hacked, then that impacts only the subdomain. Generally, we try to be as surgically granular as possible.
19. Does Google access info from Gmail and other sources to personalize results?
Illyes: Yes, if you’re logged in.
Sullivan: This happens only within Gmail (I think).
20. Why did you decide to do a video on how to hire an SEO?
Moeva: Our target was non-savvy people, to help them understand how to approach it.
21. How many sites do you manually review in a week?
Moeva: Every Googler has to do 20 sites before breakfast (joke). Seriously, scale is the main objective. Google is trying to find patterns, more than sites. Ideally, we do this in a way that you find a pattern that scales across many sites.
22. How does it affect our ranking if our responsive mobile site has the same content as the desktop?
Illyes: This is the desired behavior, and there is no duplicate content issue since they are on the same URL. Also, there is no such thing as a duplicate content penalty.
(Author’s note: If you have duplicate content because you are scraping other people’s sites, this can result in your site being hit by Panda, but that is not what Illyes is addressing in his response.)
Having a responsive site will help you, especially in the future. With mobile-first, when it rolls out, responsive sites won’t have to change anything. Other sites may have to do something more to not suffer when that transition happens.
23. What would be harmed by Google being more open and transparent?
Sullivan: To be fair, they are very open on many things.
Moeva: The issue is that we’re trying to get people to focus on the right things. If we start dissecting (and sharing) what we do every day, this would prevent people from focusing on their sites. You should try to focus on the good stuff. Worrying about what Google change happened, when the next one will be, etc., diverts your focus from where it belongs.
Illyes: Both of us teach a class to Nooglers (new Googlers) called the “life of a query.” We know a lot about how it works, and this class is very specific. But, we have to decide if revealing a piece of information will hurt us in the long term. If we share info that causes people to do the wrong things, this can hurt the search results, and we can’t allow that. But we try to be as transparent as possible.
24. Can Google see a bounce on your site, even if not from a search result, and is it a negative result when that happens?
Sullivan: In other words, do you use click-through rate (CTR) as ranking factor?
Illyes: We only use CTR for QA purposes, not direct ranking purposes.
Moeva: We also don’t use things like Chrome to capture data like that.
25. If CTR is not a ranking factor, then why do tests sometimes show that it does influence rankings?
Sullivan: What if you believe that Google is lying about this — that you believe they’re using CTR, even though they say they aren’t? What would you do differently with your site? In principle, nothing. You should be trying to optimize to improve CTR and retain users anyway!
26. What about RankBrain and machine learning? What’s up with that?
Illyes: Not really anything new happening. The team is focused on some other machine learning ideas, and I can’t say what they are or whether they will be applied to search. But we’re always throwing out ideas on how to better understand pages or queries and working to make search better. Machine learning is just a tool that you can apply to different things.
Moeva: A great example is what video to show you next on YouTube; that’s an interesting challenge that is a perfect application for machine learning. We can leverage what people have watched and match them up with choices made by others with similar affinities.
Sullivan: Could you have a machine learning search algorithm system now?
Illyes: We probably wouldn’t want that, as we still look at search pages manually, and machine learning algorithms are freakishly hard to debug. For example, if we see some problem manually, it would be impossible to figure out why the decision was made. If we replaced the traditional algorithms with machine learning, we would have a really hard time improving results, because we would not able to identify where the failures are or what caused them.
Moeva: The algorithms are only as good as the training data that we give them, and that’s a big issue in coming up with good ones.
27. How do you measure voice searches? Can the rest of us get to see that?
Moeva: Voice queries are often super long-tail because of their use of natural language, so it’s hard to decide what to show. (Moeva then asked people to provide feedback on what they would do with it.)
28. Is it possible to highlight quick answers in Search Console separately?
Illyes: We get this request a lot, and we’ve talked to the highest possible person in the search team to see if they can, but we have not persuaded them yet. We’re still fighting for it, but it’s not a simple problem. Please ping us on Twitter and tell us how you would use that data to help us.
29. How do you get featured snippets?
Moeva: Create content that is relevant to the query and structured well. Structure it as an answer to a question.
30. Is WHOIS info used as part of local ranking?
Illyes: No idea.
31. Does the percent of 404 pages on your website impact your ranking?
Illyes: No.
32. Should we cross-link between product and category pages?
Illyes: Does it help users?
33. Does a large e-commerce site have a natural advantage over a small site?
Illyes: It doesn’t matter.
34. Will traffic from email and social media help your rankings?
Sullivan: In other words, do you use social signals?
Illyes: We did it in the past for a specific feature, but then the social media site turned off the feature, and it was a really bad thing, and for this reason we’re not willing to be dependent on social signals.
35. Is content length a ranking factor?
Illyes: No. The quality and relevance of the content is the key.
36. Is it bad if we have http and https live on a site at the same time?
Illyes: In general, no — but we have seen situations where sites have some differences between the sites, such as they implement hreflang to the http version of the site, but not the https version. That type of thing could be an issue.
37. Do you look primarily at the source code for a page or the document object model (DOM)?
Moeva: We look at the DOM.
38. Will we see an AMP e-commerce carousel in the near future?
Illyes: We are looking into e-commerce features, and we’re very aware that this functionality is needed. If you want to see what’s planned, check out the AMP roadmap.
39: Is authorship really gone as a ranking factor?
Illyes: Yes.
Sullivan: Dead, dead, dead, deader than Google+.
Some opinions expressed in this article may be those of a guest author and not necessarily Search Engine Land. Staff authors are listed here.
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Are you grateful for digital?
And because we can get things done quickly, it’s also the worst. The world expects things to be done quickly — and all the while, we’re bombarded with interruptions in our digital experience.
When push comes to shove — and that’s how it feels on the internet today — are you grateful for digital?
As a consumer, I’m exhausted by the constant digital interruptions. I find it challenging, if not utterly frustrating, to focus on a single task while advertising pops up all around me. To me, it’s the equivalent of trying to write a blog post when the kids want me to take them somewhere — that constant, “Dad! Dad! Dad! Dad! Dad!” How can anyone focus and get anything done?
Because that’s the promise of digital, right? Helping you to get stuff done instead of hounding you with constant distractions.
The internet has made marketing rude!
With respect to marketing, the internet has delivered a vast amount of data. We understand the customer journey; we can decipher the signals that tell us when our target customers are ready to make decisions and ready to buy.
But we’ve gotten so immersed in our own way of communicating with these consumers that instead of gently persuading them to buy our product, it’s more like we’re jumping out of the shadows and threatening them with a large, blunt object. When we should be making persuasive offers, we’re instead shouting them down.
The problem boils down neatly to the fact that our goals are simply not aligned. Consumers want their internet experience to be efficient and effective: get the research done, buy the thing. We as marketers are focused on efficiency only, and effectiveness be damned. We want them to buy the thing from us, and we’re not putting enough thought into their overall experience.
It’s not that we don’t have manners. It’s because we need our message to that consumer to stand out on a page or device filled with engaging content and advertising. Today’s internet leaves us few options. How else are we supposed to get them to buy that shiny new toy?
So really, who can blame consumers for blocking ads? The marketer has trained the consumer to be an intrinsic ad blocker, ignoring everything. When we’re driven to creating ever more intrusive ads, it’s the only way they can preserve their own user experience.
The marketer must find a way to reach consumers that’s unobtrusive and polite but will still get their attention. The challenge is finding out what that looks like.
Native ads seem to be the obvious alternative, but limited inventory could be a problem — as well as the inevitability of blocking, not to mention all of the other digital pain points marketers deal with, like ad fraud and viewability.
What’s a marketer to do?
Maybe take a breath and consider the basics and start from scratch. What do consumers care about? What do they interact with? What do they gloss over, and what do they keep?
Remember, marketers, you are consumers, too. Put yourself in their position. I don’t think we do this often enough.
Can we please stop searching for silver bullets?
We’ve become so obsessed with the concept of the “silver bullet” — getting the right message to the right consumer at the right time. Programmatic, data-driven advertising was meant to solve that, even ensuring that the message arrived on the right device at a critical moment along the path to purchase.
But have we ever considered that while “right message” and “right consumer” are obviously keys to the conundrum, the “right time” for us may not be the “right time” for the consumer?
Take a minute and think about that. Imagine the consumer’s situation for a moment when they’re online. Are they ready for your ad? Receptive to an interruption?
If a purchase is more than, say, $20, do we know for a fact that surfacing a digital advertisement to a consumer will compel them to buy within an hour? What if we could deliver something more valuable and tangible — something non-digital — to that consumer, and give them control over when (and if) to respond?
A consumer considering a luxury purchase — a watch, for example — may not be swayed by yet another digital ad, no matter how graceful the storytelling. If they’re already in that consideration phase, it may take something more personal and more high-touch to move them on to checkout: a phone call, an invitation to see the watch in-store (assuming that’s possible) or a personalized, tangible piece of collateral they can open and touch.
Any one of these options could help a marketer rise above the noise of the internet and stand out — and could meet the “right person, right message” criteria.
However, we may have to reconsider the “right time” leg of the stool. Our marketing goals may be driving that time; the consumer isn’t in a rush. From that perspective, they may not be grateful for the internet either. Looking at a watch online shouldn’t mean you get harassed by ads for 30 days to the point you wished you had a restraining order.
Perhaps it’s time we started giving consumers a little more time to consider their purchases — and a little less digital interference. Perhaps, if we put the customer journey back in the customer’s control, and maybe, just maybe, showed them a little more respect — in the form of a discount or promo code, or even just a tangible “thank you” of some kind — they would appreciate our efforts more.
If we try in earnest to respect consumers’ experiences online, maybe we could begin to make them feel honestly grateful for the internet.
Some opinions expressed in this article may be those of a guest author and not necessarily Marketing Land. Staff authors are listed here.
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Pulling Ads from Google: Smart Move or PR Stunt?
Recent headlines and Tweetstorms about Google ads—specifically ads on the Display Network and YouTube—appearing alongside potentially offensive domains or videos have caused an increasing number of globally recognized brands to pull their whole Google advertising budget. Take Pepsi, the latest domino to fall, for example; they “just pulled all ads from Google and YouTube.”
While this creates the illusion that these brands are doing “the right thing,” it’s little more than an ill-informed, feel-good PR stunt.
Here’s some potentially shocking information: Google is a search engine, a smart advertising company, and a bastion of innovation. It is not a moral compass.
As such, there are websites on the Google Display Network and videos on YouTube that may very well offend or upset some people. It makes sense for Google to cast as wide a net as possible: a broader network of websites running AdSense and videos bookended or interrupted by ads means more revenue. Inevitably, this net will scoop up driftwood, garbage, and the occasional body part.
However, since advertisers pay for clicks or impressions, and Google cares about its customers continuing to pump billions per annum into advertising, it behooves Google to give advertisers some measure of control over where their ads are shown.
In fact, these controls have existed for some time now; you just have to know where to find them.
By simply dropping all of their Google ad spend on principle, these brands are going to lose out on valuable advertising opportunities that, for the most part, would have had limited affiliation with any kind of offensive content. For “limited” to become “zero,” all it takes is an understanding of negative placements and content exclusions.
How to Prevent Your Ads from Appearing on Offensive Content
If you feel there are websites or YouTube channels that don’t align with your brand, you can eliminate them from your campaigns with ease.
Here’s how.
Google Display Network: Negative Placements
There are two ways to eliminate websites that trade in offensive content from your GDN advertising strategy. The first involves making sweeping changes to the types of website eligible to display your ads using “Site Category Options.” The second involves curating a list of custom placements that you’ll add as campaign-level exclusions.
The easy, catch-all way
You, too, can cast a wide net.
By using site category exclusions, you can negate websites that Google has identified as fitting into one or multiple categories from your Display campaigns. You can find this option at the bottom of the Display Network’s “Placements” tab.
While this isn’t going to eliminate all potentially offensive websites, content, and placements that your banner creative might appear near, it’s an excellent start.
The #granular way
If you already know there are specific websites you’d like to avoid, there’s no need to leave their exclusion to chance.
Negating specific website is like the bizarro version of Managed Placements. All you need to do is enter a single site (or list of them) in the field depicted above and Google will stop showing your ads there. You can leverage placement exclusions across all Display and Remarketing campaigns, ensuring your ads avoid any content that exists in opposition of your brand’s mission.
YouTube: Content Exclusions Settings
Today, the ability to control the types of videos your ads are shown on is more limited that the controls available to advertisers on the GDN; per Google, that’s going to change soon (more on that in a moment).
For now, advertisers making use of pre-and-midroll creative can adjust their content exclusion settings from the default, “all content except mature and unlabeled content” to the more discerning “all content except mature, unlabeled, and sensitive subjects.”
Again, this isn’t a perfect solution; it’s ostensibly the YouTube version of site category exclusions.
Coming soon though…
Google’s New Expanded safeguards
Starting in Mid-March, Google rolled out a suite of advertiser-focused measures they’re calling them “Expanded Safeguards.”
Per Google, these changes will make it easier for advertisers to control when and where their ads are served. Google aims to establish a “safer default for brands,” adjusting automatic settings to make site and YouTube channel exclusions easier. This means companies can balance morality and business growth without feeling compromised.
In relation to video specifically, there’s talk of tightening safeguards and making it easier for advertisers to eliminate offensive content placements. Google’s also taking a hard look at what kind of content (paid or otherwise) should be allowed to exist on YouTube.
It’s also worth noting that brands can opt into the original, broader audiences if they choose.
Mark’s Take: Eliminate Bad Placements, Not You AdWords Account
When the first wave of advertiser backlash began back in November, our resident data scientist Mark Irvine wrote about excluding ads from certain sites. When asked to touch on brands pulling their ad spend from Google, here’s what he had to say:
“A few months ago we began to notice that clients became more selective in how they bought programmatic ads. Before November, our clients didn’t think twice about their ads appearing across 1 million different sites (in fact, that was considered a value prop). Over the past few month, though, about 40% of our clients have asked about removing different controversial sites and content categories from their targeting. Google’s ad inventory is large enough that removing 1 domain or one category of domains doesn’t strictly limit your reach on the platform nor does it reduce spend.”
In short, the GDN and YouTube are so large that eliminating one or even a whole industry’s worth of websites and video will have no discernable impact on your advertising.
In Conclusion
If you implement negative placements and content exclusions, you can continue using AdWords with a clear conscious and without passing on valuable prospects and brand-building opportunities. No gestural morality needed.
Moving forward, Google’s promise to provide more in-depth reporting on video ads. They’re developing tools and throwing money behind new measures to improve their ability to identify questionable content, and escalation procedures to fix issues that slip through the cracks in “less than a few hours.”
About the Author
Allen Finn is a content marketing specialist and the reigning fantasy football champion at WordStream. He enjoys couth menswear, dank eats, and the dulcet tones of the Wu-Tang Clan. If you know what's good for you, you'll follow him on LinkedIn and Twitter.
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