Report: Google to reabsorb Nest to better compete with Amazon in smart home market

According to a report in The Wall Street Journal, Google is considering bringing its smart home device unit, Nest, back under the Google umbrella. Nest was acquired in January 2014 for roughly $3.2 billion.

Nest became part of Google’s “other bets” when the company formed Alphabet in 2015 and separated its other lines of business. In its most recent earnings report, the company said that “other bets” collectively brought in $302 million (vs. $197 million a year ago). Analysts believe a meaningful chunk of that belongs to Nest.

The rationale behind the potential reintegration is that the Nest team and Google teams could work more closely to develop more tightly integrated products. In addition, there are manufacturing and distribution synergies from the recombination.

The analyst consensus is that Nest has underperformed relative to its potential and early promise. It’s now just one among many dozens of home automation companies. But as Google pushes Google Home as the gateway to smart home automation, it makes considerable sense to sell a larger array of devices.

Consumer Intelligence Research Partners has found that ownership of Google Home and Echo devices triggers other smart home purchases by consumers:

The growth in smart home devices has promoted the connected accessory market. In home lighting, more than 70% of Amazon Echo and Google Home owners with smart lighting in their home, report purchasing the system after owning an Echo or Home device. Over 80% of smart thermostat users reported installing and setting up their connected accessories themselves. Over 70% of smart door lock and smoke detector systems report using Echo or Home to control the system.

Nest was Google’s second-largest purchase after Motorola’s consumer hardware division ($12.5 billion), which was eventually sold to Lenovo. Earlier this year, Google got back into that business, buying HTC’s smartphone unit for more than $1 billion.

Consumer surveys reflect that Amazon Echo and related devices control about 70 percent of the US smart speaker market today. Smart speakers are just the entry point and first round in the larger battle for home automation.

I would speculate that if the reintegration of Nest happens, we’ll probably see the Nest brand disappear over time. The Google brand is much stronger.

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About The Author

Greg Sterling is a Contributing Editor at Search Engine Land. He writes a personal blog,

Screenwerk

, about connecting the dots between digital media and real-world consumer behavior. He is also VP of Strategy and Insights for the Local Search Association. Follow him on

Twitter

or find him at

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Choosing an enterprise SEO platform

With hundreds, thousands, tens of thousands, and even millions of pages, sites, social conversations, images and keywords to manage and optimize, enterprise SEO has become increasingly complicated and time-consuming. Using an enterprise SEO platform can increase efficiency and productivity while reducing the time and errors involved in managing organic search campaigns.

More specifically, managing SEO through an enterprise toolset can provide the following benefits:

• Many tools, one interface — enterprise SEO platforms perform many tasks in one system.
• More efficient management of global operations with built-in diagnostics that can identify sitewide issues across languages, countries or regions.
• The ability to stay up to date with the search engine algorithm changes and their impact on ranking factors.
• Automated reporting to provide data in near-real time.

If you are considering licensing an SEO software tool, MarTech Today’s “Enterprise SEO Platforms: A Marketer’s Guide” will help you decide if you need to. This 42-page report examines the market for SEO platforms and the considerations involved in implementing this software into your business and includes profiles of 13 leading SEO tools vendors, capabilities comparison and recommended steps for evaluating and purchasing.

Visit Digital Marketing Depot to download “Enterprise SEO Platforms: A Marketer’s Guide.”

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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Google book search now includes audiobook results

Google has added an audiobook option to its book search feature.

Now, if you search for a specific book title, the Google book search feature includes an “Audiobook” button under the “Get Book” tab that will display different audiobook platforms offering the title.

The book search update was announced via the following tweet:

Have audiobook, will travel. Book the perfect holiday road trip read with new audiobook options, now in Search. http://pic.twitter.com/GHPmAaDWjX

— Google (@Google) November 29, 2017

To actually listen to the audiobook, users must select their preferred audiobook app.

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About The Author

Amy Gesenhues is Third Door Media's General Assignment Reporter, covering the latest news and updates for Search Engine Land and Marketing Land. From 2009 to 2012, she was an award-winning syndicated columnist for a number of daily newspapers from New York to Texas. With more than ten years of marketing management experience, she has contributed to a variety of traditional and online publications, including

MarketingProfs.com

,

SoftwareCEO.com

, and Sales and Marketing Management Magazine. Read more of Amy's articles.

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LaterPay offers first paywall platform for AMP pages

AMP (accelerated mobile pages) is designed to deliver publishers’ pages quickly on mobile devices, but the stripped-down format lacks functionality in some areas.

This week, the German-Swiss online payment infrastructure provider LaterPay is releasing what it says is the first AMP-enabled paywall and subscription platform, called AMP Access.

While there are other custom solutions, such as from The Washington Post, LaterPay CEO and founder Cosmin Ene told me he is unaware of any other out-of-the-box offering.

[Read the full article on MarTech Today.]

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About The Author

Barry Levine covers marketing technology for Third Door Media. Previously, he covered this space as a Senior Writer for VentureBeat, and he has written about these and other tech subjects for such publications as CMSWire and NewsFactor. He founded and led the web site/unit at PBS station Thirteen/WNET; worked as an online Senior Producer/writer for Viacom; created a successful interactive game, PLAY IT BY EAR: The First CD Game; founded and led an independent film showcase, CENTER SCREEN, based at Harvard and M.I.T.; and served over five years as a consultant to the M.I.T. Media Lab. You can find him at LinkedIn, and on Twitter at xBarryLevine.

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Is pixel tracking dead?

I know what you’re thinking — sensationalist clickbait title — but it really isn’t. It’s time we all make a plan to move away from pixel-based tracking.

If you are just reading far enough to see if pixel tracking will stop working today, I’ll put you out of your misery. It won’t. The threats to pixel tracking have arisen gradually.

But if you’re focused on data-driven decision-making, it’s time to stop depending on a hack to track billions of dollars in sales.

Pixel tracking is a hack?

This gets a little technical, but bear with me. The src parameter in the html tag is meant to link to a real image. But a frustrated techie who was fed up with explaining to marketers how to perform an HTTP GET request realized that they could emulate the GET call without the need for any scripting language.

By pointing the src parameter in an HTML image tag to a dynamic script located in an ad tech platform, they could process the needed marketing data and actually return a valid image  — usually a 1×1 transparent GIF — in response.

And as an added bonus, because the src was linking to the ad tech solution’s domain, this meant that the script had access to the cookies it had previously set on the browser. And voila, the pixel train had left the station.

The simplicity was so appealing that fast-forward 15 years and almost everyone is using this hack to track a huge portion of their business. Sure, we’ve had innovations around it. We’ve developed dynamic JavaScript tags, and we’ve created container tags, because I mean really, why stop at one pixel when you can have ten?

And yet, slowly but surely, the pixel train is being derailed. I’m sure we are all aware of Safari’s Intelligent Tracking Prevention (ITP). It’s the latest challenge facing pixel tracking. There still seems to be some denial about the importance of this. I think that comes down to the perception that Safari has a relatively small share of the browser market. But browser share varies by audience and region, and any challenge that makes it harder to track performance marketing sales is something we all need to take seriously.

And there is more to come! How about the impending Chrome native ad blocker? This technology may block the entire call back to the ad tech platform. This is no different from the ad-blocking browser extensions we are all familiar with, but it will be installed by default. That’ll put it in the hands of over 1 billion active users. It’s coming, and we have to be prepared.

How do you take control?

So, how do we circumnavigate these developments? As marketers, you need to book some time in with your tech teams. The key is to take control of your data out of the hands of the browser so that you can collect complete and accurate information regardless of changes made in the browser environments. The eventual data pass-back for events and sales has to be performed outside of the browser.

Tech projects like this can seem burdensome to marketers. They don’t have to be. Marketing and tech are now much better connected and aligned than before. And APIs have radically reduced the complexity of direct integrations with solutions providers.

Take control by moving past the hack. Not only is it more secure to move beyond browser-dependent tracking, it is also more accurate.

No other methodology than direct integration can be considered a legitimate solution. Moving a pixel to a JavaScript tag is only buying time. Custom tracking domains pose an operational overhead and are cumbersome for publishers.

Moving away from pixel tracking requires a little effort now to ensure a solid future — a future that guarantees tracking integrity, so all parties involved continue to grow their businesses without interruption. It’s time to get off the pixel train before it leaves the tracks.

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Opinions expressed in this article are those of the guest author and not necessarily MarTech Today. Staff authors are listed here.

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About The Author

Pete Cheyne is CTO for Performance Horizon. The architect of Performance Horizon's best-of-breed solutions, Pete oversees the technology strategy of the company. Prior to Performance Horizon, Pete was Head of Integration at Buy.at, where he was responsible for all integrations across a wide variety of EU-based companies.

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Facebook halts advertisers from using targeting to exclude racial groups

Tell me if you’ve heard this one before: Facebook is disabling some ad-targeting options because it’s been revealed how those those options can be used to discriminate against people.

First, some backstory. A little over a year ago, Facebook came under fire for enabling advertisers to skirt federal housing laws and use its quasi-racial ad-targeting options to discriminate against people based on ethnicity (African American, Asian American and Hispanic). Then, earlier this year, Facebook said that it would institute a system to reject housing-, employment- or credit-related ads that exclude racial groups. However, last week, ProPublica revealed that system to be porous. In response, Facebook is temporarily disabling advertisers from using its multicultural affinity ad targeting options to exclude people in those segments from seeing an ad.

“ProPublica recently found that safeguards we put in place earlier this year were not as comprehensive as they should have been. This was a failure in our enforcement. We must do better,” said Facebook’s VP of ads growth and solutions Rob Goldman in an emailed statement.

But here’s the thing. It was clear back when Facebook announced those safeguards that they were not comprehensive. Here’s what I wrote at the time:

When the system is finally in place, it won’t be impermeable. It will be like a road work section along a highway, with signs telling drivers to slow down, that penalties are doubled but that can’t physically slow down a driver until a cop pulls them over. In Facebook’s case, the system will show alerts at different points in the ad-buying process. If the Page buying the ad is categorized as a housing page, for example, when that advertiser clicks to begin creating an ad an alert will appear informing them of Facebook’s policy. Same if and when the advertiser opts to use an ethnic affinity targeting option.

If the advertiser doesn’t heed Facebook’s warnings and Facebook’s automated approval system isn’t able to recognize any violations in the ad, then the ad can still be shown to people, and it will be up to those people to recognize if the ad is discriminatory and flag it to Facebook.

It was ProPublica, not Facebook, that found the ongoing flaws in the system. Now that the inadequacy of Facebook’s system has been revealed, the company is reviewing its ad-targeting options for the second time in almost as many months.

In addition to disabling brands from using its multicultural affinity targeting for exclusion targeting, Facebook is reviewing how its portfolio of ad-targeting options can be used to exclude “other potentially sensitive segments (e.g., segments that relate to the LGBTQ community or to religious groups),” according to Goldman’s statement.

Facebook will also require advertisers “to certify that they understand our anti-discrimination policies and the law when using multicultural affinity segments for inclusion on ads on Facebook. These self-certification measures will be introduced over the next several weeks,” said Goldman. Now to wait to see if Facebook’s latest attempt to mitigate this misuse — which sounds a lot like its earlier attempt — is sufficient.

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About The Author

Tim Peterson, Third Door Media's Social Media Reporter, has been covering the digital marketing industry since 2011. He has reported for Advertising Age, Adweek and Direct Marketing News. A born-and-raised Angeleno who graduated from New York University, he currently lives in Los Angeles. He has broken stories on Snapchat's ad plans, Hulu founding CEO Jason Kilar's attempt to take on YouTube and the assemblage of Amazon's ad-tech stack; analyzed YouTube's programming strategy, Facebook's ad-tech ambitions and ad blocking's rise; and documented digital video's biggest annual event VidCon, BuzzFeed's branded video production process and Snapchat Discover's ad load six months after launch. He has also developed tools to monitor brands' early adoption of live-streaming apps, compare Yahoo's and Google's search designs and examine the NFL's YouTube and Facebook video strategies.

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MarTech Today: ‘4D Interactive Ads,’ insights from Black Friday and Cyber Monday, & the first paywall for AMP

Here's our daily recap of what happened in marketing technology, as reported on MarTech Today, Marketing Land and other places across the web. From MarTech Today: ironSource’s ‘4D Interactive Ads’ deliver personalization (and data) through interactivity Nov 29, 2017 by Ginny Marvin Advertisers can glean behavioral data based on the choices users make when engaging with the ads. More than mobile: Martech insights from Black Friday & Cyber Monday Nov 29, 2017 by Robin Ku[...]

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