SEO Is a Means to an End: How Do You Prove Your Value to Clients?

“Prove it” is pretty much the name of the game at this point.

As SEOs, we invest so much effort into finding opportunities for our clients, executing strategies, and on the best days, getting the results we set out to achieve.

That’s why it feels so deflating (not to mention mind-boggling) when, after all those increases in rankings, traffic, and conversions our work produced, our clients still aren’t satisfied.

Where’s the disconnect?

The value of SEO in today’s search landscape

You don’t have to convince SEOs that their work is valuable. We know full well how our work benefits our clients’ websites.

1. Our attention on crawling and indexing ensures that search engine bots crawl all our clients’ important pages, that they’re not wasting time on any unimportant pages, and that only the important, valuable pages are in the index.
2. Because we understand how Googlebot and other crawlers work, we’re cognizant of how to ensure that search engines understand our pages as they’re intended to be understood, as well as able to eliminate any barriers to that understanding (ex: adding appropriate structured data, diagnosing JavaScript issues, etc.)
3. We spend our time improving speed, ensuring appropriate language targeting, looking into UX issues, ensuring accessibility, and more because we know the high price that Google places on the searcher experience.
4. We research the words and phrases that our clients’ ideal customers use to search for solutions to their problems and help create content that satisfies those needs. In turn, Google rewards our clients with high rankings that capture clicks. Over time, this can lower our clients’ customer acquisition costs.
5. Time spent on earning links for our clients earns them the authority needed to earn trust and perform well in search results.

There are so many other SEO activities that drive real, measurable impact for our clients, even in a search landscape that is more crowded and getting less clicks than ever before. Despite those results, we’ll still fall short if we fail to connect the dots for our clients.

Rankings, traffic, conversions… what’s missing?

What’s a keyword ranking worth without clicks?

What’s organic traffic worth without conversions?

What are conversions worth without booking/signing the lead?

Rankings, traffic, and conversions are all critical SEO metrics to track if you want to prove the success of your efforts, but they are all means to an end.

At the end of the day, what your client truly cares about is their return on investment (ROI). In other words, if they can’t mentally make the connection between your SEO results and their revenue, then the client might not keep you around for long.

From searcher to customer: I made this diagram for a past client to help demonstrate how they get revenue from SEO.

But how can you do that?

10 tips for attaching value to organic success

If you want to help your clients get a clearer picture of the real value of your efforts, try some of the following methods.

1. Know what constitutes a conversion

What’s the main action your client wants people to take on their website? This is usually something like a form fill, a phone call, or an on-site purchase (e-commerce). Knowing how your client uses their website to make money is key.

2. Ask your clients what their highest value jobs are

Know what types of jobs/purchases your client is prioritizing so you can prioritize them too. It’s common for clients to want to balance their “cash flow” jobs (usually lower value but higher volume) with their “big time” jobs (higher value but lower volume). You can pay special attention to performance and conversions on these pages.

3. Know your client’s close rate

How many of the leads your campaigns generate end up becoming customers? This will help you assign values to goals (tip #6).

4. Know your client’s average customer value

This can get tricky if your client offers different services that all have different values, but you can combine average customer value with close rate to come up with a monetary value to attach to goals (tip #6).

5. Set up goals in Google Analytics

Once you know what constitutes a conversion on your client’s website (tip #1), you can set up a goal in Google Analytics. If you’re not sure how to do this, read up on Google’s documentation.

6. Assign goal values

Knowing that the organic channel led to a conversion is great, but knowing the estimated value of that conversion is even better! For example, if you know that your client closes 10% of the leads that come through contact forms, and the average value of their customers is $500, you could assign a value of $50 per goal completion.

7. Consider having an Organic-only view in Google Analytics

For the purpose of clarity, it could be valuable to set up an additional Google Analytics view just for your client’s organic traffic. That way, when you’re looking at your goal report, you know you’re checking organic conversions and value only.

8. Calculate how much you would have had to pay for that traffic in Google Ads

I like to use the Keywords Everywhere plugin when viewing Google Search Console performance reports because it adds a cost per click (CPC) column next to your clicks column. This screenshot is from a personal blog website that I admittedly don’t do much with, hence the scant metrics, but you can see how easy this makes it to calculate how much you would have had to pay for the clicks you got your client for “free” (organically).

9. Use Multi-Channel Funnels

Organic has value beyond last-click! Even when it’s not the channel your client’s customer came through, organic may have assisted in that conversion. Go to Google Analytics > Conversions > Multi-Channel Funnels.

10. Bring all your data together

How you communicate all this data is just as important as the data itself. Use smart visualizations and helpful explanations to drive home the impact your work had on your client’s bottom line.

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As many possibilities as we have for proving our value, doing so can be difficult and time-consuming. Additional factors can even complicate this further, such as:

• Client is using multiple methods for customer acquisition, each with its own platform, metrics, and reporting
• Client has low SEO maturity
• Client is somewhat disorganized and doesn’t have a good grasp of things like average customer value or close rate

The challenges can seem endless, but there are ways to make this easier. I’ll be co-hosting a webinar on March 28th that focuses on this very topic. If you’re looking for ways to not only add value as an SEO but also prove it, check it out:

Save my spot!

And let’s not forget, we’re in this together! If you have any tips for showing your value to your SEO clients, share them in the comments below.

This marketing news is not the copyright of Scott.Services – please click here to see the original source of this article. Author: KameronJenkins

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Daily Search Forum Recap: March 20, 2019

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:

• Google: With March 2019 Core Update We Try To Make Incremental Improvements
  Google’s John Mueller for the first time addressed the latest Google algorithm update, the March 2019 core update, that touched down on March 12th. He was asked if it was a softening of the August 1st core Medic update. He said he doesn’t know but generally Google likes to make incremental updates in these cases.
• What Is Google’s Neural Matching?
  Yesterday I covered that Google said that their neural matching AI has nothing at all to do with the March 2019 core update, nor any previous updates. But this concept of neural matching seems to confuse not just SEOs but also Googlers – so I thought I’d bring it up again.
• Google Search Console Now Allows Removal Of XML Sitemaps
  You can now remove your XML Sitemaps from the new version of the Google Search Console. Pedro Dias first spotted this and posted about this on Twitter. You can go to your Sitemap report and click on a sitemap you want to remove, then the three dots to remove that sitemap.
• Google: Differentiate Structured Markup Between Recorded & Live Stream Videos
  Google’s John Mueller said in a webmaster hangout yesterday that it is really important that when you use structured data for video content, you use the right markup based on it being either recorded video or live stream video.
• First Day Of Spring, Spring Equinox Logos From Google & Bing
  Today is the first day of Spring in the Northern Hemisphere and to celebrate Google has a Doodle, Bing has posted a nice photos on their homepage and we have redone our site’s theme today as well.
• Puddle Raindrop At GooglePlex
  For some reason when I saw this photo on Instagram of a puddle and raindrop at the Google office, the GooglePlex, I laughed. I mean, who would take a photo of a puddle? But I guess it is rare for it t

Other Great Search Forum Threads:

• Ah, gotcha. Yeah, I’ve been wanting to write that up. The short is feel free to personalize, but keep in mind that Googlebot will just see one version, so usually it makes sense to keep a part of the page stable.… https://t.c, John Mueller on Twitter
• I think that’s fine – you don’t need those per-post feed URLs indexed.…, John Mueller on Twitter
• E.U. Fines Google 1.49 Billion Euros Over Antitrust in Advertising, WebmasterWorld
• Firefox 66 Released, Autoplay Blocking By Default, WebmasterWorld
• ICANN May Allow .Org Domain Renewal Prices to go Sky High, WebmasterWorld
• Oh, I’m well aware that discouraging smart & curious SEOs to test something is a bit futile, but I thought I’d be blunt regardless :)… https://t.co/w3bdxeAXah, John Mueller on Twitter
• To be honest, that doesn’t give me a lot of feedback (past ranking doesn’t guarantee future ranking); if you have general queries where you see that the results are bad (not just “my site is just as good”), I’d love to forward, John Mueller on Twitter

Search Engine Land Stories:

Other Great Search Stories:

Analytics

Industry & Business

Local & Maps

Mobile & Voice

SEO

PPC

Search Features

This marketing news is not the copyright of Scott.Services – please click here to see the original source of this article. Author: barry@rustybrick.com (Barry Schwartz)

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AMP’d Up for Recaptcha

Beyond search Google controls the leading distributed ad network, the leading mobile OS, the leading web browser, the leading email client, the leading web analytics platform, the leading free video hosting site.

They win a lot.

And they take winnings from one market & leverage them into manipulating adjacent markets.

Embrace. Extend. Extinguish.

Imagine taking a universal open standard that has zero problems with it and then stripping it down to it’s most basic components and then prepending each element with your own acronym. Then spend years building and recreating what has existed for decades. That is @amphtml— Jon Henshaw (@henshaw) April 4, 2019

AMP is an utterly unnecessary invention designed to further shift power to Google while disenfranchising publishers. From the very start it had many issues with basic things like supporting JavaScript, double counting unique users (no reason to fix broken stats if they drive adoption!), not supporting third party ad networks, not showing publisher domain names, and just generally being a useless layer of sunk cost technical overhead that provides literally no real value.

Over time they have corrected some of these catastrophic deficiencies, but if it provided real value, they wouldn’t have needed to force adoption with preferential placement in their search results. They force the bundling because AMP sucks.

Absurdity knows no bounds. Googlers suggest: “AMP isn’t another “channel” or “format” that’s somehow not the web. It’s not a SEO thing. It’s not a replacement for HTML. It’s a web component framework that can power your whole site. … We, the AMP team, want AMP to become a natural choice for modern web development of content websites, and for you to choose AMP as framework because it genuinely makes you more productive.”

Meanwhile some newspapers have about a dozen employees who work on re-formatting content for AMP.

Feeeeeel the productivity!

Some content types (particularly user generated content) can be unpredictable & circuitous. For many years forums websites would use keywords embedded in the search referral to highlight relevant parts of the page. Keyword (not provided) largely destroyed that & then it became a competitive feature for AMP: “If the Featured Snippet links to an AMP article, Google will sometimes automatically scroll users to that section and highlight the answer in orange.”

That would perhaps be a single area where AMP was more efficient than the alternative. But it is only so because Google destroyed the alternative by stripping keyword referrers from search queries.

The power dynamics of AMP are ugly:

“I see them as part of the effort to normalise the use of the AMP Carousel, which is an anti-competitive land-grab for the web by an organisation that seems to have an insatiable appetite for consuming the web, probably ultimately to it’s own detriment. … This enables Google to continue to exist after the destination site (eg the New York Times) has been navigated to. Essentially it flips the parent-child relationship to be the other way around. … As soon as a publisher blesses a piece of content by packaging it (they have to opt in to this, but see coercion below), they totally lose control of its distribution. … I’m not that smart, so it’s surely possible to figure out other ways of making a preload possible without cutting off the content creator from the people consuming their content. … The web is open and decentralised. We spend a lot of time valuing the first of these concepts, but almost none trying to defend the second. Google knows, perhaps better than anyone, how being in control of the user is the most monetisable position, and having the deepest pockets and the most powerful platform to do so, they have very successfully inserted themselves into my relationship with millions of other websites. … In AMP, the support for paywalls is based on a recommendation that the premium content be included in the source of the page regardless of the user’s authorisation state. … These policies demonstrate contempt for others’ right to freely operate their businesses.

After enough publishers adopted AMP Google was able to turn their mobile app’s homepage into an interactive news feed below the search box. And inside that news feed Google gets to distribute MOAR ads while 0% of the revenue from those ads find its way to the publishers whose content is used to make up the feed.

Appropriate appropriation.

Each additional layer of technical cruft is another cost center. Things that sound appealing at first blush may not be:

The way you verify your identity to Let’s Encrypt is the same as with other certificate authorities: you don’t really. You place a file somewhere on your website, and they access that file over plain HTTP to verify that you own the website. The one attack that signed certificates are meant to prevent is a man-in-the-middle attack. But if someone is able to perform a man-in-the-middle attack against your website, then he can intercept the certificate verification, too. In other words, Let’s Encrypt certificates don’t stop the one thing they’re supposed to stop. And, as always with the certificate authorities, a thousand murderous theocracies, advertising companies, and international spy organizations are allowed to impersonate you by design.

Anything that is easy to implement & widely marketed often has costs added to it in the future as the entity moves to monetize the service.

This is a private equity firm buying up multiple hosting control panels & then adjusting prices.

This is Google Maps drastically changing their API terms.

This is Facebook charging you for likes to build an audience, giving your competitors access to those likes as an addressable audience to advertise against, and then charging you once more to boost the reach of your posts.

This is Grubhub creating shadow websites on your behalf and charging you for every transaction created by the gravity of your brand.

Shivane believes GrubHub purchased her restaurant’s web domain to prevent her from building her own online presence. She also believes the company may have had a special interest in owning her name because she processes a high volume of orders. … it appears GrubHub has set up several generic, templated pages that look like real restaurant websites but in fact link only to GrubHub. These pages also display phone numbers that GrubHub controls. The calls are forwarded to the restaurant, but the platform records each one and charges the restaurant a commission fee for every order

Settling for the easiest option drives a lack of differentiation, embeds additional risk & once the dominant player has enough marketshare they’ll change the terms on you.

Small gains in short term margins for massive increases in fragility.

“Closed platforms increase the chunk size of competition & increase the cost of market entry, so people who have good ideas, it is a lot more expensive for their productivity to be monetized. They also don’t like standardization … it looks like rent seeking behaviors on top of friction” – Gabe Newell

The other big issue is platforms that run out of growth space in their core market may break integrations with adjacent service providers as each want to grow by eating the other’s market.

Those who look at SaaS business models through the eyes of a seasoned investor will better understand how markets are likely to change:

“I’d argue that many of today’s anointed tech “disruptors” are doing little in the way of true disruption. … When investors used to get excited about a SAAS company, they typically would be describing a hosted multi-tenant subscription-billed piece of software that was replacing a ‘legacy’ on-premise perpetual license solution in the same target market (i.e. ERP, HCM, CRM, etc.). Today, the terms SAAS and Cloud essentially describe the business models of every single public software company.

Most platform companies are initially required to operate at low margins in order to buy growth of their category & own their category. Then when they are valued on that, they quickly need to jump across to adjacent markets to grow into the valuation:

Twilio has no choice but to climb up the application stack. This is a company whose ‘disruption’ is essentially great API documentation and gangbuster SEO spend built on top of a highly commoditized telephony aggregation API. They have won by marketing to DevOps engineers. With all the hype around them, you’d think Twilio invented the telephony API, when in reality what they did was turn it into a product company. Nobody had thought of doing this let alone that this could turn into a $17 billion company because simply put the economics don’t work. And to be clear they still don’t. But Twilio’s genius CEO clearly gets this. If the market is going to value robocalls, emergency sms notifications, on-call pages, and carrier fee passed through related revenue growth in the same way it does ‘subscription’ revenue from Atlassian or ServiceNow, then take advantage of it while it lasts.

Large platforms offering temporary subsidies to ensure they dominate their categories & companies like SoftBank spraying capital across the markets is causing massive shifts in valuations:

I also think if you look closely at what is celebrated today as innovation you often find models built on hidden subsidies. … I’d argue the very distributed nature of microservices architecture and API-first product companies means addressable market sizes and unit economics assumptions should be even more carefully scrutinized. … How hard would it be to create an Alibaba today if someone like SoftBank was raining money into such a greenfield space? Excess capital would lead to destruction and likely subpar returns. If capital was the solution, the 1.5 trillion that went into telcos in late ’90s wouldn’t have led to a massive bust. Would a Netflix be what it is today if a SoftBank was pouring billions into streaming content startups right as the experiment was starting? Obviously not. Scarcity of capital is another often underappreciated part of the disruption equation. Knowing resources are finite leads to more robust models. … This convergence is starting to manifest itself in performance. Disney is up 30% over the last 12 months while Netflix is basically flat. This may not feel like a bubble sign to most investors, but from my standpoint, it’s a clear evidence of the fact that we are approaching a something has got to give moment for the way certain businesses are valued.”

Circling back to Google’s AMP, it has a cousin called Recaptcha.

Recaptcha is another AMP-like trojan horse:

According to tech statistics website Built With, more than 650,000 websites are already using reCaptcha v3; overall, there are at least 4.5 million websites use reCaptcha, including 25% of the top 10,000 sites. Google is also now testing an enterprise version of reCaptcha v3, where Google creates a customized reCaptcha for enterprises that are looking for more granular data about users’ risk levels to protect their site algorithms from malicious users and bots. … According to two security researchers who’ve studied reCaptcha, one of the ways that Google determines whether you’re a malicious user or not is whether you already have a Google cookie installed on your browser. … To make this risk-score system work accurately, website administrators are supposed to embed reCaptcha v3 code on all of the pages of their website, not just on forms or log-in pages.

About a month ago when logging into Bing Ads I saw recaptcha on the login page & couldn’t believe they’d give Google control at that access point. I think they got rid of that, but lots of companies are perhaps shooting themselves in the foot through a combination of over-reliance on Google infrastructure AND sloppy implementation

Today when making a purchase on Fiverr, after converting, I got some of this action

Hmm. Maybe I will enable JavaScript and try again.

Oooops.

That is called snatching defeat from the jaws of victory.

My account is many years old. My payment type on record has been used for years. I have ordered from the particular seller about a dozen times over the years. And suddenly because my web browser had JavaScript turned off I was deemed a security risk of some sort for making an utterly ordinary transaction I have already completed about a dozen times.

On AMP JavaScript was the devil. And on desktop not JavaScript was the devil.

Pro tip: Ecommerce websites that see substandard conversion rates from using Recaptcha can boost their overall ecommerce revenue by buying more Google AdWords ads.

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As more of the infrastructure stack is driven by AI software there is going to be a very real opportunity for many people to become deplatformed across the web on an utterly arbitrary basis. That tech companies like Facebook also want to create digital currencies on top of the leverage they already have only makes the proposition that much scarier.

If the tech platforms host copies of our sites, process the transactions & even create their own currencies, how will we know what level of value they are adding versus what they are extracting?

Who measures the measurer?

And when the economics turn negative, what will we do if we are hooked into an ecosystem we can’t spend additional capital to get out of when things head south?

This marketing news is not the copyright of Scott.Services – please click here to see the original source of this article. Author: Aaron Wall

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Programming Note: Offline For Passover 5779 – April 26th

This is a programming note that I will be 100% offline on Friday April 26th, for the Passover holiday.

Any story published on Friday April 26th were pre-written and scheduled to go live on that date. That includes this post announcing I am offline, this was pre-written and scheduled. It also includes the search video recap, which was produced on Thursday and scheduled for Friday.

If there are any comment spam that slip through the comment spam filters on those days, I won’t be able to get to it until I come back online.

I hope anyone celebrating Passover has a nice holiday and be back on Monday morning all!

This marketing news is not the copyright of Scott.Services – please click here to see the original source of this article. Author: barry@rustybrick.com (Barry Schwartz)

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Daily Search Forum Recap: April 25, 2019

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:

• Google: Sitemap Dates vs Web Page Dates
  John Mueller from Google explained on Twitter the difference between the timestamp date in an XML Sitemaps lasmod date and the date on a web page. John said the sitemaps lastmod is when the page as a whole was last changed for crawling/indexing. The date on page is the date to be associated with the primary content on the page.
• Google: You Cannot Isolate Specific Ranking Factor Successes
  I am going to do it, I am going to read between the lines here on a John Mueller tweet. In short, he said that you really cannot say that one specific ranking factor is the reason why a site might be doing well or poorly in search, even if that site focused on that exclusively over the last time period.
• Google Really Wants You To Use Remote Job Markup For Job Schema
  In February, Google sent out Search Console notifications that you can and should add job opportunities that are available to remote workers after launching markup around that a year prior. Okay, so Google is reminding people to use the markup – okay. But yesterday, Google posts on the search blog there is a new way to find jobs for work-from-home job seekers.
• Google Posts Reminder On How Structured Data Can Richen Search Results
  Daniel Waisberg, who recently moved to the Google search team, posted his first blog post under his new position. In the blog post he posted a reminder on how structured data can help richen up the search results. There is nothing new in the blog post, but it is a nice reminder of how using schema and markup can help give you a competitive edge in search.
• Google’s Penguin Room – Giorgio’s Center
  Here is a photo of one of the rooms at the Google Zurich office – we know they have a Penguin Ave sign but here is a photo of a room that looks to be designed with Penguins. It is named Giorgio’s Cent

Other Great Search Forum Threads:

Search Engine Land Stories:

Analytics

Industry & Business

Links & Promotion Building

Local & Maps

Mobile & Voice

SEO

PPC

This marketing news is not the copyright of Scott.Services – please click here to see the original source of this article. Author: barry@rustybrick.com (Barry Schwartz)

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Report: Facebook the top network for app-installs, Google, Apple follow

The top sites and networks for mobile app installs are, in order, Facebook, Google, Apple (Search Ads), Snap and Twitter. This changes somewhat by app category and geography but this is the hierarchy in North America according to the latest AppsFlyer Performance Index (registration required).

Facebook #1 overall, Snap most improved. Facebook remains the top network for mobile app installs overall. It’s also the ROI leader, while Snap saw the best improvement in ROI in the non-gaming category. Google is a strong number two in the majority of categories. Apple generally follows in the third position or fourth, though not in all categories. Twitter, Snap (as mentioned) and others rank highly depending on the category: gaming vs. non-gaming, etc.

The analysis is based on more than 20 billion installs during the second half of 2018. It also examined more than 11,000 apps across more than 350 media networks.

Fraud is high, Facebook and Google share flat. One of the more important findings, AppsFlyer said that app-install fraud remains high. Indeed, the company reports that 30 percent of all installs are fraudulent. AppsFlyer added that the affiliate model for app marketing is losing ground because it is more vulnerable to fraud.

AppsFlyer further reports that that although the perception is that Facebook and Google’s dominance and share of the app-install market are growing, their combined market share is large but flat. Especially in gaming, a number of networks (AppLovin, ironSource, Unity Ads, Vungle, Tapjoy) are growing and showing strength.

Why should you care. The report is useful to app marketers to better understand the networks and platforms to use to market their apps. Facebook, Google and Apple Search Ads are must-dos. After that marketers can be more selective.

The other important thing in the report to be aware of is app-install fraud. According to estimates, app developers are spending an average of 31 percent of their budgets on app marketing. Billions of dollars globally are thus being wasted because of widespread fraud. Choose your networks wisely.

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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 Google+.

This marketing news is not the copyright of Scott.Services – please click here to see the original source of this article. Author: Greg Sterling

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IAB Europe releases new GDPR consent framework for comment

IAB Europe, in partnership with IAB Tech Lab, announced Thursday new technical specifications for its second iteration of the Transparency & Consent Framework (TCF v2.0), designed to facilitate GDPR and ePrivacy Directive compliance for ad tech vendors.

The new specifications are currently available for public comment over the next 30 days.

Why we should care

IAB Europe’s TCF offers companies a framework with which companies can manage GDPR-approved consent collection from users and site visitors. The new version takes into account feedback from publishers for more granular controls among the requests. With more explicit terms and practices outlined in TCF v2.0, publishers and vendors have access to deeper knowledge and control when collecting and managing personal data. The framework provides more intuitive solutions and resources so that publishers, tech vendors and advertisers can more easily meet the transparency and consent requirements of GDPR.

Google, which has not signed on to the initial TCF, has that it would officially integrate this next version of the framework as a recognized TCF vendor after the release. The parties said they have been collaborating on the revision.

“Google is actively contributing to the different TCF work-tracks, both on the IAB Europe and the IAB Tech Lab sides, and have said they will announce the timing of their integration once Version 2.0 of the TCF is out in the market,” Townsend Feehan, CEO of IAB Europe, told MarTech Today in February.

We have reached out to Google for an update. In January, Google was hit with a 50 million euro penalty ($56.8 million) for not being transparent enough about the use of personal information and for not obtaining specific consent for ad-targeting purposes under GDPR.

Key changes in TCF v2.0

The updated framework is intended to provide consumers and publishers with more transparency and control over consenting to and collecting personal data, IAB Europe said. Key changes include:

• Extending the original purposes for processing personal data from five to twelve to provide more in-depth context.
• Users’ ability to expressly indicate the “right to object” to a vendor collecting and processing their data.
• Increased control in consenting to data processing, and how the vendors might use the data (including precise geolocation data).

This story first appeared on MarTech Today. For more on marketing technology, click here.

https://martechtoday.com/iab-europe-releases-new-gdpr-consent-framework-for-comment-233134

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About The Author

Taylor Peterson is Third Door Media’s Deputy Editor, managing industry-leading coverage that informs and inspires marketers. Based in New York, Taylor brings marketing expertise grounded in creative production and agency advertising for global brands. Taylor’s editorial focus blends digital marketing and creative strategy with topics like campaign management, emerging formats, and display advertising.

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Snap names former McDonald’s marketing leader Kenny Mitchell as its first CMO

Snap Inc. CMO Kenny Mitchell.

Kenny Mitchell, the former VP of brand content and engagement for McDonald’s, has been named Snap’s first ever CMO. Mitchell will begin in June and report to CEO Evan Spiegel.

Why we should care

Mitchell is the fourth C-level officer to join Snap’s executive team since November. With this latest hire, the company is continuing to build out its top leadership and better position itself as a major player among the social media platforms.

“Throughout his career, Kenny has demonstrated his ability to successfully execute innovative, global marketing campaigns, many of which have leveraged our own vertical video and augmented reality products,” said Spiegel, “He’s a natural fit to join our team and lead marketing as we continue driving the positive momentum we have in the business.”

Snapchat currently reaches 90% of all 13 to 24-year-olds in the U.S. and 75% of 13 to 34-year-olds, according to the company’s first quarter earnings report released on Tuesday — a coveted audience for many marketers. Under Mitchell’s guidance leading consumer and product marketing programs, Snap aims to attract advertisers that may not fully understand the messaging app’s appeal. Before joining Snap, Mitchell worked closely with the Snapchat team to develop vertical video and AR campaigns for brands like McDonald’s and Gatorade.

During his time as the head of consumer engagement for Gatorade, Mitchell oversaw the brand’s Dunk AR Lens for the Super Bowl — a campaign that won Gatorade five Lions awards at Cannes.

More on the news

• In addition to McDonald’s and Gatorade, Mitchell has held marketing leadership roles at NASCAR and NBC Sports Group.
• Snap announced on Tuesday a 39% year-over-year increase in revenue for the first quarter of 2019, and showed signs it had finally stabilized user growth — an issue that has been a challenge for the company since rolling out a major redesign more than a year ago.
• Last October, Snap named Jared Grusd as its new chief strategy officer and Jeremi Gorman to serve as chief business officer.

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About The Author

Amy Gesenhues is Third Door Media’s General Assignment Reporter, covering the latest news and updates for Marketing Land and Search Engine 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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Facebook ad revenue keeps rising, 3 million advertisers using Stories Ads

Source: Facebook

Facebook’s bet on Stories Ads looks like it is paying off.

COO Sheryl Sandberg said Wednesday during the company’s first quarter earnings call that, while Facebook and Instagram feed ads make up the bulk of Facebook’s ad business, Stories Ads are “an increasingly important growth opportunity.” Facebook announced it now has three million advertisers running Stories Ads across Instagram, Facebook and Messenger, and more than 500 million daily active users engaging with Stories experiences across the three platforms.

The company reported $14.9 billion in ad revenue during the first quarter of the year, up 26% year-over-year. At $13.9 billion, mobile ad revenue accounted for 93% of the company’s total ad revenue — up 30% year-over-year.

Advertisers keep spending. Facebook’s ads business has yet to show any signs of serious impact from the company’s ongoing user privacy and data mishandling scandals– most likely because advertisers continue to see results. The average price of an ad decreased 4% during the first quarter of the year, while ad impressions (across all of its services) jumped 32%.

“Impression growth was primarily driven by ads on Instagram Stories, Instagram Feed and Facebook News Feed,” said CFO David Wehner. He said that the year-over-year decline in average price per ad reflects an ongoing mix shift towards Stories Ads and geographies that monetize at lower rates. According to the Wehner, Facebook saw the strongest ad revenue growth come from the U.S. and Canada at 30%.

COO Sandberg noted that the top 100 advertisers on Facebook account for less than 20 percent of the company’s total ad revenue. “Our advertiser base is more diverse compared to the same period over last year,” said Sandberg.

Wehner did say that Facebook expects overall revenue growth to decelerate sequentially throughout the year, with fallout from limitations on ad targeting to be more pronounced in the second half of 2019.

E-commerce initiatives. Sandberg referenced the company’s recent social commerce initiatives with the launch of Checkout on Instagram, a new e-commerce feature that rolled out to a select group of brands. The Checkout on Instagram feature delivers in-app purchasing capabilities for brands, making it possible to provide users with an ad that leads straight to a product purchase without having to leave the app.

The COO also noted the recent of expansion of Marketplace Ads to more countries and launch of Collaborative Ads (designed for brands without DTC channels so that they can run e-commerce campaigns connected to retailers).

User growth continued. In the face of all the reports and surveys claiming Facebook usage has flattened, the company has in fact reported daily active user growth for nine consecutive quarters now.

Facebook’s DAUs grew 8% year-over-over, reaching 1.56 billion during the first quarter of 2019. Monthly active users reached 2.38 billion last month, also up 8% year-over-year. Wehner said Facebook, on average, sees 2.1 billion people per day using at least one of its apps. Facebook’s DAUs in the U.S. and Canada have grown by nearly 50 million since the first quarter of 2018, now at 490 million.

Why we should care. Facebook is in a time of major transition. The company is centering its focus on moving from news feed to private, encrypted messaging — or what CEO Mark Zuckerberg continually refers to as the digital equivalent of a family’s living room.

“Our plan is to build this the way we’ve developed WhatsApp: focus on the most fundamental and private use case –messaging –make it as secure as possible with end-to-end encryption, and then build more ways for people to interact on top of that,” said Zuckerberg during the earnings call.

Advertisers who have relied on Facebook’s ad-targeting capabilities and wide audiences will have to adjust to what comes next, although Zuckerberg said that he doesn’t foresee the coming changes hurting the company’s advertising business. “It will strengthen people’s privacy without meaningfully affecting our business,” said Zuckerberg.

In the immediate future, it seems likely more advertisers will give the (for now) lower-cost Stories Ads a run.

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About The Author

Amy Gesenhues is Third Door Media’s General Assignment Reporter, covering the latest news and updates for Marketing Land and Search Engine 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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We can’t live without digital media, but why would we want to?

“But dad, I can’t live without them!”

My daughter Judy and I were once again locked in the battle over screen time by now familiar to many of today’s parents and significant others. We had turned a day of errands into some father-daughter time with a few fun diversions and I was hoping she would surface from her screens long enough for us to enjoy it.

Although her plea was not as heartfelt as Nilsson’s 1971 power hit, “Without You,” Judy was quite serious about not being able to live without her screens.

My oft-rehearsed “don’t be so dramatic” speech was at the tip of my tongue when it hit me: maybe she is right. With me behind the wheel and her behind a screen, we had effortlessly checked off errand after errand, leaving us with more time to appreciate our day together.

Pocket-sized portals to pervasive media

Judy got directions via Waze, checked store hours with Google, compared prices for a hair dryer she needed on Amazon, found an amazing taco place for lunch through Yelp, helped me install a new key fob battery with YouTube, searched LinkedIn to advise her brother on a resume entry, filled a prescription at CVS.com, chose a movie and theater on Fandango and amused us throughout with her friends’ Instagram posts and my Facebook feed.

Without our digital media screens, we likely would have spent most of the day on the phone with various customer service representatives, pouring through newspaper reviews, visiting retail location after location (arriving at times too early or too late) and grumbling all the while.

If we now rely so much on screens as individuals, can we as a society function without them?

Our smartphones and tablets are mobile portals to the digital media realm, where tools and resources that historically existed in separate spheres have been brought under a single roof. Though media has long played a role in specific social interactions, digital media consolidates almost all domains of social exchange in a manner previously unthinkable.

In the digital age, media is no longer merely the realm of entertainment or information; it is now pervasive, touching every aspect of our being, from how we live to how we work, play, communicate, connect – and even find love. We literally can’t live without media.

But wait, what exactly is media?

“Media” (sing. medium) is derived from the Latin word Medius, meaning “middle.”

Even in today’s digitally-driven usage, this connotation persists: media are the creative and physical infrastructure that connect content producers and consumers. Media can be more granularly understood as a process of mediation, whose stages progressively encode and then decode content “packages” as they move from producer to consumer.

Imagine writing a letter by hand, putting it in an envelope and sending it (crazy, right?). You take your thoughts and turn them into written words, which you then package in a form that the postal service can ship. The recipient must then invert the process: opening the envelope to read the letter and interpreting the written words back into thought.

Though undoubtedly more complicated, all media undertakes a largely similar project. It configures content so that it can be efficiently transferred to and then consumed by the recipient. Variations of this process have facilitated the exchange of entertainment and information for millennia, but the internet century’s technology-driven shifts profoundly expanded media’s role in society.

Back in the day, media was just for fun!

Since the beginning of history, media acted almost exclusively as a vehicle for information and entertainment, playing a singular and discrete role in people’s everyday lives. The earliest stories enthralled their audiences and imparted social values – much as they did later via network primetime – while town criers, and eventually newspapers, kept people informed.

Outside of these channels, people communicated largely in person. Politics were debated in town centers, dating and marriage were arranged by friends and relatives and shopping was done at public markets. In other words, most transactions have historically been unmediated: there was no person, process or technology that stood between us and the rest of society.

Over centuries, innovation increased the time we all spend with media, but its role in informing and entertaining mainly remained the same, as did its status as a distinct interactive mode, alongside politics, culture, healthcare, socialization, transportation, infrastructure and economics. Each of these was a distinct domain and transactions in one were conducted differently than in another.

The boundaries between domains were defined by time and space. We used writing to keep records and exchange messages, but these were stored in a physical location or sent to a physical address; likewise, theatrical performances took place in a space different from the one used to execute legal proceedings or exchange goods and services.

Most of the time, though, we were media-free as we participated in our community or the economy. Media certainly had no role in our health, transportation or infrastructure. We turned media on and off at well-defined times and in familiar contexts: reading the newspaper in the morning, listening to radio programs during our daily commute and watching television at night.

Digital technology disrupted this clear boundary between media and non-media interactions—today, media is pervasive.

Pervasive media isn’t just a new tool, it’s a new way

We need look no further than the latest election cycle to see that media is a part of politics; virtual doctor visits make healthcare immediately accessible; dating would be seemingly non-existent without a cache of apps; cars are becoming media platforms, as is our homes’ infrastructure; and, of course, our work lives are permeated with media from search to LinkedIn.

Today it is unthinkable to leave the house without a mobile media device. We use them to conduct a growing share of daily business. Living in an urban center, it is equally unthinkable to leave home without a credit card. Just as we can use credit cards to pay our rent and utilities, subscribe to streaming services and buy groceries, we use digital media to meet many of our daily needs.

Many of the transactions above are conducted not merely with a credit card, but specifically through digital media platforms. Few social exchanges have escaped digitization. Anything that isn’t material can be reduced to ones and zeroes and anything that can be ordered and shipped with them. Like water, digital is an almost universal conductor.

Mediating anytime, anywhere

The digital mediation of even our most intimate exchanges has atomized our relationship with society. No longer bound by conventions of time and space, we can consume entertainment, schedule appointments or satisfy our curiosity wherever and whenever we please.

It looks to me like Judy is always “on her phone” but, in truth, she’s organizing her time, connecting with friends, helping her brother nail an interview, vetting lunch spots or keeping up on current events. It’s just hard to tell without the myriad accouterment we needed in my day.

I’m still not thrilled about how much time she (or I, for that matter) spends on her media screens. It’s all too easy to get sucked in by our pocket-sized portals to everything. But it’s hard to imagine our day would have been better spent scouring maps or pouring through phone books, so maybe Judy is right – we really can’t live without them.

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

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About The Author

Peter Minnium is president of Ipsos US, where he leads the US team in helping companies measure and amplify how media, brands, and consumers connect through compelling content and great communications. Prior to his switch to market research, Peter was Head of Brand Initiatives at the IAB focused on addressing the under-representation of creative brand advertising online.

This marketing news is not the copyright of Scott.Services – please click here to see the original source of this article. Author: Peter Minnium

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What’s it like using DuckDuckGo in 2019?

DuckDuckGo could be your new default search engine if you want to focus on privacy and security. What it’s like using it nowadays?

You might have heard of DuckDuckGo in the past. Our first long post about it was back in 2016 with Rebecca Sentance trying out the new search engine for a week.

Three years later, many things have changed. More users are losing trust in big tech companies and privacy and security are more important than ever. How does DuckDuckGo fit in this change?

And how is the experience of switching into a new search engine nowadays?

DuckDuckGo in numbers

Over the last few months, DuckDuckGo has seen increased media coverage. Its growing stats among a growing conversation around online privacy make it more relevant than ever.

There are more than 30 million searches happening on DuckDuckGo every day. Its data indicates a constant growth. It’s currently the fourth largest search engine in the U.S. counting more than 1 billion searches every month all over the world.

Google is holding the reins of the market share with 88.5% of it, Bing is following with 6.12%, Yahoo! is third with 4.11% and DuckDuckGo is forthwith 0.99% of the market share.

It clearly has a long way to go to stand out as a serious competitor in the market share. However, it has already paved the way in a new kind of search engine that is serious about security and privacy. In fact, its mission is to set a new standard of trust online.

The search engine that doesn’t track you

One of the first things you notice when visiting DuckDuckGo, except for the search box, is the subheading “the search engine that doesn’t track you”.

DuckDuckGo was built as an alternative to Google and the big search engines that use tracking data to improve personalization. DuckDuckGo reassures its users that they don’t store their personal information. They don’t collect or share personal data. They are not storing your search history, which means that they are not able to sell this data to advertisers. Moreover, there’s no tracking in the private browsing mode, which sounds encouraging for everyone who is interested in a search engine that won’t track every single search.

What’s interesting is that DuckDuckGo wants to prove that they take privacy seriously. A click on their menu button at the homepage on ‘privacy simplified’ allows you to:

• Protect your data on every device
• Subscribe to their Privacy Crash Course to improve your understanding of online privacy
• Protect your devices by reading privacy guides
• Find out more about the importance of reduced tracking

Just recently, Google announced an expanded number of default search engines for users including DuckDuckGo for the first time. This was certainly a small win for the DuckDuckGo and also for people who want to focus on private searches.

It’s not surprising that more users are interested in learning more about their online privacy.

[Screenshot from DuckDuckGo’s traffic page.]

A closer look at DuckDuckGo’s stats indicates this growing interest in security and privacy. DuckDuckGo reached 10 million searches in one day back in 2015. It managed to reach 20 million searches in October 2018. In April 2019 it counts 38 million searches.

Making the most of DuckDuckGo

I’ve decided to try out DuckDuckGo after many years of using Google. The focus on online privacy along with the growing number of people switching to DuckDuckGo made it an intriguing choice.

The first impression seemed familiar. Simplicity and a minimal interface made the transition easy.

The fact that your searches are not personalized means that everyone can access the same results in a similar search. This seems to be a relief in the common pattern of the online filter bubbles that we’re used to be part of.

Another relief was the lack of endless ads before the actual search results. I’ve been used to the series of ads before the actual search results and the science of PPC from a professional perspective, but it was still a nice experience to find the direct results of my query. There was only one ad at the top of the search results, which I certainly wouldn’t mind seeing a similar limit to my Google results.

In addition to these, you can also save time from your searches by making the most of DuckDuckGo’s bangs. Bangs are shortcuts that allow you to search results on other sites. If you want to search for “SEO” on Search Engine Watch and you’re actually on DuckDuckGo’s homepage, all you need to do is to type ‘!searchenginewatch seo’

There are currently more than 12k bangs so you can search any of the big sites without visiting them in a different tab.

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Finding the best search results — not everything is perfect

I must admit that the lack of personalization has its pros and cons. It is obviously reassuring to feel that you’re in control of your own data. However, you should also be prepared for the additional queries you might need to find the best results.

Forget queries like “cinemas near me” and “what’s playing”

The search results will be the same for everyone all over the world without detailed queries that could possibly help you get more personalized results.

Moreover, the actual search cannot compete with Google’s sophisticated search. After years of serving as the biggest search engine, there is a learning of semantics that leads to way better results compared to all other search engines.

This shouldn’t be a surprise and it should be clear when you’re jumping into DuckDuckGo that not everything will be the same.

There will also be an initial phase of learning the ropes of a new search experience, which is expected in every new tool and site.

Are these reasons enough to abandon DuckDuckGo? Not yet. It’s good to understand that it won’t replace Google anytime soon but this doesn’t mean that it doesn’t deserve a chance, especially if you’re serious about your online privacy when searching. I’ll personally give it a go knowing that if I can’t find a specific result, I can still use Google. I also enjoy their curated stories around privacy on their Twitter feed so it was an easy decision to follow them and stay up-to-date.

The choice is yours

The online world is changing. And we’re facing with numerous dilemmas when it comes to staying loyal to the big tech companies. As more data breaches and scandals show up, it’s up to us to decide whether we want to keep personalization or not.

There’s no right or wrong answer.

Google is certainly enjoying the success of the big search giant with a large index and search features that keep us hooked with along the numerous services we use on a daily basis. However, it’s refreshing to feel that we still have alternative options. Whether we use them or not, it’s up to us.

What’s important is to be conscious of your decision and your online privacy. The more informed we are, the better our online experience.

Want to stay on top of the latest search trends?

Get top insights and news from our search experts.

Related reading

I’ve analyzed over 120 pieces of content across 16 industries to define common threads between campaigns that exceed or fall short of their expectations.

Detailed guide to conducting a branded search audit, identifying areas of concern, and making improvements. Lots of examples included.

Alt text for images is an important piece of the SEO puzzle and a great area of opportunity for marketers. Ways to create search engine friendly alt text.

A recent survey found that while 76% of marketers said brand awareness is a KPI for them, only 9% will focus on Digital PR in 2019.

Want to stay on top of the latest search trends?

Get top insights and news from our search experts.

This marketing news is not the copyright of Scott.Services – please click here to see the original source of this article. Author: Tereza Litsa

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Release Notes: Marketo adds collaboration features for email, makes AccountAI tool available to all users

Marketo’s product updates for the second quarter of 2019 include enhancements to its core platform along with the general availability of Account^AI. The company also outlined a number of updates to its Marketo Sky, Sales Engage and Bizible platforms that began rolling out during the first quarter of the year and will continue to be released through the beginning of the second quarter.

Core platform updates were released on March 15. All updates to other products will be rolled in the beginning of the second-quarter.

More collaborative email features. The company’s Email Deliverability Powerpack includes more collaborative features, making it possible for users to flag and comment on specific email test results, share results with other team members via a URL, and track changes to an email so that all team members can view the edit history.

Branded tracking links. Users who have purchased Marketo’s “Secure Domains for Tracking Links” feature will be able to display branded tracking links within emails as HTTPS. The HTTPS will add an extra layer of security for the tracking links used to measure engagement within emails.

New communication limits. Admins now have more control around communication protocols, with the ability to set custom daily or weekly communication limits.

Updates to the Smart Campaign Asset API. Marketo’s Smart Campaign Asset API also has been updated, making it possible for users to retrieve records by date and ID.

Account^AI available to all users. Account^AI, Marketo’s account based marketing tool that uses artificial intelligence to help users with ABM prospecting strategy, is now generally available to all.

Marketo Sky updates. Marketo Sky, which first launched in beta a year ago, has received a number of new updates that began rolling out during the first quarter, including full email program functionality and smart campaign functionality (with a new user interface). Users also have the ability to apply bulk actions to their assets via the Design Studio lists views, which includes their templates, images, forms, snippets, files, emails and landing pages.

The latest update to Marketo Sky also included a few “fixes”: The default program’s analytics behavior has been fixed so that users can now change drop-down values. (According to the update, default programs previously showed an error when users typed in a filter drop-down.) Another error that has been fixed within the Design Studio: clicking on emails will no longer prompt a system error. Instead, users will see a “Coming Soon” screen.

More auditing abilities for Marketo Sales Engage. Marketo’s Sales Engage platform has added visibility around people, email and content, and the ability for an existing campaign to be closed by a user other than the person who created the campaign. There is also a new “Unsubscribe” feature that allows users to block email domains they do not want to contact. These updates were released in the first quarter of 2019, and will continue to roll out during the beginning of the second quarter.

New segmentation and multi-currency support in Bizible. Bizible, which was acquired by Marketo last May, has new dashboard segmentation capabilities and multi-currency support. The platform will automatically convert currency standards between corporate currency and any local currency. It can also measure the spend and ROI of offline marketing activities by pulling cost data from the CRM campaign object. Along with the Marketo Sky and Sales Engage updates, these new features were released in the first quarter of 2019, and will continue to roll out during the beginning of the second quarter.

Why you should care. Marketo’s various products offer a wide breadth of features for marketers, but it’s difficult to stay on top of all the latest functionality enhancements. Marketo’s quarterly release notes provide insight on specific feature updates to the company’s core platform, along with overall improvements to Marketo’s solution-oriented platforms — making it easier for marketers to take full advantage of their edition of Marketo.

This story first appeared on MarTech Today. For more on marketing technology, click here.

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About The Author

Amy Gesenhues is Third Door Media’s General Assignment Reporter, covering the latest news and updates for Marketing Land and Search Engine 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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