While many companies struggled to adapt during the pandemic, Dennis Publishing, the parent company of popular media brands like Kiplinger, The Week, several automotive publications, among others, decided to prioritize business transformation and find new ways to drive growth through audience monetization. And its strategy is paying off. In a recent session at the MarTech Fall Conference, Dennis Publishing’s chief product & data officer, Pete Wootton, joined Jackie Rousseau-Anderson of customer data platform BlueConic to explain how the company is scaling its first-party data strategy, including the launch of ‘Autovia,’ a business unit that combines the power of content with e-commerce to establish a highly engaged auto buying audience. The intersection of product and data“Customer data has become an instrumental part of our business strategy,” said Wootton, adding that the company uses the consented data it collects to understand its audiences, inform engagement, and drive growth in all areas of the business, including advertising, demand generation, subscriptions, and e-commerce. “All of these efforts are predicated on having high-quality first-party data.” Wootton noted, however, that unifying data from across channels and systems into a single customer view is only one part of the equation. The data must also be accessible and actionable by various business teams to inform audience engagement and enhance audience-based products – something the company’s legacy data lake could not do. “Consolidating online and offline data sources into a single customer view provides insight into who your audiences are and what they are doing,” said Wootton. While Dennis was able to collect and consolidate data from across the business in their data lake, it didn’t enable their growth-focused teams to access and activate that data with the speed, scale, and flexibility they needed to optimize customer experiences and business outcomes. “That’s when it became clear a customer data platform (CDP) would be fundamental to what we were trying to do,” he said. Expanding CDP use cases beyond marketingAt the start of its CDP journey, Dennis Publishing had a very specific vision for how a CDP could empower its growth-focused teams. But as their knowledge of the technology grew, so did the possibilities. “We started off with an idea of what our initial use cases would look like, but that evolved and changed over time, and we saw opportunities in certain areas that we didn’t when we began,” said Wootton. For instance, the company originally planned to use BlueConic’s CDP to power website overlays and modals, email campaigns, and other traditional marketing techniques but quickly saw the benefit of using it to deliver more relevant, personalized, and value-driven on-site experiences. “The elements and widgets on a particular page are now completely defined by the information we have about a particular user,” explained Wootton. For instance, with BlueConic, the company can now suppress messaging so they don’t offer a subscription to an individual who is already a subscriber. “This may seem obvious,” Wootton continued, “but it opens up opportunities to offer a new product or do cross-sell and upsell. The real estate on your website becomes much more efficient and effective if you know who is looking at your content. When you’re able to use what you know about a person, you can take a much more targeted and personalized approach to every user on your site.” Driving e-commerce growth through media audience monetizationWootton also spoke about how Dennis is leveraging the first-party data it already has from the traditional publishing side of the business to drive growth for the new e-commerce side of the business. In particular, he highlighted how the company’s Autovia business unit is finding innovative ways to connect audiences with carmakers and dealers, and drive new revenue streams via audience monetization. “We have an e-commerce business that sells cars. With a CDP, we can prioritize and promote the brands and products we offer an individual based on the content they’ve been consuming on our media sites.” “If, for example, someone only looks for family hatchbacks or sportscars on our media sites, we can then make sure we’re promoting that sort of content on our e-commerce site because it’s much more likely to convert,” he continued. “These small changes can have big improvements in conversion, which is what we’re now seeing with BlueConic.” Change management is an ongoing journey and company-wide effortWootton concluded the session by offering advice to other companies just starting their own business transformation journey. He stressed the importance of communicating the goals, use cases, timing, and expected outcomes for a CDP implementation across the business – from the senior-most leaders in the company who are making the technology purchase to the users who are actually in the platform and using it to support their day-to-day efforts. “We spent a lot of time talking at a strategic level with the whole business about what we were trying to achieve. If you want people to be engaged, it’s the old adage – it’s about hearts and minds. You need to take them on the journey with you,” said Wootton. For multi-brand organizations like Dennis, he also recommended starting with one or two brands and then expanding from there. “We have a broad portfolio, so we’ve decided to do a deep dive on a couple of brands rather than having a light implementation across the whole lot,” Wooten said. This implementation approach has enabled the company to zero in on the areas where they will see the highest return on investment and the biggest improvements in business performance. Going forward, their focus will be rolling out what they’ve already implemented for some of their key brands across all of the brands in their portfolio. The post How Dennis Publishing made first-party data core to its business transformation appeared first on Search Engine Land. via Search Engine Land https://ift.tt/3F44puH
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Since the beginning of the pandemic, Yelp has rolled out a number of profile attributes for restaurants, ranging from vaccine-related notices to attributes for LGBTQ and Asian-owned businesses. Now, Yelp is rolling out a Virtual Kitchens attribute for ghost kitchens, virtual restaurants and virtual food courts to identify themselves to potential customers and cut down on confusion regarding their dining experience, the company announced Wednesday. Why we careIn Q2 2021, business openings for food delivery services were up 166% above pre-pandemic levels, according to Yelp. While these takeout or delivery-only restaurants present customers with a potentially safer dining option, they may also disappoint customers that are looking to dine in. The Virtual Kitchens attribute may help frame expectations, and that may, in turn, result in better reviews and more business. RELATED: How Google and Yelp handle fake reviews and policy violations More on the news
The post Yelp adds virtual restaurant attribute to help reduce customer confusion appeared first on Search Engine Land. via Search Engine Land https://ift.tt/3zQCvhY The post 20210929 SEL Brief appeared first on Search Engine Land. via Search Engine Land https://ift.tt/3uiNCPu A five-star rating is never enough. When you really start to dive into what your reviews mean to your customers, you’ll see that there’s a lot more to it than just stars. Join search experts from Podium as they reveal what people notice when they look you and your clients up online, including how the pandemic has changed your customers’ expectations. Learn more about gathering reviews, responding to reviews, and keeping your online reputation robust. Register today for “Boost Your Online Reputation With Your Google My Business Ranking,“ presented by Podium. The post Boost your online reputation with your Google My Business ranking appeared first on Search Engine Land. via Search Engine Land https://ift.tt/3zJQHZW The post 20210928 SEL Brief appeared first on Search Engine Land. via Search Engine Land https://ift.tt/3F0bpIV With COVID forcing many retailers online, there are more ecommerce options than ever. Google Search Central recently released new guidelines for developers to help improve search visibility for ecommerce sites. “When you share your ecommerce data and site structure with Google, Google can more easily find and parse your content, which allows your content to show up in Google Search and other Google surfaces. This can help shoppers find your site and products,” said the guide. The guide has seven pages covering the following topics:
Where content can appear. The guide says that ecommerce content can actually appear in more results than just traditional search. These include Google Search, Images, Lens, the shopping tab, Google My Business, and Maps. “Product data is the most obvious type of ecommerce related content, but other types of information can also be useful to shoppers at different stages of their shopping journey,” according to the guide. So Google recommends promoting content like product reviews, offers, customer service touchpoints, and even livestreams. Adding product data. Structured data can also help your ecommerce products show in Google search properties. The guide recommends the following ways to show Google what your products are:
URL structure for ecommerce sites. “A good URL design structure helps Google crawl and index your site,” says the guide. A poor URL structure can cause confusion, though, resulting in missed content, content that’s retreived more than once, and crawlers thinking your site has infinity pages (and beyond!). The guide includes recommedations for a URL structure that helps search engines better understand your content and pages:
Make your ecommerce site navigation Google crawler friendly. Both shoppers and search engines need to be able to easily understand what’s going on with your website and where to find what they’re looking for via navigation. What are navigation best practices for ecommerce? “For example, add links from menus to category pages, from category pages to sub-category pages, and finally from sub-category pages to all product pages.” Why we care. With many businesses starting ecommerce websites for the first time in the past year or so, this guide can help ensure that they’re following the best practices to get their products seen in the varying search engines Google provides. It also gives SEOs who focus on ecommerce documentation to show their clients and stakeholders to help get their recommendations for better ecommerce SEO implemented. The post Ecommerce SEO guide: New documentation from Google appeared first on Search Engine Land. via Search Engine Land https://ift.tt/3AR6UxI Search Engine Land’s daily brief features daily insights, news, tips, and essential bits of wisdom for today’s search marketer. If you would like to read this before the rest of the internet does, sign up here to get it delivered to your inbox daily. Good morning, Marketers, your reputation precedes you. What does the web have to say about your business? What’s your online reputation look like these days? Platforms like Google have been making efforts to increase transparency so that users have all the information they need to stay safe, but also to protect themselves from increased regulatory scrutiny. On the PPC side, we’re seeing this play out in Google’s “About this advertiser” initiative (more on that below). On the organic side, the search engine launched the “About this result” box in February and, over the summer, expanded it to include why it ranked a specific search result. Although users probably aren’t inspecting these details before every click from the SERP, all the information is available to them, which means that it’s easier for them to find out more about your brand. If you’re in a highly competitive space, and/or if your reputation isn’t stellar, the information could cost you conversions. And, with consumer preference and regulatory trends the way they are, platforms will most likely be releasing more of these features to take some of the heat off. If that’s scary for you, perhaps it’s time to audit your online reputation and business practices to make the necessary changes before it’s too late. George Nguyen, Google Ads announces machine learning-based data-driven attribution models in new privacy landscape“In a move away from last-click, data-driven attribution [DDA] will soon be the default attribution model for all new Google Ads conversion actions,” tweeted Ads Liaison Ginny Marvin on Monday morning. As Google works toward a more privacy-focused search experience for users, it’s also adjusting the available attribution models for advertisers. DDA works by looking at all the touchpoints, like clicks and video engagements, on your Search (including Shopping), YouTube and Display ads in Google Ads to compare the paths of customers who converted with ones who didn’t. The model then identifies patterns among those interactions that lead to conversations. Over the coming months, Google Ads will be migrating existing conversion actions to DDA for many advertisers over the coming months, Marvin said. Why we care. Attribution has long been an issue for marketers. This conundrum is especially salient as FLoC threatens to take away even more data from search advertisers — leaving them cobbling together data on their own. Google Ad’s machine learning attribution model seems to be Google’s solution to this lack of data. “Privacy-centric, DDA trains on real conversion paths & uses machine learning to measure and model conversion credits across touchpoints, even when cookies are missing,” added Marvin. Additionally, DDA was previously only available to accounts with enough conversions in their recent history. Now, all accounts can run it and it’s replacing last-click as the default. Many advertisers have claimed that the lack of data and reliance on machine learning makes their jobs harder (how can we optimize when we don’t know exactly what is causing success or failure?). This is another case where they will have to just trust the information that Google Ads is giving them without seeing the inside of the process. However, if done well, it could help many advertisers better understand which campaigns and ads are contributing to overall success throughout the funnel. Should robots.txt support a feature for no indexation? Take the surveyHave you ever blocked a page from being crawled, yet still wanted it indexed? Eric Enge, SEO veteran and general manager at Perficient Digital, says that he’s never encountered such a situation in his 20+ years in the industry. A few professionals have taken this idea to Google’s John Mueller, asking whether the company has considered making it so that robots.txt files don’t just block crawling, but also indexation: “That would be a significant change in expectations (and yes, we do think about these things regardless). Do you have some examples where this would cause a visible improvement in search?” Mueller responded. “I’d like to avoid adding more directives. I’m still not aware of common issues caused by this documented functionality … SEOs worry about indexing, but usually these URLs only rank for site:-queries (or if there isn’t other, better content on the site), so it feels artificial?” What do YOU think? Would it be helpful to have a feature in Robots.txt that allowed you to specify the pages you don’t want to have indexed? Take our quick three-question poll and let us know what you think. SMX Next Super Early Bird rates end this SaturdayWith October right around the corner, marketers should be building out their roadmap for 2022. At SMX Next, happening November 9–10, we hope to help you overcome the search marketing challenges you’re currently facing as well as prepare you for what’s next. On the SEO side, there’ll be sessions covering Python SEO, auditing your Core Web Vitals and ranking in Discover, News and Web Stories, to name a few. PPC practitioners that attend can learn about incrementality testing, advanced modeling for better forecasting as well as how to develop an RSA strategy as ETAs go by the wayside. As a former content marketer, I’m particularly excited about our session on the future of content creation, in which we’ll learn how to generate hundreds of new content ideas using data analysis. And, as a member of the search industry, I consider it an honor to present to you career development sessions on effective mentorship programs and what to look for when hiring SEOs. There are way more sessions that you’ll be able to view live or on-demand, and if you register before 11:59 p.m. ET this Saturday, October 2, you’ll be able to take all those learnings back to your company and with you for the rest of your career, at the lowest possible rate. I hope to see you there! ‘About this advertiser’ initiative now includes Advertisers Pages for Google AdsLast year, Google launched an identity verification program for advertisers, and with that came the “About the advertiser” disclosure. Last week, the company expanded on this transparency measure by adding advertiser pages that enable users to see the ads a specific verified advertiser has run over the past 30 days. This expansion will be rolling out on YouTube and Google Search in the coming months. Why we care. The advertiser page gives PPC experts the opportunity to show the integrity of their advertising to users but also leaves a trail of previous advertisements. This will hopefully help keep advertisers in compliance with Google’s ad policies and encourage them to think about how their ad history affects any current ads. It seems like there might be an opportunity for competitors to report ad violations (how would consumers know what violates Google’s ads policies?), but that seems like a super niche use case for this feature. An attribute for Latino-owned businesses, and jokes that aren’t really jokesThe Latino-owned GMB attribute may be on the way. Google My Business profile managers may already be familiar with the women-led, Asian-owned or veteran-led profile attributes (to name just a few), and it looks like the platform will be adding a Latino-owned attribute soon. Tip of the hat to Colan Nielsen for bringing this to our attention. The metaverse is an environment created by marketers…for marketers? “Marketers often go into new experiences with brand myopia, over-inflating how much people actually want to engage with their brands,” said Marketoonist creator Tom Fishburne. But, as my colleague Chris Wood so concisely put it, “Brands should experiment with new platforms when a sufficient number of their customers are there.” John’s got jokes. I do believe John Mueller is satirizing Internet 4.0 and dunking on spammy email outreach tactics all in the same tweet. The post Data-driven attribution to become the default in Google Ads; Tuesday’s daily brief appeared first on Search Engine Land. via Search Engine Land https://ift.tt/3odMlIi Microsoft Advertisings new Credit card ads continue its streak of vertical-specific products9/28/2021 Microsoft Advertising has introduced Credit card ads as an open beta, the company announced Wednesday. Credit card ads will become available this week to advertisers targeting customers in the U.S. and Canada. Over the last six months, the company has also launched ad formats specifically for the travel and leisure and automotive sectors. Where and when Credit card ads can appear. Credit card ads appear on the right rail of Bing search results and run alongside mainline text ad placements. These ads can trigger for queries like brand name, card category and credit level. How Credit card ads work. Credit card ads are dynamically generated based on advertisers’ data feeds. The feed file should contain business data like the card issuer, annual fee and any sign-up bonuses. Keywords are not required and Microsoft Advertising does not need to crawl your site to generate content for this ad format. How to get started. To register for the open beta, contact your Microsoft Advertising representative or enroll at this link. Why we care. This format may be useful for credit card advertisers, like banks, brands and comparison sites, to showcase their promotions. They may also offer increased efficiency for this particular segment of advertisers: “In early flights of Credit card ads, advertisers so far have seen 70% lower cost per acquisition,” Microsoft said. From an industry standpoint, Microsoft Advertising is on a streak of launching vertical-specific, feed-based products that are unique to the company — in addition to Credit card ads, the company has rolled out open betas for Tours and Activities ads and Automotive ads over the last six months. The platform’s strategy of appealing to advertisers with automated ad formats tailored specifically to their industry may help it achieve wider adoption and increase its market share. The post Microsoft Advertising’s new Credit card ads continue its streak of vertical-specific products appeared first on Search Engine Land. via Search Engine Land https://ift.tt/3uq0Dqr I saw a discussion on Twitter this morning about the idea of having a feature in Robots.txt that would block both crawling AND indexing. It started with this tweet by Christian Thurston (@ct_oz): “Hi John [Mueller], has Google considered making it so that the robots.txt file doesn’t just block crawling, but also blocks indexation? To quote @willcritchlow: “I can’t see many situations where I want to block crawling but don’t want to block indexing”. “That would be a significant change in expectations (and yes, we do think about these things regardless). Do you have some examples where this would cause a visible improvement in search?” Mueller responded. “I’d like to avoid adding more directives. I’m still not aware of common issues caused by this documented functionality … SEOs worry about indexing, but usually these URLs only rank for site:-queries (or if there isn’t other, better content on the site), so it feels artificial?” With over 20 years of experience in SEO, “I have never encountered a situation where a publisher wanted to have a page indexed that they block for crawling in robots.txt. Not even once have I seen that,” I tweeted in response. “It’s common practice for me to educate people that they have a choice: (1) block crawling, or: (2) prevent indexation, when what they want to do is both. Note: definitely more of an issue for larger sites where crawl budget is an issue.” Will Critchlow of Search Pilot agreed, “100% agree. I can see the conservatism of not changing a long-standing standard, but I have never seen, and can’t think of a situation where you’d want to block crawling but allow indexation.” But what do YOU think? Would it be helpful to have a feature in Robots.txt that allowed you to specify that pages you don’t want to have indexed? Take our quick three-question poll below and let us know what you think. Please keep in mind that if you vote yes for doing this that you would need to accept ALL the risk that at some point your dev team might misapply the capability and NoIndex pages that you don’t want them to. The post Should robots.txt support a feature for no indexation? Take the survey appeared first on Search Engine Land. via Search Engine Land https://ift.tt/2XV7LyL Search Engine Land’s daily brief features daily insights, news, tips, and essential bits of wisdom for today’s search marketer. If you would like to read this before the rest of the internet does, sign up here to get it delivered to your inbox daily. Good morning, Marketers, and have you heard of the Nugget couch? If you’re a parent of young kids or know one, you might have. It’s essentially sets of ridiculously expensive foldable and different-shaped cushions that you can build into all kinds of forts and couches and play areas. Not only can you make it a rocket ship and a reading area and a tent, but it’s easy to move around your house, kids’ room or playroom. My spouse told me that initially, marketing for the Nugget was targeted toward college students, and I can totally see it. Residence halls have minimal space and a fold-up couch that can be used for lounging, studying or watching movies should do well, right? But the price point likely wasn’t a match for that particular target audience. Plus, “the college market was too limiting—most sales happen in a single month of the year,” said Laura Baverman for WRAL TechWire. They definitely got their younger target market right because they are regularly sold out or have long order times. Sometimes we leave the market research to the branding folks, but this example really highlights how getting it right can affect ALL areas of marketing — and how the research we do in SEO and PPC can contribute to that overall positioning. I like to tell SEO noobs that search marketing should be the foundation of your marketing ecosystem. We can tell you who’s searching what and what that means for your business. So next time your organization is considering positioning for a product or service, use your search research and see what others might be missing. Carolyn Lyden, Facebook changes business options in reaction to iOS updatesIf you’re a social media marketer, you may know that Facebook isn’t a fan of Apple’s recent privacy changes. The social media giant recently announced some updates and new features to help business owners advertise on the platform in light of the loss of data from Apple. “The social networking giant has repeatedly argued that Apple’s changes would impact small businesses that relied on Facebook ads to reach their customers. But it was not successful in getting any of Apple’s changes halted. Instead, the market is shifting to a new era focused more on user privacy, where personalization and targeting are more of an opt-in experience,” said Sarah Perez for TechCrunch. New features include the following: – Expanded click-to-chat options from ads. – Start a WhatsApp chat from an Instagram profile. – Lead gen directly from Instagram. – File Manager to allow businesses to manage content within Facebook Business Suite. – New post testing options. Why we care. Facebook is expanding its advertising options, trying to make its Business Suite easier for businesses of all sizes to use, and developing other ways for businesses and customers to connect. Shopify partners with Yahoo ad services for ecomm SMBsLast week, Yahoo announced a new partnership with Shopify, linking the ecommerce platform’s SMB merchants with Yahoo’s premium environments, including Yahoo Finance, AOL and elsewhere. Through this partnership, Shopify merchants gain access to the Yahoo ConnectID, which has been integrated by over 3,000 publisher domains, including Cafe Media and Newsweek. Using Yahoo ConnectID, merchants can feed the most relevant products to their customers who are engaging with content on those publishers. Merchants will also have access to Yahoo’s Dynamic Product Ads, managing Yahoo ad campaigns directly within their Shopify admin, where they can also set up and monitor campaigns in near real-time. Why we care. According to Yahoo, before this partnership, Yahoo ConnectID had over 200 advertisers and agencies using it. With the Shopify partnership, many smaller merchants will potentially be taking advantage of affordable campaigns that use this premium inventory. Shopify’s recent partnership with Roku achieves a similar upgrade to SMB ad campaigns. Data and identity technology are enabling smaller-scale advertisers to achieve relevant campaigns on premium streaming and online news experiences. On the hunt for something new? Check out the latest jobs in search marketingSEO Manager @ Weston Distance Learning (Fort Collins, CO) – Salary: $90k-120k/yr – Develop, implement and optimize SEO strategies including link building, mining data for kw and content creation opportunities using data to support strategy. – Conduct website optimization of meta tags, title tags, kw’s, speed, etc. to include all on-page SEO strategies. Head of Content Marketing @ ContentHarmony (anywhere remote, overlap with US workday hours) – Salary: $60k-80k/yr – Writing content, writing emails, producing podcast/video programs – Building and maintaining our email marketing efforts, and other promotion work like assisting with ad campaigns and messaging for search/social/retargeting, etc. Senior Product Marketing Specialist @ Verblio Accelerator – Salary: $85k-105k/yr – Conducting, gathering, and synthesizing market and customer research and customer data to identify opportunities for growth and devise an actionable strategy to capture this growth – Constructing, maintaining, and communicating a continuously prioritized list of opportunities to assess and their status Paid Search Manager @ Heart + Paw (Greater Philadelphia, remote) – Salary: $65k-70k/yr – Plan and execute paid media campaigns in search, social, streaming, etc. in collaboration with key stakeholders – Bring data-driven approach, defining and delivering core KPIs through robust insight and measurement platforms Search Shorts: Sorry not sorry, Google. Bing image search. Google and auto dealers.Sorry Google. There are benefits to using multiple match types when using Broad Match with Smart Bidding. PPC expert Greg Finn breaks down some examples of using multiple match types in this latest piece for Cypress North. Bing updates image search. “To improve the image quality in our search and multimedia products, we released the updated version (V3) of the Aesthetic model.” Google Search features could stall traffic for auto sites. “Google seems to have rolled out automobile search features that show more detailed specifications without sourcing where it found those specs.” What We’re Reading: When you ‘Ask app not to track,’ some iPhone apps keep snooping anywayiPhones now have the option for users to reject app tracking with a pop-up that says, “Ask app not to track.” However, data from Lockdown Privacy indicates that “App Tracking Transparency made no difference in the total number of active third-party trackers, and had a minimal impact on the total number of third-party tracking connection attempts.” They go further: “Detailed personal or device data was being sent to trackers in almost all cases. ATT was functionally useless in stopping third-party tracking, even when users explicitly choose ‘Ask App Not To Track’.” As a user my first reaction is, say what?! As a marketer my reaction is, ok well where is that data going then? Some people believe Apple is working on its own ad options BTS. But social media advertisers are still suffering: “The changes Apple made in iOS 14.5 … is causing tumult for advertisers who rely on Facebook to sustain their businesses. Performance marketers… are particularly struggling,” wrote Alex Kantrowitz for CNBC. “iOS14.5 took a toll on Facebook ad campaigns for a lot of people. How are you feeling about it? What are you trying or changing as a result?” asked Kurt Elster, ecommerce consultant. “Pretty brutal. Working on more specific offers -> LPs to test with certain interests again. I think the broad targeting and have FB find you customers easy days are done.” replied Travis Rice, a startup founder. Facebook and other apps are asking advertisers to “hang in there” and their new ad features (listed above) may help, but is this just the case of Apple using the guise of privacy for their own ends? The post Social media advertising is getting harder; Monday’s daily brief appeared first on Search Engine Land. via Search Engine Land https://ift.tt/2Y1lggM |
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