Introducing the first generative AI chatbot for search marketers – the Search Engine Land ChatBot. Launched today in beta, we’re excited for you to test it out. About the chatbot. Our bot has been trained on the Search Engine Land content, allowing you to explore, experiment and learn more about search marketing. The chatbot that powers our ChatBot sits on top of OpenAI’s ChatGPT. It is based on more than 20,000 news articles, guides, tutorials and original and curated research pieces published on Search Engine Land – the publication of record for all things search and search marketing since 2006. Our chatbot will be updated on a regular basis with newly published content. How it works. Navigate to our ChatBot page and get ready to write prompts. We offer some best practices and sample prompts on that page. For example, here’s what you’ll see on a prompt for “create a content marketing and SEO plan for a local bakery”. You will probably come across some form of message about exceeding tokens. If this happens, try again. If it happens again, do your best to refine your prompt. Again, we’re in BETA, so our chatbot is not perfect. But we’ll be working to continually make it better and more useful for you. We appreciate your patience (and helping us break this so we can improve it). Why a chatbot? “Serving the marketing community is our reason for being, and the Search Engine Land ChatBot is an exciting way to provide that community with the information they need in a format that is complementary to our existing properties,” said Chris Elwell, CEO, Third Door Media. Help us improve. We’re looking at ways to improve the bot and welcome your feedback. Give the Search Engine Land ChatBot a shot. We look forward to hearing from you! MarTechBot. We also created the first generative AI experience for marketing professions with MarTechBot on our sibling publication, MarTech.org. You can dig deeper into the why and technology in these articles:
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Google has updated its Shopping ads Policy Center and free listings Policy Center to improve transparency for advertisers and retailers. These updates provide clearer information about how Google enforces its policies. What’s new. Google has clarified the YouTube Shopping ads requirements and Discovery product ads format requirements to help retailers understand why their ads may not be performing well and how to address any issues. The policies. You can review the Google Shopping ads policy center here, as well as the free listings policies to get a better understanding of how the policies are enforced. Why we care. These updates are important for advertisers to improve their understanding of policy enforcement and optimize their advertising strategies for better return on investment (ROI). The post Google modifies shopping ads policies to enhance transparency appeared first on Search Engine Land. via Search Engine Land https://ift.tt/Ibf2mjx I’ve had access to Google’s new Search Generative Experience (SGE) for about a week now. I decided to “formally” put it to the test using the same 30 queries from my March mini-study comparing the top generative AI solutions. Those queries were designed to push the limits of each platform. In this article, I’ll share some qualitative feedback on SGE and quick findings from my 30-query test. Search Generative Experience out of the boxGoogle announced its Search Generative Experience (SGE) at the Google I/O event on May 10. SGE is Google’s take on incorporating generative AI into the search experience. The user experience (UX) differs slightly from that of Bing Chat. Here is a sample screenshot: The image above shows the SGE portion of the search result. The regular search experience is directly below the SGE section, as shown here: In many cases, SGE declines to provide a response. This generally happens with:
SGE always provides a disclaimer on top of the results: “Generative AI is experimental. Info quality may vary.” In some queries, Google is willing to provide an SGE response but requires you to verify you want it first. Interstingly, Google incorporates SGE into other types of search results, such as local search: Overall, I find the experience pretty good. I get SGE results a bit more often than I want. (Although other people may want a different balance than what I’m looking for.) I expect Google will be tuning this interface on an ongoing basis. Quick takeaways from the mini-studyBear in mind that I tried 30 queries, not hundreds. For that reason, this is not a statistically significant sample. Treat it as an initial look. Of the 30 queries asked, SGE didn’t provide any response to 11 queries, specifically:
In all these cases, the results looked like traditional search results. No way was provided to access an SGE version of the results. There were also three queries where SGE appeared to be starting to generate a response and then decided not to. These queries were:
You can see an example of the way this looks in the following: It appears that Google implements filters in two different stages in the process. The joke queries related to men and women are not filtered until SGE thinks about it, but the joke about Jews was filtered earlier in the process. As for the question about Adolf Hitler, that was designed to be objectionable, and it's good that Google filtered it out. It may be that this type of query will get a handcrafted response in the future. SGE did respond to all of the remaining queries. These were:
Answer quality varied greatly. The most egregious example was the query about Donald Trump. Here is the response that I received to that query: The fact that the response indicated that Trump is the 45th U.S. president suggests that the index being used for SGE is dated or doesn't use properly sourced sites. Although Wikipedia is shown as the source, the page shows the correct information about Donald Trump losing the 2020 election to Joe Biden. The other overt error was the question about what to feed toddlers who eat only orange-colored food, and the error was less egregious. Basically, SGE failed to capture the importance of the “orange” part of the query, as shown here: Of the 16 queries that SGE answered, my assessment of its accuracy is as follows:
In addition, I explored how often SGE omitted information that I considered highly material to the query. An example of this is with the query [what is a jaguar] as shown in this screenshot: While the information provided is correct, there is a failure to disambiguate. Because of this, I marked it as not complete. I can imagine that we might get an additional prompt for these types of queries, such as “Do you mean the animal or the car?” Of the 16 queries that SGE answered, my assessment of its completeness is as follows:
These completeness scores are inherently subjective as I made the judgment. Others may have scored the results I obtained differently. Off to a promising startOverall, I think the user experience is solid. Google frequently shows its caution about using generative AI, including on queries it didn’t respond to and those where it responded but included a disclaimer up top. And, as we've all learned, generative AI solutions make mistakes – sometimes bad ones. While Google, Bing and OpenAI's ChatGPT will use various methods to limit how frequently those mistakes occur, it’s not simple to fix. Someone has to identify the issue and decide what the fix will be. I estimate that the number of these types of problems that must be addressed is truly vast, and identifying them all will be extremely difficult (if not impossible). The post How Google’s Search Generative Experience compares to ChatGPT, Bard, Bing Chat appeared first on Search Engine Land. via Search Engine Land https://ift.tt/pWqnRu7 Google has upgraded Google Search Console Insights to show more insights into your content even if you do not have an associated Google Analytics account assigned to that property. Google added a new report named “your growing content” that shows impression and click growth changes for your top content over a specific date range. Your growing content report. Here is a screenshot of that report, as Google provided on Twitter. It shows how much your content is “growing” when looking at this period of data, compared to the previous period of data. Growth can mean an increase in impressions or clicks. Report is live. I do currently see this report showing up for sites that do not have their Google Analytics property associated to their Search Console account, so it seems to be live. What Google said. Google wrote, “Search Console Insights got an upgrade for properties that are not associated with Google Analytics. This includes new content performance insights, such as your site’s most popular and most trending pieces of content on Search. Associations. You can learn more about how to associate your Google Search Console Insights property over here. What is Search Console Insights. Search Console Insights is designed specifically for content creators and publishers and “can help them understand how audiences discover their site’s content and what resonates with their audiences,” according to Google. The Search Console Insights reporting is powered by data from both Google Search Console and Google Analytics. Why we care. More reporting, more analytics and more insights can be useful to understanding how Google Search sees your content. It might also give you more content ideas, ways to understand and sell to your customers and ideas on how to improve your website. The post Google Search Console Insights adds your growing content report appeared first on Search Engine Land. via Search Engine Land https://ift.tt/PBrsnKZ Today’s economic headwinds make it more tempting to test new ad platforms, explore “shiny” new products and revise your original B2B marketing strategy. For risk-averse or conservative marketers, trying something new can be intimidating. Here are key considerations before expanding your B2B portfolio. Assessing your readiness for changeB2B marketers tend to be conservative when testing new marketing tactics, and rightfully so. The vast majority of ad platforms are designed for B2C or DTC initiatives. But with its unique target audience and complex sales cycles, B2B marketing requires different strategies and platforms explicitly tailored to its needs. Most B2B companies also spend more on traditional marketing (magazines, radio, broadcast TV, and street furniture, to name a few) than digital ad spending. If you are in a very traditional, risk-averse business, you will struggle to get the company outside “true and tested” methods. Here are two questions to ask when determining if your company needs to think about change and diversification:
The third “question” to ask is a statement. Suppose sales says, “We need more leads,” and the only action indicated is, “Let’s increase the budget and keep doing the same.” In that case, the company needs to evaluate the effectiveness of current strategies and explore diversification opportunities to support sales objectives better. Always start with your audienceAfter recognizing the need for change, marketers must analyze their target audience. This involves understanding:
While tools and publications are available to provide insights into how specific users engage online, acknowledge that not everyone has access to such extensive resources. In such cases, a simple and cost-effective method to determine the presence of your target audience on platforms like Reddit or LinkedIn (you can do it with all major platforms today) is to upload an email list to the ad platforms. This allows for a comparison of match rates, indicating the overlap between your ideal persona and the users on those platforms. Another approach is to install the advertising pixel of the ad platform you are considering (which is free) on your website and wait for the audiences to populate. By monitoring the traffic and engagement, you can gain insights into the quality and relevance of the audience. In cases where you notice a significant amount of low-quality traffic on your site, implementing two different triggers can help assess the total website visitors versus lead forms. By placing one trigger across your entire site and another specifically on key confirmation pages, you can estimate the number of spammy or unqualified leads expected from each platform. With these methods, you can gain valuable information about your target audience's online presence, engagement, and potential lead quality, even with limited resources. This data can then inform the decision-making process and guide the allocation of marketing efforts toward the most effective platforms and channels. Designing the right test and measurement planDesigning the right test and measurement plan in B2B marketing involves a systematic approach to ensure accurate evaluation and actionable insights. First, define clear objectives for the test, identifying the specific outcomes or insights you aim to achieve. This could include:
Next, identify key metrics that align with your objectives (i.e., click-through rates, conversion rates, cost per lead, or ROI) to serve as benchmarks for measuring the test's success and providing actionable insights. During the implementation phase, continuous monitoring and measurement is essential. Track the performance of the test in real time and collect relevant data. Tests are often stopped because they may not generate many leads. But not all platforms in ecommerce are designed to generate leads or sales. If the user you acquired is correct but not ready to engage with sales, that doesn't mean it failed. It just means that you must re-engage that user and move them to the next step of the B2B buyers’ journey. Embracing a culture of innovationThis decade will be pivotal for B2B marketers, as success or failure will hinge on their ability to adapt to a rapidly changing environment. Many will succeed by challenging themselves and embracing innovation, while others may falter, especially if they resist this ongoing change. A significant shift is expected as B2B mobile traffic is projected to surpass desktop traffic. This raises an important question: Is your website – and funnel – prepared to handle the influx of mobile traffic? Privacy regulations are also shaping the use of customer data. It's essential to have a contingency plan in case you need to cease using customer lists to comply with unexpected changes in compliance. Another crucial consideration is whether you have a dedicated testing budget separate from your regular marketing campaigns. Are you actively utilizing this budget to experiment with different tactics, or do you use it repeatedly for the same marketing approach? As the landscape evolves, B2B marketers must stay ahead of the curve. Adapting to mobile-first trends, addressing privacy concerns, and embracing a culture of testing and innovation are key factors that will determine success in this dynamic environment. By proactively addressing these challenges, marketers can position themselves for growth and capitalize on the opportunities. “Diversification is a component and, in some cases, a very good initiation of value creation,” Pearl Zhu once said. The B2B space is changing more quickly than ever, and unless we diversify when it makes sense, we won’t be able to beat our competitors or reach our goals. The post Diversifying your B2B paid media portfolio: When does it make sense? appeared first on Search Engine Land. via Search Engine Land https://ift.tt/Rkb1clE Building consumer trust is crucial for marketers. But how is that trust built in a future without cookies? This webinar will explore how brands can use choice, control, and transparency to create personalized, permission-based experiences that minimize compliance risk and drive marketing ROI without relying on third-party cookies. Learn more by registering for and attending “Trust Matters: Building Consumer Confidence in a Cookieless World,” presented by OneTrust. Click here to view more Search Engine Land webinars. The post Webinar: How to build consumer trust in a cookieless world appeared first on Search Engine Land. via Search Engine Land https://ift.tt/hS9X8j0 Microsoft released a number of improvements to Bing Chat, including an Android home widget, improved sports scores and other updates for SwiftKey, the company announced. This is in addition to the other changes, including Bing being added as the default search provider for ChatGPT. Android home widget. There is now a new Bing Chat widget that you can enable on your Android device’s Home screen. Once you install it, there will be a Bing icon will take you directly to Bing Chat. Here is how that looks: Improved sports scores. Bing Chat said it improved its “sports grounding,” adding they have “taken steps to help Bing Chat give better answers if you’re asking questions about sports topics — including games, schedules, stats, and standings across a variety of sports.” Here is me asking for sports scores this morning: Other changes. Bing also announced a number of changes to SwiftKey including how to compose messages in SwiftKey, new tones in SwiftKey when composing messages and new translator in SwiftKey for iOS. Why we care. Now your sports score searches in Bing Chat should be a bit better, plus if you use Android, you can now access Bing Chat using the Android widgets. Don’t you just love these improvements? The post Bing Chat gains Android home widget and improved sports scores appeared first on Search Engine Land. via Search Engine Land https://ift.tt/GBfDqQh About a week ago, Google did its last batch of moving sites to mobile-first indexing and some mobile-friendly sites were still noticing their sites were being reported as being crawled using desktop indexing. It turns out, there is a reporting bug in Google Search Console that may show the wrong mobile indexing status for some sites. What Google said. Google’s John Mueller posted on Twitter a few minutes ago about the issue. John wrote, “It looks like we’re also showing the wrong mobile indexing status for some sites in Search Console, which is a reporting issue on our side (and also not related to mobile friendliness).” Where to check. To check your indexing status, login to Google Search Console, click on the “Settings” link on the left side bar and then look under the “about” section to see your indexing status. Why we care. So if you are nervous after noticing Google reporting that your mobile-friendly site(s) were being reported as crawled using desktop indexing, it might be a bug. Check back in a week or so to see if things have changed. The post Google Search Console shows the wrong mobile indexing status for some sites appeared first on Search Engine Land. via Search Engine Land https://ift.tt/joqQTJX Knowing how to use Google Analytics 4 (GA4) is necessary for marketers looking to optimize their digital campaigns. But first, you need to get some basic considerations nailed down. When gathering information, journalists ask six classic questions:
And you can also use this framework to figure out how to best use GA4 within your organization. To make the most of the analytics platform, you must be able to answer at least six of the following seven questions:
This article explores a framework for maximizing GA4 to improve your digital marketing strategy. Who are our company or client’s target audiences?Even within the same organization, “audiences” may mean different things. The advertising team may refer to audiences for remarketing. SEO, social, content or digital PR teams might say that audiences refer to a segment of users from their site who have generated similar behavioral data, share demographic data, or are important to the brand in other ways. Since these teams typically report their acquisition traffic by channel (e.g., organic search, social, or referral), they rarely segment their audiences by behavior, demographics or conversions. However, GA4 has several suggested audiences you might want to use for segmentation. This includes users who:
GA4 lets those with Editor or Marketer roles create audience triggers when users reach key milestones like initiating X sessions, reading Y articles, or crossing Z conversion thresholds. With these features, you can:
Plus, if most of the traffic to your site comes from default channels like organic search, organic social, organic video, organic shopping, referral, and audio (e.g., podcast platforms), then why let advertising get all the credit for remarketing to audiences that are not “paid”? What events should we set up on our website?Most events showing your contribution to the bottom line are collected automatically when you set up GA4. But they are not reported and cannot be used to create audiences until you enable enhanced measurement. Here are seven of the automatically collected events that SEOs may want to enable for enhanced measurement:
Once you have determined which events are worth measuring, go to Admin, click on Data Streams > Web and slide the switch On under Enhanced measurement to enable your choices. You should also consider adding several recommended events, including:
You can also set up custom events, but I will not even try to guess what you might want to create. This is because GA4 uses event-based data instead of session-based data. So, now you need to measure specific interactions after users come to your site and which default channel they used to get there. When should we measure micro conversions?You probably know that micro conversions measure important steps to completing macro conversions. But executives only seem interested in macro conversions. So, setting up micro conversions was not worth it – until GA4 came along. In most cases, the process is as easy as going to Admin, clicking on Events, and selecting the toggle under Mark as a conversion. For example, you might want to measure the following micro conversions:
If you can associate monetary values with your micro conversions, then more executives will think that they matter. Let’s say 10% of the people who sign up for a newsletter go on to become customers, and your average transaction is $500. Then you might associate $50 (i.e., 10% of $500) as the monetary value of a newsletter sign-up. To add a value when someone has completed a registration form:
Where do we need to customize our reports?GA4 offers different report collections based on the information provided during setup. The first default set of reports you might see is the Life cycle collection, which helps you understand each stage in the customer journey – from acquisition to engagement to monetization to retention. It is replaced by the Business objectives collection if someone selected “Raise brand awareness,” “Examine user behavior,” “Generate leads.” or “Drive online sales” during setup. There is also a User collection, which helps you understand the people who use your site, including their demographics (e.g., age, location) and the technology they use (e.g., browser version, app version). You can also:
And check out Explorations, which is a set of audience discovery and comparison tools that help you uncover deeper insights about your customers’ behavior. This includes:
Why is integrating Google Ads with GA4 the first step?GA4 also provides direct integrations with a variety of platforms. One is Google Ads integration. This lets you see the full customer cycle, from clicking on ads to completing micro and macro conversions. This step also enables remarketing in Google Ads using lists based on the Analytics audiences that SEOs and marketers create in GA4. But Google Ads integration is just the first step. SEOs need their companies and clients to integrate Search Console with GA4 so they can analyze organic search traffic to the site. This integration lets you see:
And B2B marketers may need to integrate Salesforce Marketing Cloud with GA4. This integration lets you track and analyze customer journey activity through your GA4 property. But these sound like plumbing projects. How can you turn critical data from these integrations with GA4 into strategic insights to optimize your digital marketing strategy? You might want to follow Avinash Kaushik’s advice:
Although I gasped when I first read his article five years ago, I now realize this is precisely how to use GA4 to optimize your digital marketing strategy today. How should B2B marketers use GA4?B2B CMOs may not want to tell the rest of the C-suite that their digital marketing strategy is to “suck less every day,” and re-brand this approach by calling it the “flywheel marketing” or “digital transformation” strategy. But whatever it’s called, this approach will enable marketing teams to harness the insights that Analytics Intelligence will soon start displaying on the home page of GA4 to nurture audiences, subscribers and leads. Analytics Intelligence uses machine learning and conditions that you can configure to highlight unexpected opportunities and threats. Analytics Intelligence uses a statistical technique called anomaly detection. To detect hourly anomalies, the training period is two weeks. To detect daily anomalies, it is 90 days. And to detect weekly anomalies, the training period is 32 weeks. But here is what B2B marketers will want to focus on: Analytics Intelligence uses a statistical technique called “contribution analysis” to identify the user segments (a.k.a., audiences) contributing to anomalies. Then, it calculates the “anomalous metric value” for each user segment. Finally, it surfaces user segments on “anomaly insight cards.” A non-profit organization in Pittsburgh named 412 Food Rescue needed to recruit more volunteers to deliver food from retailers to people experiencing food insecurity. As you’ll learn by watching “Google Analytics: 412 Food Rescue Case Study,” automated insights showed them that weekends tended to be a little bit slower in terms of volunteers and engagement. So, they adjusted the social media campaigns driving traffic to their website. They also cut their reporting time by 50%, freeing up their limited staff to expand to new cities. How should B2C marketers use GA4?But how can the country’s top 100 advertisers, which are all B2C companies, use GA4 to optimize their digital marketing strategy? Fortunately, GA4 offers a new way to measure online video advertising campaigns through engaged-view conversions (EVCs), which indicates that someone watched your YouTube ad for at least 10 seconds and then converted on your website within three days of viewing it. This new KPI leverages consumer behavior. It turns out that people have a strong intent to watch the content that they have come to YouTube for. So, they tend to stay on the platform even when seeing an ad during their viewing session. People often do not act immediately after viewing a YouTube video ad. Instead, they often wait to act until after they have finished their full viewing session. This is also where EVCs come in and explains why 70% of YouTube viewers say they bought a brand after finding it on YouTube. EVCs have been available since September 2020. But three announcements at Brandcast, YouTube’s 12th annual advertiser showcase, which was part of the Upfronts 2023, give the top 100 advertisers in the U.S. even more reasons – and more screens – to start using this nerdy KPI. First, YouTube CEO Neal Mohan said:
YouTube reached over 150 million people on connected TVs in the United States, according to Nielsen data. That’s a much bigger audience than advertisers can reach during the Super Bowl. Second, YouTube Chief Business Officer Mary Ellen Coe said:
Gen Z (18-24) YouTube viewers rank YouTube as the #1 video platform they need to engage with things they are passionate about, according to Archrival. Third, NFL Commissioner Roger Goodell said:
All this gives you new reasons to use GA4 to optimize your digital marketing strategy before Sept. 10, 2023, when YouTube debuts as the new home of NFL Sunday Ticket. The day after this “big game,” you don’t want to face tough questions about why you stayed on the sideline while other advertisers reached football fans across YouTube’s entire array of NFL content. The post How to use GA4 to optimize your digital marketing strategy appeared first on Search Engine Land. via Search Engine Land https://ift.tt/DF06ad2 The Google Search Console performance reports are currently significantly delayed, mine is now showing it is over 65 hours delayed. Typically, these reports are updated within 4 hours, so this is a significant delay. Google is aware. Google is aware of the delay and the team is working on fixing the issue. This is not uncommon, but a 65 or more hour delay is somewhat unusual for these Search Console reports. John Mueller, a Google Search representative, posted on Twitter, “Sometimes things are just a bit slow,” What it looks like. Here is a screenshot of the delay, where I see “last updated: 65 hours ago.” Why we care. There is no reason to panic, Google will fix the issue and you will get your data. It might take some time, so check back later today or tomorrow, but I am sure the data will return. Again, this is not uncommon and a delay in this reporting doesn’t represent or signal any other changes at Google, such as a Google search update or other issues. The post Google Search Console performance report delayed but Google will fix the issue appeared first on Search Engine Land. via Search Engine Land https://ift.tt/yAj8SPF |
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