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Want more actionable insights from your Twitter participation? The company wants you to have it too. Today, they announced the release of Twitter Engage a US-only iOS application that is intended to give all content creators, especially marketers, celebrities and public figures easier ways to connect with fans and influencers.

With Engage, real time insights will be provided to those who use the app, inclusive of notifications for when influencers follow the connected account or mention the account.

Additional real time insights such as recent number of likes, retweets, mentions and impressions are served via a dashboard.

Engage will also provide content review and performance activity metrics, so that content creators can also see data around each individual conversation that they’ve initiated.

Twitter has also said that similar app executions will be rolled out to Niche and Vine in due time.

 

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Good morning from beautiful Seattle! We’re at the Bell Harbor Convention Center today, overlooking Elliott Bay, for the start of Marketing Land’s Social Pro conference.

Two days of intense and informative social media marketing training begins shortly with a keynote from Wei Kuan Lum, Facebook’s Head of SMB Business Marketing. We’re expecting her to talk about where Facebook is headed and what it’ll mean for small business owners, social media marketers, digital agencies and more. The keynote is due to begin at 9:00 am PT, so come back then and follow along as we live blog the opening keynote.

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Last week was a big one for marketing news, and that prompted a full hour’s worth of conversation and analysis in the latest episode of our weekly video show — and now a podcast, too — Marketing Land Live.

We began by discussing the news from Apple’s annual developers conference, including the potential impact on Google from Apple’s move to bring Siri search to the desktop. We also talked about the Microsoft-LinkedIn deal and what it might mean for digital advertisers. There were a couple rants during the show — one about a Facebook VP’s prediction that News Feed will be “probably all video” within five years, and the other about the confusion over how Google Autocomplete works and accusations that it’s been favoring U.S. presidential candidate Hillary Clinton.

This episode runs just under an hour and features Marketing Land’s Ginny Marvin, Greg Sterling, Danny Sullivan and myself. You can watch the replay below, and be sure to scroll below the video for this week’s Show Notes, with links to the stories we talked about.

If you’d prefer an audio version of our weekly show, it’s now available as a podcast on both iTunes and Google Play Podcasts.

Show Notes

Apple brings Siri to Mac, new exposure for non-Google search engines

Siri goes viral: Apple opens up the virtual assistant to third-party developers

Apple Maps becomes a platform with new extensions for third-party apps

Microsoft buys LinkedIn for $26.2 billion

The Microsoft-LinkedIn Deal: What it means for advertisers

Microsoft’s LinkedIn acquisition represents huge opportunity for Bing Ads

What Microsoft’s acquisition of LinkedIn means for Bing and LinkedIn Ads

Facebook VP: 5 years from now, your News Feed will be “probably all video”

Official: Google is rolling out green “Ad” label globally

Google: Autocomplete does not favor any candidate or cause

Facebook is putting maps in ads and will measure store visits

Why location is the hottest topic in digital marketing right now

Twitter will let brands target ads based on the emojis people use 🤔🤑

Why should you enter the 2016 Search Engine Land Awards?

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By now, you’ve probably heard a bit about Google’s new Analytics 360 Suite of products, designed to give enterprises a truly integrated package of marketing analytics and optimization tools.

While some of the 360 Suite is composed of products that have been around for a while — such as Analytics 360 (formerly known as “Premium”) and Tag Manager 360 — several of the Suite’s products are brand-new. These include Audience Center 360, Data Studio 360 and the tool I’m most excited about: Optimize 360.

Optimize 360 allows you to run A/B or multivariate tests, as well as personalization campaigns, on your site. Of course, a variety of tools already offer these features: Optimizely, Monetate, Maxymiser and a host of others. So you may be wondering why you ought to be excited about the latest entrant in a crowded field.

If you’re already a Google Analytics (GA) user, Optimize 360 should be very exciting indeed. Here’s why: As a marketer, you can define important, valuable audiences in Google Analytics, then seamlessly port those audiences into Optimize, where you can test new, personalized experiences.

It’s a simple idea, but a key differentiator in the testing/personalization space. On top of that, you’ll also be able to run deep analysis on your test results, using Google Analytics tools you already know and love.

Let’s take a look at a handful of ideas for audiences that e-commerce businesses can use to get off to a fast start with Google Optimize. Then, we’ll take a look at why analyzing test results using the full power of GA is such a big deal.

Anonymous users

Anonymous users might seem like an odd target for personalization at first, but consider: If you want to reach potential customers with laser-targeted marketing campaigns, it helps to know a bit about them. There are many ways you can experiment with encouraging anonymous users to create an account, and hence a record, in your CRM (customer relationship management) system.

For example, if an anonymous user is browsing a product detail page, you could test a modal window that offers the user a promo code for their next purchase if they sign up to receive your email newsletter. Even if they don’t end up buying something during that visit, you might now be able to target that user with email marketing campaigns.

Alternatively, if you allow users to check out as guests, you could test a message that offers a price discount on the items in the user’s cart if they decide to create an account instead. The small hit you take on your margin for that transaction may be more than paid off in the long-term value of being able to reach that customer with more targeted marketing messages in the future.

Lapsed customers

A “lapsed” customer will mean different things to different organizations, but let’s take an example: any user who has spent money with you in the past but hasn’t visited your site in the past 30 days.

Offering these users a custom “welcome-back” experience when they return to the site could encourage them to re-engage with you more effectively. This approach could tie in very nicely with a retargeting campaign or an email blast.

High-value customers

As with “lapsed” customers, a “high-value” customer means different things in different contexts, but say, for example, that a high-value customer is one who has spent at least two times as much as the average customer in the past year. Personalizing their experience may open the door to a variety of performance improvements.

For example, you likely don’t need to incentivize a high-value customer with a discount or promotion, but consider how you can spur these customers into becoming your advocates. After a high-value user checks out, you could test a change to the “thank-you” page that invites the customer to share their purchase through their social networks or to invite a friend to browse the same product. While you may not want to ask the same thing of your typical customer, a very loyal customer may be happy to do this for you — if you only prompt them.

Merchandise affinities

If you have several product categories, you may have noticed that some customers have a strong affinity for a particular category of merchandise. For example, some customers may have made several purchases in the “polo shirts” category, but no purchases in the “jeans” category. Customers who show strong preferences for certain categories would likely have a better on-site experience if your site’s navigation reflected their tastes.

In the example of a polo shirts customer who never buys jeans, you could test your navigating to ensure that the first category listed is polo shirts. (Or you could test cross-sell techniques to get single-category customers to broaden their horizons into other categories.)

Note that this kind of targeting may require a degree of integration between Google Analytics and your organization’s CRM system, but that can be fairly easily accomplished via GA’s “Data Import” feature.

Analyzing your test results

Any testing platform will come with some built-in tools for helping you measure the results of an experiment. Google Optimize is no different: You can see how different variations are performing against goals that you have chosen in advance (as shown below), and the system lets you know when it has definitively found a winner.

But stopping there would be a mistake; you can dive much deeper using Google Analytics itself.

Imagine you’re testing out different variations of the upsell/cross-sell flow on your website. Of course, you want to know which variation works best overall — that’s the whole point of testing. But it would also be great to know if there are specific segments that respond differently to the experiences you’re creating.

For example, using Google Analytics segmentation tools, you could find out that while Variation B of an experience wasn’t the winner overall, it was the highest-performing experience for customers who have purchased at least three times. That idea — that specific segments prefer different experiences — can come up in any number of ways. Maybe customers who come in from search engines prefer one experience, while customers who visit your site directly prefer another.

Getting down to this level of detail is crucial if you want to get the most “bang for your buck” from your testing efforts. You’ll still be able to implement a winning variation, but you’ll also understand that certain segments are ripe for a more personalized experience — which, as we’ve seen with some of the examples above, you can implement using Google Optimize.

The example shown below is a common one. Here, we see that New Visitors and Returning Visitors prefer different variations. With this deeper knowledge, we can easily serve each segment the best experience.

In summary, Google Optimize hasn’t reinvented the world of A/B testing — ultimately, you’re creating variations of an existing experience and serving those variations at random to a given audience of people on your website.

Instead, the exciting part of Optimize is the ability to define and target those specific audiences in the first place. Using Google Analytics’ long-familiar segmentation tools, we can now home in on audiences that are much more specific and customized than most other tools can easily reach. Then, using those same tools, we can analyze test results to gain a much deeper understanding of what’s working best for different segments of our audience.

Like any other process, when it comes to testing, you get out what you put in. As a result, with better targeting of test audiences and deeper analysis of your test results, your tests are more likely to yield valuable insights and outcomes.

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If you write marketing or advertising text for a living, you may want to get a second job skill.

That’s because software that writes text is here, and it is tackling a growing list of assignments.

Several companies offer software that regularly churns out thousands of stories and reports based on structured data, like financial results. Ads that literally write themselves emerged last week, as IBM announced a new service based on its Watson supercomputer. A program called Quakebot has generated earthquake stories for the LA Times. And at least one software service is regularly creating short email and marketing text, while another is attempting to deliver full essays on any subject.

A billion and a half stories

The Wordsmith natural language generation software from Durham, North Carolina-based Automated Insights, launched last year, currently creates about 3700 quarterly earnings stories every quarter for the Associated Press, which has invested in the company.

It utilizes raw earnings data from Zacks Investment Research to generate about a dozen times more such stories than AP reporters could do by hand in an equal period of time, all written in the AP’s style. So far, the displaced reporters are reportedly delighted, since earnings stories are among their dullest writing chores.

AP is only one of Automated Insights’ 200+ clients, for which it creates about a billion-and-a-half stories annually from structured data. Wordsmith also generates car descriptions for Edmunds and Fantasy Football recaps for Yahoo, as well as product category landing pages, fund reports, ratings reviews, ticket sales reports, and other formats. The company claims the “world’s only open API” for natural language generation, allowing it to “use any [structured] data source to automatically generate unique narratives on a massive scale.”

Here’s a sample from Friday’s Yahoo! Finance, credited as: “This story was generated by Automated Insights”:

Capstone Turbine reports fourth-quarter loss but tops expectations

CHATSWORTH, Calif. (AP) _ Capstone Turbine Corp. (CPST) on Thursday reported a loss of $5.3 million in its fiscal fourth quarter.

On a per-share basis, the Chatsworth, California-based company said it had a loss of 25 cents. The results topped Wall Street expectations. The average estimate of five analysts surveyed by Zacks Investment Research was for a loss of 31 cents per share.

The maker of turbine systems for energy generation posted revenue of $18.9 million in the period.

For the year, the company reported that its loss narrowed to $25.2 million, or $1.39 per share. Revenue was reported as $85.2 million.

‘Numbers get articulated’

A competitor, Chicago-based Narrative Science, generates earnings previews for Forbes Magazine and other clients with its Quill software. Through its natural language generation, VP of professional services Keelin McDonell told me, “numbers get articulated” by drawing on any data in a consistent form, such as CSV, XML, or JSON files.

While the company’s reports can be customized by hand, she said that the content usually goes out to the intended audience without a human editor.

McDonell noted that financial institution Credit Suisse found many users couldn’t interpret charts in one of its online dashboards, so Narrative Science’s software was employed to generate narrative reports. Its big enterprise customers include USAA, MasterCard, Deloitte, and an investment firm called In-Q-Tel, which backs “innovative technology solutions to support the missions of the U.S. Intelligence Community.” Narrative Science declined to provide any detail on what it does for In-Q-Tel.

The company’s Quill Engage application serves about 14,000 small-to-medium sized businesses, for such uses as reports about websites’ or AdWords’ performance, based on rules set up by the business. Here, for example, is a sample of a generated Web site report:

Another platform that draws on financial data is a crowd-sourced neural network called Emma/Mansi (Machine Augmented Neural Search Interface), an artificial intelligence system from a company named Stealth Mode Inc. One of its specialties is to predict which Exchange-Traded Funds will be most profitable. It also sidelines as a financial writer, such as a story Emma recently created in competition with an actual writer for the Financial Times:

While Automated Insights and Narrative Science are doing their best to turn structured data-heavy reports and narratives into just another output option, New York City-based Persado intends to become marketers’ Best Assistant Ever for short marketing messages.

It offers what co-founder and VP of product Assaf Baclu described to me as a “cognitive content generation platform,” employing natural language processing, machine learning, statistical analysis, and computational linguistics.

The platform needs to know what the marketer’s offer is about, but it can then generate content from scratch or take existing content and suggest more effective versions.

Up to 400,000 versions

The platform can create huge numbers of variations — as many as 400,000 versions, according to Baclu — which are winnowed down algorithmically. It then sends out, say, the ten best ones, and A/B tests those.

Baclu pointed out that the key difference from what, say, Automated Insights provides, is that Persado-generated content is specifically intended to create short marketing messages for driving action.

Persado’s output includes subject lines, email bodies, short landing pages, Facebook posts, display ads, and direct (that is, post office) mail — each of which can be up to 600 characters, including spaces and punctuation. Full blog posts and other kinds of long-form narration, he said, are outside Persado’s job description. Here’s a Persado graphic comparing its output to humans’:

If you’re thinking of taking comfort in a human marketer’s ability to convey emotion, think again. Persado says it understands how to convey feelings.

It has catalogued the “cognitive triggers” for 19 different emotions, including excitement, pride, exclusivity, achievement, and gratification. For instance, Baclu said, the platform might use the phrase “awesome news” or “you’re about to miss out” to show excitement.

New York City-based digital marketing agency MondoLabs recently started using Persado to write ads for programmatic delivery. VP of marketing Laura McGarrity told me that a staff person enters draft text for ads, parameters are set, and the platform spits out multiple variations that are specifically designed for social, web, or email. Results are then A/B tested.

In each case, she said, there are multiple suggestions and, although MondoLabs is still in the early stages of using the platform, she noted that Persado claims its copy can boost engagement up to 70 percent.

“I would have to have 10 people to pump out that quality and volume without Persado,” she told me, instead of the one worker dedicated to the task. “It’s pretty impressive.”

Watson gets in the game

But Persado’s Darwinian approach to writing marketing and ad text — generate zillions, whittle them down algorithmically, and then test — may someday soon be seen as a shotgun approach compared to the new sharpshooting from systems like IBM’s Watson.

Last week, IBM’s Weather Channel subsidiary announced its new “cognitive ads,” where supercomputer Watson takes a break from finding medical cures to write original, responsive ads.

For instance, a viewer of an ad for seasoned tomato sauce Manwich might type in any ingredient, along with a question like, “What can I make for dinner using Manwich and these ingredients?” The Watson-powered ad will return an appropriate, original recipe, based on Watson’s understanding of how human taste works. I also saw a remote demo where the Watson ad returns written advice about using the allergy medicine Flonase after the viewer of the ad asks a question, such as about the drug’s safety for small children.

IBM told me via email that Watson Ads can “surface insights from massive amounts of data, but it does not generate original content.”

But, while Watson may just be pulling and combining knowledge or even excerpts from massive amounts of content, it sure looks like it is generating original text to a viewer of the ad.

Articoolo’s effort

Writers of marketing-related text might still claim a refuge in long-form posts and articles. But New York City-based Articoolo is trying to enter that refuge, with claims it can generate long-form narratives based on a few keywords you supply.

Here, for instance, is the text generated to my entered keywords of “software that writes”:

“As is the scenario with any technology that’s used, one must consider the good and the bad points and the same holds true for the resume writing applications. The most evident advantage of using free software is that there’s absolutely no cost involved. Only access to the internet and an OS that’s appropriate with the merchandise are needed. Another good thing about using applications that writes vitae is the fact the fact that all the templates are generic enough to adjust to nearly every career kind or field of experience or interest. This kind of generalization makes it possible for people to ensure their resumes are customized as far as possible as well as give them templates and recommendations which could help them in completing the resume.

“The templates are extremely helpful and the resume writing applications typically offers a variety of styles and templates including functional, chronological, specialized and hybrid. For new employees and for all those with limited work history like latest graduates, the functional template is ideal. For individuals with a significant work history and number of accomplishments to their credit in their career, the chronological template will work best. There are people who’ve worked for a long time period, but have held only one job title regardless of work duties improving and changing with time and for such individuals the hybrid template, which is a blend of chronological and practical, is best suited.

“For individuals with very specific abilities like compute professionals, trades people, medical specialists and others, the technical template is appropriate. Most free programs which write resumes provide choices for contacting ones resume, posting ones resume on-line and creating follow up and addressing letters or emails. With the advantages, there are also a few disadvantages included with the resume writing software. Probably the biggest disadvantage is that all of the templates tend to be structured and resistant to change and change, meaning that one can’t really deviate from the template much, despite the need for additional space or the need to do away with a few sections or headings of the resume. There’s also an extremely limited selection of fonts, graphics and characters you can select from to utilize in the covering letter or resume. These free softwares usually don’t have the advancement necessary for professional and high level resumes since the resume writing software doesn’t have options that extremely trained and qualified professionals require in their covering letter or resume.”

‘Not yet perfect’

Given that Articoolo took the term “software that writes” to mean resume-writing software, the entry is not bad for a computer’s first cut, notwithstanding the fact that it needs a good edit to be readable and clean.

But, when The Next Web tried it out, they discovered on two occasions that Articoolo-generated content actually contained rewritten content from two EzineArticles essays that had been published online.

I asked CEO and co-founder Doron Tal about the roughness and apparent plagiarism. Via email, he replied:

“The quality of our content is not yet perfect. It can’t completely replace a human writer, at [least] not yet. But we never claim that our goal is to replace human writers. Instead, we are aiming at helping writers do their job quicker and more efficient. Using Articoolo one can save about 90% of the time and effort it would take to write an article. The cost of using our tool is so low [99 cents to $1.25/article] that it is almost a no-brainer. And by the way, since the review on TNW was written, more than 2 months ago, we’ve accomplished few more development milestones which improved the quality of the articles our algorithm writes so I urge you to try it yourself.”

“Regarding the claim that an article that was written with our tool appeared to contain content from other sources on the Web — it is true that our algorithm sometimes uses different kind of content sources from the web but the AI process that it does with the content leaves almost no trace of the original text. Each and every article goes through our own thorough clearance process to make sure it is completely unique and then also a Copyscape verification so we can be 100% positive about its uniqueness.”

When I asked if this involved “spinning” existing content, so that some words are changed to disguise the source, he replied:

“We take content bits from several resources after analyzing them (semantic, sentiment, etc.) and constructing it into a new coherent piece of content. The rephrasing phase at the end is also not just replacing words for synonyms, but a broader concept of syntax and grammar sentence rebuilding that we developed.”

Humans’ ‘one big edge’?

Articoolo’s struggle with creating usable, much less excellent, long-form content offers a brief but not permanent respite for those of us who write long-form marketing-related content.

After all, Watson and other supercomputing systems have demonstrated their ability to understand, relate, and utilize concepts, so it would seem that the day when they can articulate their insights is coming.

Certainly, reports and short articles based on structured data appear to have succumbed to writing software. Narrative Science’s McDonell told me that her company can foresee their Quill software embedded in dashboards, leading to the day when you generate a written report for structured data as readily as you can now generate a PDF.

MondoLabs’ McGarrity said that Persado and similar software are “absolutely the future,” because of the huge cost saving in generating so many useful variations. And Persado’s Baclu told me that he expects 60 to 80 percent of marketing content will be generated by platforms in five years, given that much of marketing text is shorter form.

The question, then, is not whether such software will be able to generate most if not every kind of marketing content. The question is whether there is some irreducible … something … that humans will be able to claim as their own, forever.

Slate’s Will Oremus has been sanguine about humans retaining “one big edge,” preventing such software from putting all writers out of a job.

“Humans are already better at thinking like a human than computers will ever be,” he wrote in a story on this subject two years ago. He cited humans’ unique abilities to tell stories and to put data and events into a larger narrative context of trends or related developments.

Our one thing

And Baclu told me that he expects any writing that requires “the human creative genius” would be off-limits to computer-generated text, at least for the next five years. He pointed to poetry, literature, marketing slogans, and any content marketing “with an opinion.”

Unfortunately, there is ever reason to believe that story-telling, contextualization, or creative language and written thought will eventually be replicated by intelligent computing systems.

As Baclu points out, “a machine can learn style,” like how to write “cool” prose. Creativity and contextualization both require unique insights derived from massive amounts of data, a skill computers are already demonstrating.

After all, machine learning is all about generalizing from experience — which is the definition of an informed opinion. The Financial Times noted that the Emma-generated story “even included relevant context such as the possibility of Brexit (although she [Emma] was of the dubious opinion that it would be a ‘tailwind’ for the UK economy.)”

And if Watson can digest reams of information to answer questions about a drug, he already has opinions.

In fact, there’s only one arena that, at the moment, appears sacrosanct for human writers.

Writing about our experiences in the real world.

We might recreate, for instance, the exceptional customer service we get when we walk into a Trader Joe’s grocery store, or how valuable it is to get a discount coupon on our phone for a nearby iced coffee on a hot July day.

While we should expect software to learn how to opinionize, create original insights or language, write fully engaging stories, and contextualize all kinds of data, computer systems still can’t draw on the pleasure of an iced coffee on a hot day.

That is, of course, until Quill, Emma, Watson, or one of their supercomputing colleagues can put on a pair of shoes.

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People should expect to start seeing a lot more ads on Snapchat soon. But they may end up seeing less of each ad.

On Monday Snapchat announced plans to make it easier for brands to buy and produce its vertical video ads — now called Snap Ads — and to test ads inserted between stories, the collections of photos and videos that individuals post for people who follow them to see.

An influx of Snapchat’s skippable ads interrupting the flow of swiping from one story to the next means that Snapchat would need to be careful about how it intersperses those ads in order to not annoy its audience. And it appears to be doing so. For example, Snapchat’s internal team will review every ad before it goes live. But Snapchat’s also exploring other ways to make its upcoming in-stream ads more palatable.

Snapchat is asking advertisers to produce shorter versions of their ads to run between stories, according to two agency execs. One of the execs said that Snapchat is trying cut the video ad lengths from its standard 10 seconds to roughly 6 seconds, though both execs said the eventual lengths are still being worked out. A Snapchat spokesperson did not immediately respond to a request for comment on Monday.

The shorter lengths could increase the likelihood that people will sit through a brand’s entire ad, or at least reduce the likelihood that they won’t swipe past it in order to get to the next story. But there’s expected to be some pushback from advertisers who already have had to adjust to Snapchat’s 10-second video ad format, per the agency execs.

Snapchat is also officially rolling out new add-ons to its ads that aim to get people to spend more time with an ad. Those add-ons — which Snapchat has been testing since the start of the year and appear when people swipe up from a video ad — include longer versions of a brand’s video, a mobile webpage, a branded article and a gateway to download an app from Apple’s App Store or Google Play.

To help brands produce Snap Ads — be they 10 seconds or shorter and with or without add-ons — Snapchat has come up with a list of creative agencies that it recommends brands work with. Those sanctioned shops are: Allday Everyday, Big Spaceship, Contented, Matte-Finish, Media Monks, Moment Studio, R29 Brand Lab, Studio Number One, Stun Creative, The 88, The Mill, Truffle Pig (which Snapchat co-owns), Unit 9, VaynerMedia and Vice Media’s Virtue.

Snapchat has similarly organized a group of approved companies that will be able to plug into its Ads API so that brands can buy ads programmatically through those companies’ ad-buying tools, which brands may already be using to buy video ads on Facebook, YouTube and Twitter. Those approved ad-buying companies are: 4C, Adaptly, Amobee, Brand Networks, SocialCode, TubeMogul, Unified and VaynerMedia.

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Imagine the ultimate online shopping experience: An hour after you search online for a pair of shoes for an upcoming event, your favorite shoe retailer delivers a variety of relevant shoe recommendations, including new arrivals, directly to your inbox. You decide to revisit the retailer’s site, continue browsing and see recommendations for complementary items that pique your interest. But you get distracted and leave without purchasing.

The next email from the retailer reminds you about the shoes you were considering and includes a coupon to use towards your next purchase. The relevance and timeliness of the email encourage you to revisit the retailer, and the on-site recommendations are perfectly curated to your tastes. You end up purchasing the perfect shoes and accessories for your upcoming event.

Technology gives marketers the opportunity to treat every customer like a VIP. Bespoke experiences harness the power of external and customer-centric information, utilize advanced algorithms to recommend what’s relevant to each customer and have the right delivery channels in place to capture their attention on the device where they’re most likely to engage.

Personalization can have this type of direct and positive impact on the core metrics that make any e-commerce business successful: customer loyalty, conversion, retention and average order value. In fact, more than half of senior marketers polled in a 2015 survey by the CMO Council said that using enriched or personalized content created higher response and engagement rates.

Rounding up the best data, decision engine and channels will help you give customers the white-glove treatment they want — and expect — today.

Creating a VIP program with data

Volumes of data are available that signal the intent and interests of various audiences, but it’s largely anonymous and fails to cater to customers at the individual level. We see this primarily on the media and advertising side, where ad technologies engage audience segments based on aggregated actions and categories.

You can still deliver a relevant experience through advertising, but the level of information available through this channel is not enough to enable true personalization.

On the other hand, there’s customer data within a brand’s CRM (customer relationship management) system, as well as product-level information that enables brands to build rich people-based profiles. Most of this data is captured from actions like past purchases, on-site activity and email engagement.

To get the VIP status, it’s best to pair the anonymous actions with more detailed customer profiles, allowing brands to create a single comprehensive view of their customer — including their intent, interests, purchase history, price sensitivities and so forth. And when such data is used in a way that benefits the consumer, your customers will likely be more receptive to sharing their data.

Microsoft released a survey last year that cited favorable numbers related to consumers’ attitude toward sharing data, reaching as high as 79 percent when it came to search history, 75 percent for age, and 65 percent for site visits. However, the survey also found that 83 percent of respondents said they “expect brands and advertisers to ask for their permission before they use their digital information.”

Recommending what’s right

The more information you analyze, mine and process, the more possible outcomes you have for every given customer. Today, there’s a clear obsession with data and its ability to make predictions to drive revenue.

The decision-making engine needs to be able to determine when to show a product, the best product to show, and how to generate the strongest engagement at the most efficient cost.

The recommendation engine uses data science to determine the best outcomes. This might be based on relational, contextual and conditional elements, all of which are used to set up rules, such as (albeit a simplified representation) “recommend black shoes, when a customer is looking at purchasing a black dress.”

These types of recommendations are especially important for companies that sell products across multiples brands and categories and want to serve up the latest and greatest products for every individual. It’s not enough to just know people at the individual level; you need the machine intelligence to process what people are doing in the moment so that you can recommend what’s right — right now.

Delivering an orchestrated experience

It’s all about keeping your customer’s attention, from beginning to end. This means understanding them at multiple stages of their buying journey and engaging them with relevant marketing as they browse the web, visit your site and open your emails.

To successfully do this, your data and customer information should be centralized to be able to fuel real-time decisions across the buyer’s journey, from when they’re actively in purchase mode to when they are dormant. This channel orchestration should be designed to help you acquire more customers, keep high-value shoppers engaged and be reactive to those you may have lost.

When channels are not orchestrated, you’re likely to be leaving sales on the table — and worse, creating a poor experience. For example, you may give someone a 20-percent-off coupon for an item they’ve already purchased or recommend products that are way above their price point.

It’s become increasingly important to show customers that your brand knows them best. We need to make the experience online similar to the personal touch people often feel in-store.

The more you know about your customers and their behaviors, the better you can serve them with personalized messaging and leave the lasting impression of being treated like a VIP.

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Marketers, get ready to present your products and experiences inside real-world spaces.

Today in San Francisco, Lenovo introduced via live video stream its phab2PRO phone, the world’s first Tango-enabled phone. Tango — formerly Project Tango — is Google’s R&D effort to instill smartphones with the ability to immediately sense space, and then lay interactive visuals on top of it.

The new phone’s abilities to understand the space around you could lead to the wide availability of the much-heralded augmented reality. Lenovo CEO Yuanqing Yang pitched the idea that Tango capabilities could become as commonplace as GPS.

By measuring depth and motion, Tango allows not only unprecedented games and educational experiences to take place in your living room, but also product demonstrations and experiences. Your home or office becomes the showroom.

Lowe’s hardware store, for instance, demo’d an app it has created for the phone that allows the user to look through the screen and visualize a room’s renovation and furnishing. A new hardwood floor, example, was selected and finger-stretched so it visually laid on top of the actual stage floor at the presentation, and a leather chair and side table were chosen and placed on the hardwood floor. (See the image from the live stream, at the top of this page.)

The phone can also visually measure volumes of space as a kind of tape measure, such as you might want to do to make sure a potential table purchase will fit into a dining room.

The new phone, whose development had been announced months ago, features four cameras — an eight megapixel one in front, a 16 megapixel in the rear, and two rear-facing depth and motion tracking cameras. In addition to the ability to instantly track motion and depth, the camera can remember spaces it has previously measured.

Lest potential buyers worry that all that computing power will burn through battery life, Lenovo claimed a single charge should last 15 hours. Retail price will be $499 unlocked, and the device will be available globally in September.

Lenovo also showed an educational app from the American Museum of Natural History, where moving and lifesized dinosaurs can be selected to walk around the floor in front of you, as seen through the screen.

A game of virtual dominos allows a user to construct tumbling squares that know when they should fall off an actual table:

Of course, it remains to be seen if Tango capabilities are used only for special cases, like when you’re remodeling or want to play a game that takes place in the space in front of you.

On the other hand, many people originally thought personal computers would be used only for spreadsheets and recipes.

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Facebook has conditioned brands and media companies to believe mobile videos are best when they’re basically silent movies because they’re usually played on mute. “Not true!” according to Snapchat.

Snapchat claims that two-thirds of the videos posted to its mobile app are viewed with the sound on, the company announced on Thursday. And it’s putting its money where its mouth is by working with digital ad analytics firm Moat to measure how many of their Snapchat ad impressions were served in view to actual humans with the sound on.

That’s good news for brands like Unilever and media-buying agencies like WPP’s GroupM that have been pressing digital publishers to only sell them ads that real-life humans actually see *and* hear. And it’s potentially bad news for Facebook and any other publisher trying to convince brands that mobile video viewers are only interested in being shown, not told, things.

Facebook’s sales teams have been pushing advertisers to produce Facebook and Instagram video ads that can be just as easily watched with the sound off as on, to the point of rolling out a way to automatically caption their video ads. And publishers like Mic are noticing that 85% of the people watching their Facebook videos are doing so on mute.

But Facebook might hard a hard time with that push if Snapchat’s claim holds up once brands are able to see for themselves what share of people are willing to see and hear their video ads. It might be true that Facebook’s and Instagram’s mobile video viewers, in particular, are sound-averse; both Facebook and Instagram play videos with the sound off by default. But as Snapchat’s stat shows, that doesn’t mean mobile video viewers in general are anti-audio. And that means marketers — especially big brands accustomed people seeing and hearing their TV spots — might start asking Facebook, “Why can’t you be more like Snapchat?”

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After Apple owning more than half of YouTube’s ad leaderboard in April, last month saw a mix of brands in the top ten with Knorr’s #LoveAtFirstTaste spot ranking No. 1.

Earning 33 million views, the soup brand won nearly as many views as all of last month’s top ten ads which pulled in a combined 37.8 million views. Knorr’s #LoveAtFirstTaste ad follows the creative direction behind last year’s viral “First Kiss” spot, but instead of pairing strangers to kiss, the brand matched up strangers according to their favorite soups and had them feed one another.

Mother’s Day helped P&G and Cricket Wireless break into the top ten list, with both brands launching ads focused on moms. P&G revisited its “Thank You, Mom” series in a new ad for the Rio Olympics, while Cricket Wireless took the funny track in its “PhotoMombing” spot riffing on photo-bombs by moms.

GoPro was the only brand to have more than one spot in the top ten, earning a combined 6.4 million views with one ad at No. 4 and another at No. 6.

With 60.8 million combined views and more than 96 million minutes of watch time, last month’s top video ads generated nearly double the number of views and watch-time as April’s top ten most popular ads which earned only 42.8 million minutes of watch time.

Top 10 YouTube Ads in May

1. Knorr: #LoveAtFirstTaste (33M views)

2. Evian: Baby Bay (7M views)

3. P&G: Thank You, Mom – Strong | Rio 2016 Olympic Games (5M views)

4. GoPro: On a Rocket Launch to Space (3.8M views)

5. Lufthansa: Everyone’s Fanhansa (3.3M views)

6. GoPro: Man and Grizzly Bear – Adventures with Bella (2.6M views)

7. McDonald’s Malaysia: Angry Birds (2M views)

8. Benzac (w/ BuzzFeedYellow): Things You Wish You Could Control In High School (1.1M views)

9. Temptations Brand: CATTERBOX™ – The world’s first talking cat collar (1M views)

10. Cricket Wireless: #PhotoMombing! Because Moms Are the Bomb! (968K views)

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Securing real links requires outreach.

No matter the site, industry, or audience, the only way to earn worthwhile links is through some form of human-to-human communication.

Google is continuously improving its ability to detect spammy tactics, reducing the efficacy of manipulation and increasing the power of editorially given links. As Jon Cooper pointed out in a SearchFest session earlier this year, future-safe links must come from one-on-one outreach.

Outreach can make or break a link campaign. Fortunately, effective outreach only requires two simple ingredients – preparation and persuasion.

Every successful link acquisition project is fueled by well-researched, well-positioned outreach, which is, therefore, compelling.

Convincing Outreach Starts With Research

Audience research is the foundation of effective outreach, because proper research empowers you to communicate persuasively. Preparation positions you for success and you execute through compelling messaging.

There are a number of excellent outreach resources within the SEO space, and many of them provide tips and guidance on how to craft an effective email. Writing compelling emails is important, but too many people get wrapped up in crafting messages and subject lines and forget how much of the work happens before an email is ever sent.

Clever writing can only do so much, and will never be enough to overcome a lack of true value. Persuasive messaging is vital to any outreach campaign, but persuasion cannot replace preparation.

In fact, researching and preparing ahead of time makes matters easier and simpler (not to mention increases your chances for success) when you start contacting bloggers, journalists, and site owners.

There are three main elements you must thoroughly understand before you start an outreach campaign:

1. The value to your audience.
2. The website you’re contacting.
3. The person and their motivation.

Understanding these three elements will be instrumental in who you contact, how you define your value, how to position your messaging, and the overall success of your outreach campaign.

Defining value

The first step in preparing link building outreach is recognizing your value — specifically the value you offer to link prospects.

You need to ask yourself “Why would someone link to my page?” The answer should be simple – because it benefits them and/or their audience. Outreach then becomes merely explaining why it’s in their best interest to link, pointing to the value you have defined.

Recognizing the significance of your offer starts with understanding your value from the perspective of your audience. Link building and SEO must be integrated into other marketing in order to take full advantage of all assets available. As link building maven Julie Joyce said here on Search Engine Land:

Link building works best when you’re considering the whole marketing presence of a site, not just a part of it.

Through consistent communication, you can stay abreast of any new products or marketing initiatives that could be used as valuable assets for link outreach. However, awareness is only part of recognizing what you can offer; you must also have a firm understanding of why it is valuable. If you don’t fully understand how a link to your site would benefit prospective sites, you’ll never be able to communicate that value and convince someone to link to you.

Regardless of the form your offer takes (product, service, content, research data, etc.) you must recognize the value it provides to others. When you recognize the inherent usefulness in what you’re pitching, outreach becomes easier; it’s less about tips and tricks, and more about highlighting value.

Understanding the tone, core values, and USP of your brand (or the brand you’re representing) will get you part of the way there, but to truly appreciate the value of your asset you need to put yourself in the shoes of those who find it valuable or useful. Similar to building out buyer personas, you need to identify where your audience lives on the web. These sites and communities make ideal link prospects.

Create a general profile for your model audience based on:

• Pain points
• Demographics
• Beliefs/values
• Behavioral trends
• Etc.

You can use this profile to start locating potential sites and communities where this audience exists online.

Once you’ve defined value, being persuasive becomes easy. Simply explain how your asset has inherent value to a specific audience – their audience.

Understand the websites you’re targeting

With a firm grasp of the value you offer, it’s time to start analyzing potential link prospects.

These prospects are the sites that have audiences that will appreciate the value you offer. It should actually be in the site’s best interest (or the best interest of their audience) to link.

As with most aspects of link acquisition, relevance is a driving force in finding the appropriate websites.

Ensuring the site has a relevant audience that will benefit from exposure to your link (site, resource, content, etc.) is requisite, but you can dig even deeper to better position yourself for successful outreach. Ask yourself some questions:

• Why does this site exist?
• Which audience does this site serve?
• How does this site make money (affiliate, ad revenue, products, or services)?
• What types of relationships exist with other sites?
• How does this site serve its audience (blog posts, videos, podcasts, etc.)?

While you’re researching the site, make sure there aren’t any other resources/pages fulfilling the purpose you’re pitching. If you do find any tangentially related pages, know (and communicate) how your own offer differentiates. Make sure you know the name of the page (or can describe it clearly) and exact location where you think your link offers the most value.

You need to make sure you’re targeting sites that will genuinely benefit from linking to you. Outreach becomes easy when the value of your link is obvious.

You can increase your chances for success further by doing more research into the “why” behind the site, making it easier to speak to why a link to your site would benefit their site and audience.

Appreciate the person you’re contacting

Editorial links — the types of links you should want — by very definition have to be created by another human being, a person who exercises scrutiny.

Knowing a site’s audience and their interests will help you speak to the value of your link, but you also need to understand the actual human being you’re emailing. This is the person who will ultimately decide if your link goes up — and even if you offer clear value, failure to connect with this person on human level means that you may fail to secure a link.

The first thing you should do to help foster a human connection is make sure you’re contacting the appropriate person. Ideally (and typically, with a little digging) you will be able to find the person who is responsible for managing the specific portion of the website where you want a link.

Finding the most appropriate person to contact will reduce the number of barriers to your link and avoid wasting everyone’s time. You don’t want to contact someone who has to then redirect you to the actual person responsible for managing links, unnecessarily bogging down your outreach process. Perform due diligence prior to outreach to ensure you’re emailing the right person for your request.

Once you know you have the right person, you should take some time to get know that person and interact with them. Learn about why that person is active on (or maintains) their site, gain an appreciation for their passions, personal motivations, beliefs, etc.

Some simple ways to connect with potential link partners include:

• Following and engaging (like, share, ask questions) with them on social media.
• Commenting on their site and/or blog posts.
• Interact on their favorite forums or communities.
• Offer helpful feedback (inform them of broken links, report dead or broken pages, note formatting issues, etc.) regarding their site.
• Subscribe to their newsletter.

Establishing a relationship prior to requesting a link will improve your chances for success, and building positive connections around your industry also offers branding benefits and leads to further marketing opportunities.

When you understand why someone cares about their site, you can speak to what motivates them and communicate value from their perspective.

All this preliminary research primes your outreach for success. You should be able to definitively say why it’s within the best interest of the site, their audience, and the person who maintains the site to link. That’s a long way down the path of persuasive communication.

TL;DR

Being persuasive means making your outreach more about the person you’re contacting (and their site/audience) and less about you (and your link).

You must speak to three different levels of value:

1. The value for the audience of the site you approach.
2. The value for the site as well as their audience.
3. The value for the actual person you’re contacting, in addition to the site and their audience.

If you’ve done the necessary research on each level, you can keep your message succinct and simple (while still communicating persuasively) – present your asset and explain why a link to it is beneficial to everyone involved.

If one of those is missing, you may not secure a link. If all three are in place, there should be no feasible reason for them to decide against linking to you.

Further Reading

For more information on crafting compelling outreach, check out these great resources:

• The Smart SEO’s Guide To Effective Outreach by Stephanie Beadell
• The One Killer Secret to Link Building Outreach by David Farkas
• The Outreacher: Building Links With Social Skills & Science by Garrett French

[Read the full article on Search Engine Land.]

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With the rise of SEO platforms and enterprise-level technology, we are drowning in a sea of SEO data, with a lot of information right at our fingertips. But are we really getting a true and accurate picture of our SEO performance?

As marketers, we pore over data all the time — but in order to glean meaningful insights, we need to make sure our data collection tools are set up properly and managed correctly for accuracy.

Here is how to do it.

Attribution

Attribution has been one of online marketing’s biggest challenges. Who gets the credit for a conversion when there are so many different touch points along the path to purchase? Is last click the right way to look at things? How about first click?

Some brands choose first click, while some agencies look at last click. Some even have complex attribution models which give partial credit to different touch points.

We need to come to a mutual agreement with our clients on what attribution model we are going to use and then make sure our reporting data reflects this. You can use the Model Comparison Tool in Google Analytics “to compare how different attribution models impact the valuation of your marketing channels.”

Channel classification

One common mistake that I have seen over the years is that the paid search is not set up correctly and can actually get misclassified as organic search, which can inflate your SEO numbers and make them highly inaccurate. Always check to see if your search channels are set up and classified correctly.

Site search    

Tracking on-site search is a great way to get insights into what users are looking for on your site, helping you to develop a holistic content strategy at all stages of the user journey. Depending on your analytics platform, you need to enable this and add parameters to on-site search keywords.

[Read the full article on Search Engine Land.]

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Segment (formerly Segment.io) acts as a kind of data switchboard for brands. It takes data from sites, apps, and various kinds of platforms, and pipes them to any of several hundred tools for analytics, ecommerce, A/B testing, and other purposes.

In short, the company says, it acts “like a single API.”

Each Segment user can set up the data they want to collect, but the company also offers three pre-set packages that automatically capture specific kinds of data most commonly required for E-commerce, Email, and A/B Testing.

Today, Segment is announcing its Native Mobile Spec, the fourth package of automatically collected data. Part of the newest Segment software development kit for iOS and Android devices, it captures six in-app lifecycle events: Application Installed, Application Opened, Application Started, Screen Viewed, Order Completed, and Application Updated. The company says that its platform is currently connected to about 3000 apps.

CEO Peter Reinhardt told me that, within a few weeks, various marketing events will be added to the Native Spec’s set of automatically collected data, such as Install Attributed, Deep Link Opened, and Deep Link Clicked.

The data is used, for instance, to power Custom Audiences, dynamic ads, and conversion tracking on Facebook, or mobile marketing, analytics, and attribution through such tools as Tune, Kochava, MixPanel, and Salesforce Marketing Cloud.

Reinhardt noted that, previously, collecting data from apps through Segment required a brand to first determine what specs they wanted, and then the specs had to be manually set. A packaged Spec, he said, makes the process quicker, and allows Segment to offer an existing server-to-server integration. Brands can also customize the Spec’s data collection with additional choices, if they wish.

The addition of Native Mobile Spec is the latest effort by the San Francisco-based company to make its “universal API” more versatile and efficient. In April, for instance, it added Sources, which expanded its data sources beyond apps and sites to CRMs, help desks, email vendors, and others.

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