A/B testing is simple.
You just compare a control to a variant. In digital marketing (especially the field sometimes known as ‘conversion rate optimisation’), this generally means doing something like splitting traffic between two versions of the same web page and monitoring their performance. You might also try it out with emails, apps, or any other manner of digital communication, but the point is: it is simple, dead simple.
Yesterday, after four years of hurt, David Beckham’s “dream” of owning a Major League Soccer (MLS) team came to fruition.
Ever since the twilight of his time at L.A. Galaxy the former England captain has been open about his plans to return the U.S. game as an owner: he now leads a consortium who aim to establish a franchise in a state that has been without a soccer team for over a decade.
In late September, I asked: can big banks catch up to Venmo with P2P payments app Zelle?
Three months later, it would appear the answer is definitely maybe.
I think we're at a really interesting time in the history of consumerism.
In developed markets, we have all had some amazing experiences enabled by (often mobile) tech. Not only that, we are seeing incredible investment in innovative new technologies (such as voice assistants), with tech-savvy consumers seemingly ready to experiment with tech when it is arguably far from mature (an astounding 10% of UK households have an Amazon Echo, according to Kantar).
What are the implications for mainstream businesses? I'd argue there are laggards in many industries that are sitting ducks, ripe not necessarily for disruption, but certainly to be taken down a peg or two by businesses who get the customer experience right.
The likes of Instagram and Snapchat have presented a new way for brands to experiment with video, yet with 5bn videos being watched on its platform on a daily basis - YouTube is still the reigning king of visual content.
Recently, YouTube has been in the headlines, but not for the most positive reasons. On the back of controversy over brand safety and influencer wrong-doings, brands might be reconsidering how to navigate this increasingly confusing channel.
One of the most prominent trends of the fintech revolution has been that of unbundling.
Nimble, innovative upstarts have developed targeted specific markets, such as wealth management and lending, traditionally dominated by banks and large financial institutions that bundle these offerings with others across the spectrum of financial services.
With over 1,000 stores across the globe, cosmetics business Lush is no longer an underdog. Once considered a somewhat niche brand – with an odd mix of ethical dedication and a decidedly sunny personality to promote it – it has since broken through to the mainstream.
Today, it’s widely thought of as one of the most progressive and innovative brands around – especially when it comes to customer experience.
In our Day in the Life profiles we've recently looked at some of the sexier agency roles, such as creative technologist, insight director and service design lead.
This week we continue on this theme, catching up with Remy Brooks, digital strategist at agency Friday.
Whether it’s been a dry January, or a decidedly wet one for you – we’ve got the last stats roundup of the month to well and truly round things off.
This week’s includes news about influencers, ad viewability, ecommerce experimentation and lots more. Don’t forget to check out the Internet Statistics Compendium for further facts and figures.
This quick tip (and template) comes from Ecconsultancy's Content Strategy Best Practice Guide and concerns the creation of a content marketing mission statement.
Life continues to get more and more difficult for marketers, particularly those who target users as precisely as possible.
Earlier this week, Mozilla announced that it has added Opt-in Tracking Protection to Firefox Quantum, the latest version of its popular browser. Opt-in Tracking Protection enables users to block trackers, many of which are used by ad networks, all time time. Previously, Firefox blocked trackers only when users were browsing in private mode.
The latest in our 'ask the expert' series focuses on a core skill in the digital marketer's skillset - email optimisation.
We grilled three of the loveliest experts we know – Kath Pay (Holistic Email Marketing), Parry Malm (Phrasee) and Dale Langley (Emarsys).
While not without risk and regulatory concern, pharma companies have increasingly embraced social media in recent years.
As Tamara Littleton, CEO of social media agency The Social Element, put it, “The industry has realised that even if it ignores social media, its customers won't.”
Inevitably, the resource, skills and processes for winning business differ greatly from agency to agency. However, I have found there to be three issues, common to many agencies, that impact their ability to win and retain the right clients (and therefore to grow).
January sure does drag on, doesn’t it? Luckily, the end is in sight, which means it’s time to take a look back at what happened in the world of social media throughout the month.
With some big platform updates and interesting campaigns, it’s been a busy start to the year. Let’s review.
A/B testing is simple.
You just compare a control to a variant. In digital marketing (especially the field sometimes known as ‘conversion rate optimisation’), this generally means doing something like splitting traffic between two versions of the same web page and monitoring their performance. You might also try it out with emails, apps, or any other manner of digital communication, but the point is: it is simple, dead simple.
Yesterday, after four years of hurt, David Beckham’s “dream” of owning a Major League Soccer (MLS) team came to fruition.
Ever since the twilight of his time at L.A. Galaxy the former England captain has been open about his plans to return the U.S. game as an owner: he now leads a consortium who aim to establish a franchise in a state that has been without a soccer team for over a decade.
In late September, I asked: can big banks catch up to Venmo with P2P payments app Zelle?
Three months later, it would appear the answer is definitely maybe.
I think we're at a really interesting time in the history of consumerism.
In developed markets, we have all had some amazing experiences enabled by (often mobile) tech. Not only that, we are seeing incredible investment in innovative new technologies (such as voice assistants), with tech-savvy consumers seemingly ready to experiment with tech when it is arguably far from mature (an astounding 10% of UK households have an Amazon Echo, according to Kantar).
What are the implications for mainstream businesses? I'd argue there are laggards in many industries that are sitting ducks, ripe not necessarily for disruption, but certainly to be taken down a peg or two by businesses who get the customer experience right.
The likes of Instagram and Snapchat have presented a new way for brands to experiment with video, yet with 5bn videos being watched on its platform on a daily basis - YouTube is still the reigning king of visual content.
Recently, YouTube has been in the headlines, but not for the most positive reasons. On the back of controversy over brand safety and influencer wrong-doings, brands might be reconsidering how to navigate this increasingly confusing channel.
One of the most prominent trends of the fintech revolution has been that of unbundling.
Nimble, innovative upstarts have developed targeted specific markets, such as wealth management and lending, traditionally dominated by banks and large financial institutions that bundle these offerings with others across the spectrum of financial services.
With over 1,000 stores across the globe, cosmetics business Lush is no longer an underdog. Once considered a somewhat niche brand – with an odd mix of ethical dedication and a decidedly sunny personality to promote it – it has since broken through to the mainstream.
Today, it’s widely thought of as one of the most progressive and innovative brands around – especially when it comes to customer experience.
In our Day in the Life profiles we've recently looked at some of the sexier agency roles, such as creative technologist, insight director and service design lead.
This week we continue on this theme, catching up with Remy Brooks, digital strategist at agency Friday.
Whether it’s been a dry January, or a decidedly wet one for you – we’ve got the last stats roundup of the month to well and truly round things off.
This week’s includes news about influencers, ad viewability, ecommerce experimentation and lots more. Don’t forget to check out the Internet Statistics Compendium for further facts and figures.
This quick tip (and template) comes from Ecconsultancy's Content Strategy Best Practice Guide and concerns the creation of a content marketing mission statement.
Life continues to get more and more difficult for marketers, particularly those who target users as precisely as possible.
Earlier this week, Mozilla announced that it has added Opt-in Tracking Protection to Firefox Quantum, the latest version of its popular browser. Opt-in Tracking Protection enables users to block trackers, many of which are used by ad networks, all time time. Previously, Firefox blocked trackers only when users were browsing in private mode.
The latest in our 'ask the expert' series focuses on a core skill in the digital marketer's skillset - email optimisation.
We grilled three of the loveliest experts we know – Kath Pay (Holistic Email Marketing), Parry Malm (Phrasee) and Dale Langley (Emarsys).
While not without risk and regulatory concern, pharma companies have increasingly embraced social media in recent years.
As Tamara Littleton, CEO of social media agency The Social Element, put it, “The industry has realised that even if it ignores social media, its customers won't.”
Inevitably, the resource, skills and processes for winning business differ greatly from agency to agency. However, I have found there to be three issues, common to many agencies, that impact their ability to win and retain the right clients (and therefore to grow).
You started your blog because you want people to read it.
You want your blog to connect with people. You want your content to reach a wide audience. You want to build a base of fans that gobble up your every word.
And yes, at some point, you also want to make money from your blog.
Because let’s face it … as much as you love to write, you didn’t start your blog as a journaling project. (If you did, this article isn’t for you.)
But here’s the thing … if you want your writing to connect with people, you need to connect with them first.
And the best way to connect with anyone is to talk to them — as in, one-on-one.
That’s why every blogger should offer coaching.
Yes, even you. Even if you don’t think you can.
You sure about that?
Okay, I won’t lie — some niches do lend themselves to coaching more than others. Everyone’s heard of business coaches, dating coaches, and fitness coaches. And if you blog on those topics, coaching people will feel like a natural step.
On the other hand, nobody’s ever heard of a web design coach, an anxiety coach, or a travel coach. Those niches aren’t quite as compatible with coaching as the previous ones.
But that doesn’t mean you can’t offer a coaching-like service.
You don’t have to label it “coaching” if it doesn’t feel natural, but you can offer something that gets you one-on-one time with your audience.
For example:
So let’s be clear: You don’t have to be a coach in the traditional sense of the word. The important thing is that you get to talk to (and help!) your audience in a one-on-one setting.
Let’s be real. Your first coaching sessions will always feel scary, and you’re not going to feel ready the first few times you do it.
But you shouldn’t wait to start coaching until you feel ready, because you won’t feel ready until you start coaching.
Jeff Goins started coaching early in his blogging career, and even he admits he was mostly winging it at first:
And that’s the point: Coaching clients don’t expect you to be perfect. They just want you to help them get results.
If you have enough knowledge to run a blog on a certain topic, you have enough knowledge to get people results on that same topic. Right? Right. (Otherwise, I doubt you’d have started your blog in the first place.)
If you’re uncomfortable charging people at first, that’s totally understandable. (And even honorable that you don’t want to take money without first proving your value.)
To get past this, go ahead and offer your first 5–10 coaching calls for free. You’ll not only gain experience running a coaching call, you’ll also gain the confidence to charge people for a session when the time comes.
Are you feeling convinced that you can offer coaching on your blog?
Good, then we can talk about why you should.
The truth is, coaching can be a godsend for your blogging business.
I’ve been blogging for almost four years now, and it’s only been in the last year or so that I got the readership, engagement, and profitability I’ve wanted all along. I don’t think it’s a coincidence that I also started coaching about a year and a half ago.
Here are three ways coaching will benefit you as a blogger:
One of the coolest things about coaching is that clients will tell you their own specific struggles without you having to guess. I know that sounds uber-simplistic, but how many hours do you spend scouring the web for information on your audience instead of just asking them directly?
Coaching clients are incredibly forthcoming with what they need your help with, which means you’ll gather a ton of valuable insights for your content strategy.
Take Jacob McMillen, who noticed some tangible data differences after running his first coaching/mentorship program. He’d reached the six-figure mark as a writer, and wanted to know how he could help other people do the same.
After the group mentoring experiment, he realigned his content marketing based on the information he collected, and saw the following results:
After his coaching experiment, the insights he gathered helped him develop more compelling content for his particular audience, and as you can see, his engagement shot way up.
One of the best parts of coaching is that you can make money right away.
As we saw above, Jacob mentored ten students at $200 a pop, which means he brought in $2,000 he wouldn’t have otherwise.
In my own business, I let people book one-off sessions ranging in price from $125 to $200, and sometimes I even book month-long programs for corporate teams for thousands of dollars.
It’s relatively quick and easy money, and you don’t even have to spend time creating a product. Coaching is something you can start to offer as soon as you get readers. (Or even sooner, if you explore other ways to score your first coaching clients.)
Even if you don’t start out charging $100+ per session, and even if you’re only getting the occasional client at first, it’s still cash in your bank.
Yes, even if you only book one session per week and only charge $30 to $50 for it, that’s still money coming in. (And it means you’re officially “in business” as a professional blogger.)
As Pat Flynn put it: “If you truly want to know whether or not a product will sell or not, you’ve got to get people to pull out their wallets and actually pay you for it.”
He’s right. You’ll never know if you’ve got something worth paying for until someone pays for it.
One of the most popular ways to make money as a blogger is through product development — but with the amount of time that takes, it can be a risky venture if you don’t validate your product idea beforehand.
And you can validate your product idea by selling coaching sessions aimed at helping people reach the same goal. You’ll already know people are willing to pay for it, so you’ll reduce most of the risk up front.
Not only that, but the insights you get from coaching will help you refine your product and maximize its effectiveness.
James Johnson based his entire first course on the results he got from coaching:
So I asked around some freelance friends on Facebook, explained to them what I was doing, and offered to coach them for free on some of the problems they were having in their business.
When James was done, he’d helped his friend grow his freelancing business, and he’d assembled 90% of a course.
He then continued to test his solutions on paid coaching clients, noting where they hit roadblocks or had further questions. This helped him refine his course further, making it even more helpful and easier to navigate.
Your first coaching offer doesn’t have to be perfect, especially if you’re at the first stages of using it as a method of market research and a simple stream of revenue.
You’ll refine your offer(s) over time, and only experience with coaching can teach you how to become a better coach for your audience.
You’ll learn so much about your audience, build a better blog, earn some money, and gather the information you need to make your blog more profitable in the long term. (Plus, you’ll be helping people with your knowledge, which is rewarding in and of itself.)
It’s a win-win-win situation, and the world is waiting for your expertise.
So give it to them.
This post originally appeared on Growth Everywhere, a marketing and business growth blog.
Hey everyone! In today’s episode I share the mic with Mikael Yang, CEO of ManyChat, a program that helps businesses create successful Facebook Messenger bots.
Tune in to hear Mike discuss why messenger marketing is more fruitful than e-mail marketing, what they’re doing to power 100K+ pages and sending a million messages per day, and how messenger bots get up to an 80% open rate when email marketing typically gets 20% open rates and an insane CTR of 56% compared to just 1-2% for emails.
Related Content: How E-commerce Companies Can Drive Sales with Facebook Messenger Chatbots
Download podcast transcript [PDF] here: How ManyChat Exploded into the Leading Messenger Marketing Program in Just 2.5 Years TRANSCRIPT
Get your FREE bonus download to learn 29 things you should be doing to grow your business. Click below to get it right away:
The post How ManyChat Exploded into the Leading Messenger Marketing Program in Just 2.5 Years [podcast] appeared first on Single Grain.
(Reuters) — Facebook reported slightly slower-than-expected growth in daily active users in the latest quarter and said changes made to the News Feed reduced the time spent by users by about 50 million hours every day. On the Q4 2017 earnings call, Mark Zuckerberg announced that WhatsApp passed 1.5 billion monthly active users and sees 60 billion messages sent per day.
Shares of the company were down 3 percent at $181.26 after the bell on Wednesday.
Facebook said about 1.40 billion people were using its service daily as of Dec. 31, up 14 percent from a year earlier, compared with analysts’ estimate of 1.41 billion, according to financial data and analytics firm FactSet.
Facebook had warned earlier this month that user engagement would take a hit in the near term from attempts to tweak its flagship News Feed feature.
“Already last quarter, we made changes to show fewer viral videos to make sure people’s time is well spent,” Chief Executive Mark Zuckerberg said in a statement.
The company also plans to highlight “trustworthy” news in the feed following allegations that Russian operatives and others spread false reports on the site, particularly during the 2016 U.S. Presidential election.
This change is set to shrink the amount of news on Facebook to about 4 percent of all content from 5 percent currently.
Net income attributable to Facebook shareholders rose to $4.27 billion, or $1.44 per share, in the fourth quarter ended Dec. 31 from $3.56 billion, or $1.21 per share, a year earlier.
Excluding a tax provision, the company earned $2.21 per share, topping analysts’ estimates of $1.95, according to Thomson Reuters I/B/E/S.
Total revenue rose 47 percent to $12.97 billion, while full-year revenue was also up 47 percent at $40.65 billion.
Total advertising revenue was $12.78 billion, compared with analysts’ estimate of $12.30 billion, according to Thomson Reuters I/B/E/S.
Mobile ad revenue accounted for 89 percent of the total ad sales, up from 84 percent a year earlier.
Paid search marketers look to technology to provide them with a competitive advantage.
AdWords is host to a range of increasingly sophisticated features, but there are also numerous third-party tools that add extra insight. Below, we review some of the essential tools to achieve PPC success.
The paid search industry is set to develop significantly through 2018, both in its array of options for advertisers and in its level of sophistication as a marketing channel. The pace of innovation is only accelerating, and technology is freeing search specialists to spend more time on strategy, rather than repetitive tasks.
Google continues to add new machine learning algorithms to AdWords that improve the efficacy of paid search efforts, which is undoubtedly a welcome development. This technology ultimately becomes something of an equalizer, however, given that everyone has access to these same tools.
It is at the intersection of people and technology that brands can thrive in PPC marketing. Better training and more enlightened strategy can help get the most out of Google’s AdWords and AdWords Editor, but there are further tools that can add a competitive edge.
The below are technologies that can save time, uncover insights, add scale to data analysis, or a combination of all three.
Identifying the right keywords to add to your paid search account is, of course, a fundamental component of a successful campaign.
Google will suggest a number of relevant queries within the Keyword Planner tool, but it does have some inherent limitations. The list of keywords provided within this tool is far from comprehensive and, given the potential rewards on offer, sophisticated marketers would be well advised to look for a third-party solution.
A recent post by Wil Reynolds at Seer Interactive brought to light just how important it is to build an extensive list of target keywords, as consumers are searching in multifaceted ways, across devices and territories. According to Ahrefs, 85% of all searches contain three or more words and although the shorter keywords tend to have higher search volumes, the long tail contains a huge amount of value too.
Add in growing trends like the adoption of voice search and the picture becomes more complex still. In essence, it is necessary to research beyond Google Keyword Planner to uncover these opportunities.
Keywordtool.io takes an initial keyword suggestion as its stimulus and uses this to come up up to 750 suggested queries to target. This is achieved in part through the use of Google Autocomplete to pull in a range of related terms that customers typically search for. A Pro licence for this tool starts at $48 per month.
Ubersuggest is another long-standing keyword tool that search marketers use to find new, sometimes unexpected, opportunities to communicate with customers via search. It groups together suggested keywords based on their lexical similarity and they can be exported to Excel.
This tool also allows marketers to add in negative keywords to increase the relevance of their results.
We have written about the benefits of Google Trends for SEO, but the same logic applies to PPC. Google Trends can be a fantastic resource for paid search, as it allows marketers to identify peaks in demand. This insight can be used to target terms as their popularity rises, allowing brands to attract clicks for a lower cost.
Google Trends has been updated recently and includes a host of new features, so it is worth revisiting for marketers that may not have found it robust enough in its past iterations.
Answer the Public is another great tool for understanding longer, informational queries that relate to a brand’s products or services. It creates a visual representation of the most common questions related to a head term, such as ‘flights to paris’ in the example below:
As the role of paid search evolves into more of a full-funnel channel that covers informational queries as well as transactional terms, tools like this one will prove invaluable. The insights it reveals can be used to tailor ad copy, and the list of questions can be exported and uploaded to AdWords to see if there is a sizeable opportunity to target these questions directly.
For marketers that want to investigate linguistic trends within their keyword set, it’s a great idea to use an Ngram viewer. There are plenty of options available, but this tool is free and effective.
AdWords Auction Insights is an essential tool for competitor analysis, as it reveals the impression share for different sites across keyword sets, along with average positions and the rate of overlap between rival sites.
This should be viewed as the starting point for competitor analysis, however. There are other technologies that provide a wider range of metrics for this task, including Spyfu and SEMrush.
Spyfu’s AdWords History provides a very helpful view of competitor strategies over time. This reveals what their ad strategies have been, but also how frequently they are changed. As such, it is a helpful blend of qualitative and quantitative research that shows not just how brands are positioning their offering, but also how much they have been willing to pay to get it in front of their audience.
A basic licence for Spyfu starts at $33 per month.
SEMrush is a great tool for competitor analysis, both for paid search and its organic counterpart. This software shows the keywords that a domain ranks against for paid search and calculates the estimated traffic the site has received as a result.
The Product Listing Ads features are particularly useful, as they provide insight into a competitor’s best-performing ads and their core areas of focus for Google Shopping.
It is also easy to compare desktop data to mobile data through SEMrush, a feature that has become increasingly powerful as the shift towards mobile traffic continues.
A licence for SEMrush starts at $99.95 per month.
Used in tandem with AdWords Auction Insights, these tools create a fuller picture of competitor activities.
It is essential to optimize the full search experience, from ad copy and keyword targeting, right through to conversion. It is therefore the responsibility of PPC managers to ensure that the on-site experience matches up to the consumer’s expectations.
A variety of tools can help achieve this aim, requiring minimal changes to a page’s source code to run split tests on landing page content and layout. In fact, most of these require no coding skills and allow PPC marketers to make changes that affect only their channel’s customers. The main site experience remains untouched, but paid search visitors will see a tailored landing page based on their intent.
Unbounce has over 100 responsive templates and the dynamic keyword insertion feature is incredibly useful. The latter adapts the content on a page based on the ad a user clicked, helping to tie together the user journey based on user expectations.
Branded keywords should be a consistent revenue driver for any company. Although there is no room to be complacent, even when people are already searching for your brand’s name, these queries tend to provide a sustainable and cost-effective source of PPC traffic.
Unless, of course, the competition tries to steal some of that traffic. Google does have some legislation to protect brands, but this has proved insufficient to stop companies bidding on their rivals’ brand terms. When this does occur, it also drives up the cost-per-click for branded keywords.
Brandverity provides some further protection for advertisers through automated alerts that are triggered when a competitor encroaches on their branded terms.
This coverage includes Shopping ads, mobile apps, and global search engines.
Although not a specific tool, it is worth mentioning the additional benefits that custom scripts can bring to AdWords performance. These scripts provide extra functionality for everything from more flexible bidding schedules, to stock price-based bid adjustments and third-party data integrations.
This fantastic list from Koozai is a comprehensive resource, as is this one from Free Adwords Scripts. PPC agency Brainlabs also provides a useful list of scripts on their website that is typically updated with a new addition every few months.
Using the tools listed above can add an extra dimension to PPC campaigns and lead to the essential competitive edge that drives growth. As the industry continues to evolve at a rapid rate, these tools should prove more valuable than ever.
This year’s Winter Games in PyeongChang, South Korea will host the first large-scale public demonstrations of 5G video streaming technologies, broadcasting industry group IBC reports today, as well as the world’s first major 8K HDR video production. While the next-generation wireless and video standards have been tested in labs across the world, their use at the Olympics will be their first large public debut.
On the 5G front, the International Olympic Committee has worked with Intel and Korea Telecom to create 5G wireless infrastructure at select Winter Games venues. Thanks to real-time 5G video links to bobsled cameras, viewers at home will be able to experience Olympic bobsledding from “an extraordinary bullet’s eye view” at the front of any sled picked by TV producers. According to Olympic video producers, the multiple “real-time links are only possible with the low latency (almost zero delay) of 5G,” proving that 5G has game-changing applications in gathering video from events, as well as distributing it to viewers.
Other 5G demonstrations will be viewable only in special zones using demo 5G viewing devices. Intel will offer “time-sliced views of skaters in motion,” letting viewers switch between different angles of figure skating performances at any given moment, as well as “Omni-View,” a multi-view, real-time presentation of every cross country skiing competitor. The company will also offer a 5G connected car experience in Seoul, demonstrating in-car video conferencing powered by high-bandwidth, low-latency 5G networking.
IBC also reports that the Winter Games will host “the largest ever live 8K UHD production,” featuring high dynamic range (HDR), “a world first on this scale.” 8K is the successor to 4K television, offering four times as much detail; HDR expands color and brightness ranges to include stronger and more subtle tones of white, colors, and black. While both formats were introduced near-simultaneously, their incredible bandwidth demands required a gradual transition from the prior top video standard, 1080p.
As 8K HDR TVs are not yet commercially available, OBS is working with Japan’s NHK television network to capture 90 hours of 8K content including figure skating, ski jumping, and snowboarding that will be displayed on special screens. Some screens will be set up at PyeongChang’s International Broadcast Center for viewing during the Olympics, while others will be used for private viewing in Japan. NHK is expected to roll out satellite 8K video feeds in 2020.
American viewers won’t be totally left out of the ultra-high-definition experience. Though most of the games will be shot in 1080i, NBC will have access to a downconverted 4K HDR version of the 8K footage for display in the United States.
Two former Apple designers are unveiling Caffeine, a new social broadcasting platform for games, entertainment, and other artistic content.
The platform is social, real-time, personal, and requires no third-party software or plug-ins. It comes from Ben Keighran, the former product design lead for Apple TV, and Sam Roberts, the former Apple senior user experience designer. The company has raised $46 million in two rounds of funding from Andreessen Horowitz and Greylock Partners.
The Palo Alto, Calif.-based company, also called Caffeine, aimed to create a simple and safe experience for life broadcasting. The Caffeine platform is in pre-release at caffeine.tv and on the Caffeine.tv iOS app.
Above: Caffeine will have an easy-to-use interface for social broadcasting.
Keighran is also a former co-founder of Chomp, a search startup that was acquired by Apple in 2012. Keighran and Roberts hired former Valve and Oculus game leader Anna Sweet to head Caffeine’s business, content, and strategy efforts. Ben Horowitz from Andreessen Horowitz and John Lilly from Greylock Partners are on the board.
“We do something different when it comes to live broadcasting. We are not the first livestreaming platrform,” said Caffeine CEO Keighran in an interview with GamesBeat. “We are doing our own broadcasting tools. We are going after those on Twitch. We are going after the 800 million people who are not on it already. ”
He added, “You can publish directly to Twitter and Facebook, where people already have large audiences. And everything that happens on Caffeine happens in real time. We have our own data center and technology.”
Above: Caffeine lets you chat and broadcast while playing games.
Caffeine will enable broadcasters to record with a single click, without the need for additional software. The app lets you broadcast games on a PC using software. You can also broadcast via a webcam from a Mac or PC web browser, or you can use the Caffeine iOS app. You don’t have to concern yourself with details such as bitrates, stream keys, IP addresses, or other time-consuming details.
Beyond watching games, you can also watch movies or TV shows with other people. I did so in a brief demo of the Caffeine platform.
“Caffeine is masterfully designed to enable creators in all fields to connect with their audiences in the best way possible,” said Horowitz in a statement. “I am extremely excited to be working on this new future with Ben and team.”
Keighran said the PC game streaming app provides in-game overlays, which create a single-screen experience for interacting with audiences.
“Because video is in real time, all the interactions are natural and as though you are in the same room,” he said. “We created built-in tools that allow broadcasters to instantly share their show on Facebook and Twitter, which allows broadcasters to quickly reach existing audiences with new content and build their Caffeine community even faster.”
Above: Caffeine has an iOS app for social broadcasting.
Users can find content because of the people they follow in their social circles, and they can come together to experience that content. That means there are no endless feeds of meaningless comments, Keighran said.
Personal conversations with friends and creators are given preference, enabling more meaningful social engagements while disposing of toxic chatter, the company said. And because the proprietary infrastructure delivers content and conversations with virtually no latency, the interactions happen in real time, he said.
The whole point is to enable more personal, meaningful, and stronger relationships between broadcasters and followers. A monetization system will debut on the platform in early 2018. The team has been working on the tech since the spring of 2016, and it has more than 20 people. Building the real-time broadcasting tools required a lot of investment, Keighran said.
“We are very focused on the casual people, or the 798 million gamers who don’t stream already,” Keighran said.
The team has been testing the tech for about nine months now. The mobile experience is pretty similar to the PC experience, where you see a feed. You can broadcast over the phone as well. The tech uses WebRTC technology for real-time communications.
The PC Gaming channel is presented by Intel®'s Game Dev program.
Amazon sellers are a breed of their own. They are proactive entrepreneurs that aim to make money by reaching the e-commerce giant’s customer base.
Not a bad strategy. Amazon does the heavy lifting in terms of storing and shipping your products, gets your product in the spotlight, and allows you to scale your business fast. But none of that matters if you don’t know how to outsmart your competition.
To grow your business in 2018 and beyond, you need to maximize your opportunities with Amazon PPC Ads.
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There are many components of Amazon advertising, but for basic entry-level sellers, the process starts in Seller Central with Automatic and Manual Campaigns for Sponsored Product Ads. I just threw some weird terms at you and I promise I’ll explain each one thoroughly.
First, let’s go over some basics.
Google said: “15 percent of searches we see every day are new — which means there’s always more work for us to do to present people with the best answers to their queries from a wide variety of legitimate sources.”
Sellers have to do certain things to capture that 15% that they won’t be able to predict. This brings me to long-tail vs. head terms.
Head terms, or head keywords, are easy one- or two-word phrases that you already know customers will search for. For example, if you’re selling Badger Balm, “Badger Balm” would be a pretty obvious head term that will be successful every single time. They are pretty expensive terms because of their high search rate and competition.
Long terms, or long-tail keywords, are going to be multi-word phrases that you can’t really predict. They will cost less than head terms because they have a low search rate with low competition.
To dive deeper into an example, let’s look at how a head term can evolve into a long-tail term:
Balm
Badger Balm
Discount Badger Balm
Discount Coconut Badger Balm
Discount Coconut Rosemary Badger Balm
Discount Coconut Rosemary Badger Balm Sensitive
Discount Coconut Rosemary Badger Balm Sensitive Skin
Discount Coconut Rosemary Badger Balm Sensitive Skin Organic
Discount Coconut Rosemary Badger Balm Sensitive Skin Organic For Lips
You get the picture.
This is a nice image I found on Vizlly, a hospitality marketing agency site. Most of the mass of the Brachiosaurus contains more generic search terms, while his thinning tail reaches out to more specific search terms.
If you’re familiar with Google AdWords, you probably know about exact, phrase, and broad match types. Quick summary:
The least specific match type that reaches the largest audience. If you sell Badger Balm you will probably show up for “face balm” or “badger food.” This match type has the lowest CTR.
This match type offers more control. When a potential customer searches “Badger Balm,” sellers can show up for “Discount Badger Balm” or “Badger Balm Coconut” but can’t show up for “Badger Food” or “Coconut Balm.”
As you may have guessed, this is the most specific match type and the most restrictive. If a potential customer searches for “Badger Balm,” your ad is only eligible for those words in that order. However, this match type has the highest CTR.
These match types were made up by Google and copied by BingAds and even though Amazon is traditionally secret about how they rank ads, they do use some of the same methods as AdWords.
How Amazon ranks its own ads is very similar, but they do have different motives.
This key difference extends the idea of what is defined as a “Quality” Ad.
Related Content: The 10-Minute Guide to Quora Advertising for Marketers
At the end of the day, Amazon cares about what products make them the most money and will prioritize well-performing ads over others. You have to know what gets you noticed by Amazon’s ad-ranking system.
Amazon doesn’t use the term Quality Score, but they do use the same idea: combining a number of factors to influence the ranking of an ad.
Performance Metrics:
Relevance Metrics:
Learn more about Amazon’s ranking system in a recent post by Ad Badger.
Above is an example of a great product page that has everything to convince a customer to make a purchase, including bulleted features, a clear product name, zoomable images, color options, tons of reviews, and even a product video.
Yes, this is obviously an Amazon product, but that means that it’s the best example to use when creating your own product page.
Related Content: How to Gauge the Success of Your PPC Campaign
Now that you have an idea of what a good product page looks like, let’s dive into the types of ads you see on Amazon:
At Ad Badger, we emphasize Sponsored Product Ads and for good reason.
Sponsored Product ads are the most popular ad on Amazon and are seen almost everywhere in the customer journey: on the search results page, on product pages, on Amazon’s homepage, etc.
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To figure out what terms your customers are searching for, you need to have a system in place for discovering these key terms.
Yes, Seller Central is where the seller calls all the shots. Here, you set up your ad campaigns and see all the metrics associated with them.
Seller Central is used by third-party sellers or individual sellers who sell to customers through the Amazon marketplace. There is also Vendor Central for first-party sellers or big distributors that sell products to Amazon directly.
Check out this infographic to quickly catch up on the differences between Seller and Vendor Central:
Related Content: Marketer’s Guide to Reddit Advertising
Now we can focus on Automatic and Manual Campaigns for Sponsored Product Ads and discuss why they should be your first stop when beginning to advertise on Amazon.
Like I said, SPAs are extremely popular and subtle and generate really high CTRs. Amazon prioritizes these ads. If you are not prioritizing SPAs as well, you could be hurting your ROI by investing in other areas of Amazon advertising.
I’m going to highlight the differences between Automatic and Manual Campaigns because it will really excel your strategy when it comes to SPAs and help you control your advertising cost of sales (ACoS).
Here’s what Amazon sellers see inside the campaign manager in Seller Central. They have an option to choose “Automatic Targeting” or “Manual Targeting” for their ad campaigns, along with their campaign name, daily budget, and start and end date.
With Automatic Campaigns, sellers select budgets and Amazon automatically finds keywords that match your product’s category, related products, and your product’s descriptions.
Remember when I said you should have a system set in place for discovering keywords for your products? Automatic Campaigns allow you to discover long-tail keywords you may have never guessed that people would search for. That’s why Auto Campaigns are great for beginners. Sellers can go into discovery mode and find which terms work for them.
With Manual Campaigns, sellers handpick keywords they want to bid on with Manual Campaigns. Like Google AdWords, sellers can choose broad, phrase match, or exact keywords when bidding to fine tune their ad spending.
When setting up your manual campaign, remember to keep your keywords in the 20-40 range and not go overboard 500+ keywords. If you choose more than 500 keywords, there’s no way all of those are going to match with your product and you’ll be wasting ad money.
Automatic and Manual Campaigns both have some benefits and drawbacks:
Using Automatic and Manual Campaigns TogetherThe acronym that you need is RPSB, which stands for Research, Peel and Stick, Block. This means finding out which keywords get the best conversion rate and moving them into a “winner’s circle campaign.” Let me explain.
The research begins with Auto Campaigns.
On a regular basis, Amazon sellers should download the reports from their campaigns to find out the conversion rate of the keywords they’re bidding on. Sellers can see which keywords have the highest conversion rate and put them into a spreadsheet of winning terms.
You peel and stick the high-converting keywords into a new “winner’s circle” exact-match Manual Campaign.
Why go through this exercise on a regular basis? To open up the door for bid optimization.
By peeling out a search term from an automatic campaigns and sticking it into an exact-match Manual campaign, you can start bidding the ideal amount for that keyword – something you couldn’t do in an automatic campaign. You’ll be able to bid more on terms that convert at 20%, and bid less on terms that convert at 2%.
Next, you want to block these winning terms from triggering your automatic campaign.
If keywords are running in both Auto and Manual Campaigns, it defeats the purpose of the peel-and-stick step. You don’t want your winning terms still triggering in your automatic campaign. Because every keyword is bid on the same amount in Auto Campaigns, the high-converting words won’t reach their maximum profit.
When all your bids are where you want them to be, you can now maximize revenue for terms that are converting well and get better ACoS.
Related Content: Podcast Advertising: What You Need To Know
You want to be highly organized in order to grow your Amazon business and reach maximum profit. In order to do that, you need to name your ad groups and campaigns properly.
A lot of Amazon sellers name their campaign by their product, but you should always name your campaign by what campaign type it is.
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If you’re going to be bidding on Badger Balm inside Automatic Campaigns, you want to name your campaign something like “Badger Balm – Auto Research.”
Or if you’re performing a Manual Campaign, you should name that campaign “Badger Balm – Exact Match Manual Campaign.”
Although there are many ways the process can be improved, Amazon PPC is still a frontier for online advertising.
Think of Amazon PPC like a ship. If you set sail and fall asleep, then you’re going to find yourself drifting off course.
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Amazon advertising is something you have to pay attention to in order to grow your product sales. RPSB isn’t something you do once and let it run its course. But if you keep up with your account, you will gain maximum revenue.
The post Amazon Basics: Why You Need Automatic and Manual Campaigns appeared first on Single Grain.
What follows are our 10 most popular articles for January 2018. "5 Content Marketing Ideas for February 2018." Valentine’s Day dominates the retail calendar in February, driving more than $18 billion in consumer purchases in the United States alone, including, by some accounts, $5.4 billion in ecommerce sales. Valentine’s Day spending often includes dinner out and movie tickets
The post January 2018 Top 10: Our Most Popular Posts appeared first on Practical Ecommerce.
The Trump administration is said to be planning on developing a secure 5G network that could be placed under federal control. The idea, which reportedly came about due to concerns about competitions and cybersecurity threats from China, was immediately met with backlash from the FCC and the wireless industry.
Axios reported over the weekend that National Security Council officials released a memo stating the United States requires a centralized 5G network system in the next three years. The memo further outlined that the best choice would be for the government to finance and build the infrastructure before renting to telecommunication companies like AT&T, T-Mobile, and Verizon.
Officials from the White House have told Axios and Recode that the memo Axios reported on was an old and out of date one. However, two anonymous administration officials claimed that discussions about the proposed 5G network were still in the early stages.
The current administration is known for being concerned about the security and economic threats posed by superpower China. The Asian giant has been aggressive in its development of 5G and it seems the Trump government is wary that China might spy on American citizens and businesses.
The idea of an administration controlling the country's next-generation wireless system is unheard of, and the pushback from the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) was equally surprising, considering its chairman was an appointee of the president.
FCC Chairman Ajit Pai quickly issued a statement opposing the “proposal for the federal government to build and operate a nationwide 5G network.” He further described the proposed endeavor as “a costly and counterproductive distraction from the policies we need to help the United States win the 5G future.”
JUST IN: FCC chair Ajit Pai declares opposition to White House proposal to nationalize 5G network https://t.co/6xdKuWjbS9
— Axios (@axios) January 29, 2018
Pai also suggested that the government should instead “push spectrum” into the marketplace and put up regulations that would encourage private companies to develop and implement the next-gen system.
A group comprised of telecom industry's leaders like AT&T and Verizon also opposed the plan and said on Monday that a competitive marketplace is the way to ensure the country remains as a trailblazer in 5G technology.
5G technology is expected to provide even faster speeds and almost unlimited Internet capacity when compared to the previous iterations of the wireless technology. It's also essential for the further development of new technologies like the Internet of Things (IoT), self-driving cars, and virtual reality. AT&T and Verizon already finalized plans to introduce 5G service in limited sectors in 2018.
The post Trump Administration Contemplates State-Run 5G Network appeared first on WebProNews.
January sure does drag on, doesn’t it? Luckily, the end is in sight, which means it’s time to take a look back at what happened in the world of social media throughout the month.
With some big platform updates and interesting campaigns, it’s been a busy start to the year. Let’s review.
February 7, 2018, marks the release of a brand new course in the Yoast Academy: Multilingual SEO. The Multilingual SEO training is for every site owner, developer or SEO who targets people in various locales and languages. The time-limited introductory price will be $169. After a week, it will go to its regular price of $199. Don’t miss this great Multilingual SEO course!
Loads of sites target consumers from other countries. Sometimes these consumers even speak another language. Targeting these customers with a well-thought-out SEO strategy takes some work, and many sites fail to deliver. Wouldn’t it be great to get some help reaching those customers in other countries? We know it can be a struggle setting everything up correctly so we’d like to help you. That’s why, on February 7, we’re launching the Multilingual SEO course.
Sign up for our newsletter and we’ll let you know when it’s available! »
According to Yoast founder and CEO Joost de Valk, many sites make mistakes when implementing the hreflang standard. The new Multilingual SEO training by Yoast makes hreflang easy to grasp and gives a step-by-step guide to implement hreflang correctly.
We’ll also teach you how to set up and maintain a multilingual keyword research strategy. Also, users get practical tips to transfer original content from one language to the next and to pick the domain name that fits their goals best.
The Multilingual SEO course will have an introductory price of $169. The regular price will be $199.
The Multilingual SEO training has over 2 hours of video, loads of reading material and interactive quizzes to educate users on every major issue surrounding multilingual and multiregional SEO. It will take about 12 hours to complete the full training program.
1. Introduction
2. Keywords and content
3. Domain structure
4. Hreflang
The Multilingual SEO training will be launched on February 7, 2018. Sign up for our newsletter and receive a message when it is available to buy.
Sign up for our newsletter and we’ll let you know when it’s available! »
The post Coming soon: Multilingual SEO training appeared first on Yoast.
Google is trying its best to catch up to its competitors in the cloud computing industry, especially the current market leader Amazon Web Services (AWS). In a recent announcement, the search engine giant—and one of the top players in the cloud segment—revealed that it will launch a digital store offering a slew of white-label cloud-based software products for use by companies and organizations.
Google will launch the online store in a joint venture with MobileIron, a company that offers cybersecurity tools for cell phones. Google also plans to bring Orbitera’s commerce platform to the deal while MobileIron will capitalize on its expertise in app distribution, analytics, and security to make the project work.
With the new online store in place, a company will be able to purchase cloud services for eventual distribution to its employees while, at the same time, keep its corporate data secure. The platform, which is expected to roll out later this year, will be accessed through mobile telecom providers.
In its online post, Google promised a host of advantages that the online cloud store could bring to resellers, enterprises, OEMs, and ISVs. For instance, customers can customize bundles, customize branding for both the marketplace and its customers, offer one centralize bill for various services, enjoy a more secure cloud access as well as analyze usage data to see when apps are being used.
In 2016, Orbitera was acquired by Google in a deal estimated to be worth around $100 million, a move that could help Google compete against cloud rivals AWS and Microsoft Azure. Orbitera created a buying and selling platform for cloud-based software.
News on MobileIron’s partnership with Google was positively received by the market. MobileIron shares climbed as high as 14 percent or a high of $4.60 during Tuesday’s trading until it eventually settled $4.62 by afternoon’s close.
[Featured image via Pixabay]The post Google to Launch Cloud-Based Digital Store, Teams Up with Mobleiron appeared first on WebProNews.
Abandoned shopping carts are a hurdle for online merchants. Optimizing your checkout process will lower abandonment rates, and increase sales. In this post, I'll review methods to streamline and simplify a checkout. I'll cite examples from the WooCommerce platform. But the broader points apply to all merchants, on all platforms
The post Optimizing Checkout Flow in WooCommerce appeared first on Practical Ecommerce.
Although they’ve technically been around since the 1950s, virtual chatbots only recently became popularized, as brands implement them to reach more customers with greater efficiency.
KLM Royal Dutch Airlines, for example, launched a chatbot via Facebook Messenger called “BB” (stands for BlueBot). The primary function of BB is to help passengers book tickets and keep them up to date on flight status, gate changes, and similar data-driven functions.
The company built the chatbot to assist its human support team, which handles more than 16,000 customer interactions weekly, according to coverage on the MarTech Today blog. In just the first six months of operation, BB sent nearly two million messages to more than 500,000 customers. Recently, KLM expanded the reach of the chatbot by hooking it up to Google Home, adding an audio/voice layer—an interesting augmentation.
I wrote about the rise of chatbots in my book, Hug Your Haters, and since then the rollout of chatbots has become even more extensive. But as I wrote about recently here at Convince & Convert, the truth is that a lot of chatbots (and live chat technologies) frustrate and disappoint customers, the very group they are supposed to aid.
Despite the missteps in execution, most consumers (in all generational categories) are relatively bullish on what chatbots can do, when, and how.
This became clear in a 2018 research project that surveyed more than 1000 adults in the USA, aged 18 to 64, balanced by age and gender. The survey sampling was provided by SurveyMonkey Audience, and the study itself was written and conducted by Drift, Salesforce (disclosure: Salesforce is a sponsor of my podcast, SocialPros), and myclever.
You may download a copy of the entire study here—no email address required. I have summarized the findings for you in this post, the 6 Critical Chatbot Statistics for 2018.
Certainly, as we found in the Hug Your Haters research, telephone and email are still the most common forms of interaction between customers and companies.
60 percent of survey respondents say they have used these mechanisms to interact with a business in the past 12 months.
38 percent say they have used online chat in the prior year.
30 percent indicate they’ve used a company’s mobile app to interact.
28 percent have engaged with a business in social media.
As of 2018, 15 percent of American adults (per this survey) say they have used a chatbot to interact with a company in the prior 12 months. This is almost precisely the same percentage of Americans who own a smart speaker (Amazon Alexa, Google Home, et al.) as of January, 2018 per research from our friends at Edison.
15% of American adults have used a chatbot. 16% own a smart speaker like Amazon Alexa.
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The survey respondents were asked what they would use a chatbot for, if available.
Interestingly, the most common use case for chatbots is “getting a quick answer in an emergency” at 37 percent. Personally, if I have an emergency, I’m not sure THAT’s the time I’m likely to turn to a robot for fast and accurate guidance.
The second-most-common use case is “resolving a complaint or problem” at 35 percent. This makes a ton of sense, and I profiled several companies (most notably, HP) in the Hug Your Haters book that are using chatbots to augment customer service, like KLM above.
Getting detailed answers or explanations is how 35 percent of respondents might use a chatbot. This is problematic today, as many of the circumstances where early-stage chatbots fall apart is in nuanced, specific requests from customers. Because chatbots—even with artificial intelligence—can only respond to what they are programmed to respond to, detailed answers are not where they tend to shine.
34 percent of respondents say they would use a chatbot to find a human customer service assistant. This one is pretty meta. If we have to use a robot to find a real person, that doesn’t say much for the capabilities of the robot, does it?
Other uses of chatbots make more sense (at least to me). They include:
37% of Americans would use a chatbot to get a quick answer, in an emergency.
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Participants in this survey were also asked about the primary benefits of chatbots, provided they were available and working for the online services these Americans used most.
Speed and availability are where chatbots are perceived to provide the most value to consumers.
Specifically, 64 percent of respondents said “24-hour service” is a benefit of chatbots.
The second most mentioned benefit is “getting an instant response,” mentioned by 55 percent of the participants.
“Getting answers to simple questions” (55 percent) and “easy communication” (51 percent) were also mentioned by more than half of respondents.
Perhaps unsurprisingly, “friendliness and approachability” (32 percent) are not areas where consumers believe chatbots are particularly strong. This is despite the manifest efforts of many brands to make their chatbots more “human.” Plenty of work to do in this regard, it appears.
64% of Americans say 24-hour service is the best feature of chatbots. Do you agree?
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This finding surprised me somewhat. The research discovered that the perceived benefits of chatbots are roughly equivalent among younger Millennials consumers and older Baby Boomer Americans. In fact, in several areas, Boomers are actually MORE bullish about chatbots’ potential that are members of the younger cohort.
For example, 61 percent of participating Baby Boomers say a potential chatbot benefit is “getting an instant response,” while just 51 percent of Millennials say the same.
Let’s recognize that “potential benefits” do not equal “usage,” but these findings indicate that older Americans are at least open to the premise of useful chatbots.
Millennials and Baby Boomers are equally bullish on the potential of chatbots.
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In the survey, participants were asked a simple and important question: “What would STOP you from using a chatbot?”
The number one answer is a tough one for chatbots to overcome, at least for a while: our innate desire to interact with other humans.
43 percent of adult Americans say they prefer to deal with a real-life assistant, rather than a chatbot.
I guess you can look at that as a half-full or half-empty statistic. On one hand, nearly half the country would just prefer to handle their business with another person. Fair enough. However, nearly six in 10 Americans do not object to using a chatbot in some circumstances.
As chatbots improve, it will be fascinating to see if this objection fades away.
The second hurdle for chatbot usage is actually related to the first. 30 percent say that they “worry about the chatbot making a mistake.”
Conversely, on the other end of the response scale, 15 percent of survey participants indicate that NOTHING would stop them from using a chatbot. That’s a high level of trust in technology!
15% of Americans say nothing would stop them from using a chatbot.
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In almost every case, respondents indicate they believe chatbots offer more benefits when communicating with businesses, in comparison to apps. The biggest difference is in the area of “getting quick answers to simple questions,” where 69 percent of participants say chatbots are up to the task, compared to 51 percent for apps.
Users also believe chatbots to be superior in the areas of “24-hour service” (62 percent versus 54 percent and “ability to easily register a complaint” (33 percent versus 24 percent) among others.
Apps fare better than chatbots in just three categories, but they are all important:
It’s interesting that in the circumstances where users believe chatbots to be superior, they’re FAR superior. But in the core function of easy, convenient, and customer experience, apps are perceived to be better, for now.
The full study also includes comparisons between chatbots and email, and chatbots and the telephone.
Compared to apps, chatbots are believed to be faster, but not as convenient.
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Chatbots are popping up like dandelions, and companies are rolling them out to save money and (in theory) add customer convenience. In 2018, overall consumer reaction to chatbots is positive, but still somewhat wary. This is probably wise, as chatbots will only get better as the artificial intelligence underpinnings improve, and businesses learn lessons (sometimes the hard way) about how best to utilize this new technology.
If my team and I here at Convince & Convert can help you stay ahead of customer expectations in the area of email/chatbots/messaging, please get in touch about a free analysis. We create Digital Marketing Maturity Maps for some of the world’s most interesting brands, and guide them as they accelerate, measure, and propel their digital.
The post The 6 Critical Chatbot Statistics for 2018 appeared first on Convince and Convert: Social Media Consulting and Content Marketing Consulting.
