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Google tests AI-powered ads for complex purchases

Written on May 22, 2024 at 3:31 am, by admin

Google is experimenting with a new ad experience on Search that aims to guide consumers through complicated buying decisions using AI assistance.

The big picture. The test explores how Google’s AI capabilities could enhance ads to provide more tailored advice and recommendations based on a user’s specific needs and context.

Why we care. With this update advertisers will be getting a higher converting clicka to their site. Although brands should look out for traffic volumes most likely decreasing as experience on the SERP increases.

How it works. If a user searches for something like “short-term storage” and clicks on an ad from a storage facility, they may be shown an AI-guided experience to determine their storage requirements.

• Users could share details like photos of items they need to store and their budget.
• Google’s AI would then analyze that information to recommend an appropriately sized storage unit and suggest packing materials.
• The experience would link back to the advertiser’s website to complete the purchase.

What’s next. The storage unit ads are currently just an initial test case. Broader rollouts to other verticals like travel, financial services and health care could follow if the AI proves helpful for guiding high-consideration purchases.

Courtesy of Search Engine Land: News & Info About SEO, PPC, SEM, Search Engines & Search Marketing

Google CEO is ’empathetic’ to content creators Search has wiped out

Written on May 21, 2024 at 12:29 am, by admin

We’re in a disruptive moment, according to Alphabet and Google CEO Sundar Pichai. Although he is optimistic that Google AI Overviews and Search will drive more traffic and engagement, that is zero comfort for the many content creators who have seen their websites obliterated by Google in recent months.

In a new interview, Pichai discussed concerns about Google hurting websites and businesses, as well as the future of Search, content and the web.

‘These are disruptive moments.’ Pichai was asked about concerns from publishers following the AI Overviews rollout announcement at Google I/O. He likened this AI shift to concerns around the transition from desktop to mobile and the introduction of featured snippets:

• “I remain optimistic. … As a company, we realize the value of this ecosystem, and it’s symbiotic. If there isn’t a rich ecosystem making unique and useful content, what are you putting together and organizing? So we feel it.”
• “But I understand the sentiment. It’s a big change. These are disruptive moments. AI is a big platform shift. People are projecting out, and people are putting a lot into creating content. It’s their businesses. So I understand the perspective [and] I’m not surprised. We are engaging with a lot of players, both directly and indirectly, but I remain optimistic about how it’ll actually play out.”

Doomed businesses. Pichai was asked specifically about two sites that have loudly complained about losing 90+% of their Google traffic, including HouseFresh and Retro Dodo.

• “It’s always difficult to talk about individual cases, and at the end of the day, we are trying to satisfy user expectations. Users are voting with their feet, and people are trying to figure out what’s valuable to them. We are doing it at scale, and I can’t answer on the particular site…”
• “It’s not clear to me if that’s a uniform trend. I have to look at data on an aggregate [basis], so anecdotally, there are always times when people have come in an area and said, ‘Me, as a specific site, I have done worse.’ But it’s like an individual restaurant saying, ‘I’ve started getting fewer customers this year. People have stopped eating food,’ or whatever it is. It’s not necessarily true. Some other restaurant might have opened next door that’s doing very well. So it’s tough to say.”
• “You may be making a secondary point about small sites versus more aggregating sites… Ironically, there are times when we have made changes to actually send more traffic to the smaller sites. Some of those sites that complain a lot are the aggregators in the middle. So should the traffic go to the restaurant that has created a website with their menus and stuff or people writing about these restaurants? These are deep questions. I’m not saying there’s a right answer.”

Empathy. In an interesting moment, the tables were turned on Google, and Pichai was asked about how it felt when OpenAI transcribed over a million hours of YouTube videos to train GPT-4. The point being: Google is doing this same thing to millions of websites – taking their content, without permission, for profit. Pichai’s responses:

• “Look, be it website owners or content creators or artists, I can understand how emotional a transformation this is. …”
• “The way we have taken that approach in many of these cases is to put the creator community as much at the center of it as possible. We’ve long done that with YouTube. Through it all, we are trying to figure out what the right ways to approach this.”
• “…yes, I understand people’s emotions about it. I definitely am very empathetic to how people are perceiving this moment.”
• “Through this AI moment, over time, there’ll be players who will do better by the content creators that support their platforms, and whoever does it better will emerge as the winner. I believe that to be a tenet of these things over time.”

AI content and ranking. Google is in a unique position, where it helps generate AI content (via Gemini) that can be used to flood the web, with the goal of ranking in Search. Pichai said he thinks “using AI to produce content en masse without adding any value is not what users are looking for,” adding:

• “Anytime you have these disruptive platform shifts, you’re going to go through a phase like this. I have seen that team invest so much. Our entire search quality team has been spending the last year gearing up our ranking systems, etc., to better get at what high-quality content is. If I take the next decade, [the] people who can do that better, who can sift through that, I think, will win out.”

AI Overviews. Pichai continues to push the idea that AI Overviews are increasing Search usage. Pichai called it “one of the most positive changes I’ve seen in Search based on metrics.”

• “…In many cases, part of what is making people respond positively to AI Overviews is that the summary we are providing clearly adds value and helps them look at things they may not have otherwise thought about. If you’re adding value at that level, I think people notice it over time, and I think that’s the bar you’re trying to meet. Our data would show, over 25 years, if you aren’t doing something that users find valuable or enjoyable, they let us know right away. Over and over again we see that.”

While this may be true, it seems like it shouldn’t be true, as I discussed in Google AI Overviews: More searches, less satisfaction. Pichai also completely avoided two questions about whether Google will make any of this data public, so people can verify whether Google’s claims about AI Overview click-through rates and traffic are true.

A richer web. Pichai was asked what the web will look like in five years:

• “I hope the web is much richer in terms of modality. Today, I feel like the way humans consume information is still not fully encapsulated in the web. Today, things exist in very different ways — you have webpages, you have YouTube, etc. But over time, I hope the web is much more multimodal, it’s much richer, much more interactive. It’s a lot more stateful, which it’s not today.”
• “I view it as, while fully acknowledging the point that people may use AI to generate a lot of spam, I also feel every time there’s a new wave of technology, people don’t quite know how to use it. When mobile came, everyone took webpages and shoved them into mobile applications. Then, later, people evolved [into making] really native mobile applications.”
• “The way people use AI to actually solve new things, new use cases, etc. is yet to come. When that happens, I think the web will be much, much richer, too. So: dynamically composing a UI in a way that makes sense for you. Different people have different needs, but today you’re not dynamically composing that UI. AI can help you do that over time. You can also do it badly and in the wrong way and people can use it shallowly, but there will be entrepreneurs who figure out an extraordinarily good way to do it, and out of it, there’ll be great new things to come.”

The interview. You can watch the interview or read the full transcript on some tech news rag.

Courtesy of Search Engine Land: News & Info About SEO, PPC, SEM, Search Engines & Search Marketing

10 reasons to join us at online SMX Advanced next month

Written on May 21, 2024 at 12:29 am, by admin

The rise of generative AI and ChatGPT is unprecedented. Google’s March core update has major content implications. SGE is shaking up the SERPs as we know them.

Turn these daunting challenges into market-winning opportunities: Attend SMX Advanced for free, online June 11-12, to learn elite, actionable search marketing tactics that can help you keep a competitive edge and drive measurable success.

Check out the just-launched agenda, featuring exclusive keynotes with Google’s Director of Product Management and former Tinuiti VP Aaron Levy…

…plus 40+ tactic-rich sessions, Overtime live Q&As, Coffee Talk meetups, product demos, and more. Keep reading for 10 undeniable reasons why you should join us online next month:

1. You’ll unlock unbiased, trustworthy content from the experts at Search Engine Land, the industry publication of record.
2. Attend from anywhere: office, home, cafe, couch, etc. No travel headaches, no time out of the office, no carbon emissions.
3. Can’t justify registration fees? No problem. SMX Advanced is 100% free to attend.
4. You’ll only learn safe, reputable, reliable training — no get-rich-quick schemes or dodgy tactics.
5. Hours of live Q&A means you’ll get expert answers to your toughest questions.
6. Can’t attend live? On-demand access is included with your free pass, so you can train at your own pace.
7. Hear what the best in the biz are up to… and validate your own initiatives and instincts.
8. Discuss common challenges and forge game-changing connections during Coffee Talk meetups.
9. Unite your departments with a shared training experience – invaluable to on-site and remote teams alike.
10. Earn a personalized certificate of attendance to demonstrate your commitment to continued training and furthering your career.

Ready to register? Secure your FREE All Access pass now.

Psst… Yes, you’re an advanced marketer… but are you “award-winning”? Enter the 2024 Search Engine Land Awards for your chance to take home the highest honor in search. Super Early Bird expire at the end of next week! Learn more here: searchengineland.com/awards

Courtesy of Search Engine Land: News & Info About SEO, PPC, SEM, Search Engines & Search Marketing

Straight from the source: 2024 Search Engine Land Awards judges reveal what makes an application award-worthy

Written on May 21, 2024 at 12:29 am, by admin

Since its inception in 2015, the Search Engine Land Awards have recognized exceptional marketers on an annual basis — showcasing outstanding work, providing well-earned exposure in coverage and interviews, and bestowing upon them the highest honor in search.

But the road between deciding to begin an application and winning the award can be a long one. Although the 2024 submission process is exceptionally streamlined — it’s never been faster or easier to apply — there’s still a story that has to be told.

The way you tell that story is entirely up to you… but why not bear in mind some first-hand advice from select 2024 judges while you’re at it?

Keep reading for a roundup of fresh insights from some of our judges… and submit your entry before the May 24 Super Early Bird deadline to save $300 off last chance rates!

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There you have it! Remember: The Super Early Bird deadline to enter the 2024 Search Engine Land Awards is coming up fast… submit your entry by Friday, May 24 for your chance to take home the highest honor in search and save big while you’re at it!

Courtesy of Search Engine Land: News & Info About SEO, PPC, SEM, Search Engines & Search Marketing

Has ChatGPT launched its Search product in stealth?

Written on May 21, 2024 at 12:29 am, by admin

OpenAI didn’t launch its much-rumored ChatGPT Search product last week. Or did it?

Has OpenAI quietly launched an early version of ChatGPT Search, as part of the GPT-4o rollout?

ChatGPT (the free 4o version) now tells you the sites it is searching to provide its AI-generated answers and crawls and summarizes webpages. And the websites it lists aren’t hallucinations.

Searched sites. When you ask a question that requires current information, ChatGPT will tell you it is “Searching the web.” Once this part completes after a few seconds, ChatGPT tells you it “Searched X sites” and lists them.

Here’s a screenshot:

OpenAI and Microsoft are partners. So based on this screenshot, OpenAI is likely using retrieval augmented generation (RAG) to rewrite the query and search on bing.com to find websites.

But remember – OpenAI also launched a web crawler, GPTBot, in August.

• Side note: If you blocked ChatGPT and other AI companies over content theft concerns, you may want to reconsider that.

Dig deeper. Should you block ChatGPT’s web browser plugin from accessing your website?

Answers and sources. ChatGPT’s answer experience is much better – especially the prominent linking to sources – than what Google is now doing with its recently launched AI Overviews. In this screenshot, ChatGPT cites 9to5Google and Search Engine Land multiple times:

Browser. I asked ChatGPT whether it can search the web. I have no way to verify whether this is fact or hallucination, but here’s how ChatGPT responded:

• “Yes, I can search the web using a tool called the browser. This allows me to find current information, recent events, or detailed answers that aren’t in my training data. If you need me to look up something specific, just let me know what you’re looking for!”

Summarizing content. ChatGPT is crawling links and summarizing the information from them. This was shared on X by Dave Davies, a Search Engine Land contributor and speaker at SMX Advanced:

ChatGPT Search. As a reminder, don’t expect ChatGPT Search to look like Google Search. OpenAI CEO Sam Altman has said Google is boring and the world doesn’t need another Google.

Dig deeper. Is ChatGPT the Google Search killer we’ve been expecting?

Why we care. OpenAI right now is in the underdog position Google once occupied and seems to be slowly and smartly developing a unique take on Search combined with large language models (LLMs). With negative sentiment around Google, OpenAI has a legitimate shot at making a run at Google – not by trying to emulate Google, but by changing the paradigm.

Courtesy of Search Engine Land: News & Info About SEO, PPC, SEM, Search Engines & Search Marketing

Why advertisers can no longer trust Google

Written on May 17, 2024 at 3:26 pm, by admin

The Department of Justice’s laid out a damning case against Google in the antitrust lawsuit closing argument.

Search Engine Land Managing Editor Danny Goodwin highlighted some of the damaging evidence – including how Google has been increasing costs for advertisers – in How Google harms search advertisers in 20 slides

In light of the revelations, I contacted search marketers to get their thoughts on Google Ads to evaluate the current confidence level. Spoiler alert: it’s not good.

Clearly, trust is a major issue – and in the court of public opinion among advertisers, Google has already been found guilty.

Here’s what advertisers told Search Engine Land:

Manipulation and deceptive practices

Sarah Stemen (Paid Search Specialist and Founder):

• “Their willingness to rewrite help desk documents, frankly, feels shocking after such revelations.”
• “It seems like Google is trying to hide the mechanics of a potential first-price auction rather than ensuring a truly fair second-price system.”

Boris Beceric (Google Ads consultant and coach):

• “The only one ‘benefitting’ from randomization is Google.”
• “Google is a monopoly that’s raising prizes without telling advertisers about it.”

Dids Reeve (Freelance Paid Media Specialist):

• “The document reads like randomization is code for ‘we can deviate from the usual auction algorithm to make ourselves some more money’. And that if advertisers perceive Google to be ‘randomizing’, then it would be bad enough that they want to cover up the fact.”

Chris Ridley (Paid Media Manager, Evoluted):

• “The latest news of Google randomizing the top two ad positions in the hope advertisers will raise their bids, is a sign that Google is willing to rewrite the rulebook for advertising on their platform.”

Robert Brady (Founder and PPC Expert):

• “Exact match bears the name ‘exact,’ but the behavior of the match type is far from exact. They keep the name because it gives advertisers a false sense of precision.”
• “Randomization in this context is used the same way. The layperson would infer that it meant the behavior was truly random (not influenced by predictable factors), so Google deflects scrutiny when a full analysis shows that their ‘randomization’ showed a clear preference in Google’s favor.”

Amy Hebdon (Google Ads Conversion expert):

• “With RGSP, Google has gaslit advertisers with disingenuous explanations of the changes, trying to convince us that this lack of transparency is for our benefit.”

Google’s prioritization of profit over fairness

Jyll Saskin Gales (Google Ads Coach):

• “However, reading the internal Google commentary on the practice, it’s clear that the motivations for randomization were not noble.”

Charley Brennand (PPC Consultant & Founder):

• “Google will never put advertisers’ needs before their need to grow profit.”

Hebdon added:

• “Using ad rank and a second-price auction, Google already had a system prioritizing quality and user experience while setting a fair price for advertisers. Where’s the flaw in that model, besides the fact that Google wasn’t extracting the maximum revenue possible?”

Julie Friedman Bacchini (Founder of NeptuneMoon):

• “My main takeaway from this is that these exhibits show that Google Ads is absolutely doing what is best for Google Ads first and foremost.”

Nick Handley (Head of Paid Media Performance at Impression):

• “Google has a monopoly on the Search space and until another player challenges Google, I feel we’re going to continue to see this type of revenue-increasing tactic to continue with Google putting stakeholders above clients.”

Trust in Google is quickly collapsing

Kirk Williams (Founder of Zato):

• “But I can say that these [evidence brought up against Google] continually demonstrate the problem Google has right now: trust.”
• “Google has an optics problem right now, and these documents help erode, rather than increase, trust.”

Stemen added:

• “It challenges the very foundation of trust and transparency that’s essential for a healthy digital advertising ecosystem.”
• “It raises the question – what else haven’t they been transparent about?”

Reeve added:

• “It makes me feel like the PPC community and their clients are being manipulated, too.”

Ridley added:

• “We, as advertisers, should not take anything we know about how ad auctions work at face value, even if it’s within the Google Ads Help Center.”

Brennand added:

• “Now with the published data from the court case, we can see that we’ve been manipulated and actually, not even our Google counterparts are privy to what Google is up to.”

Handley added:

• “Given the recent DOJ vs Google trial, it’s becoming increasingly harder to trust Google and the recommendations they provide.”

Impact on advertisers and clients

Gales added:

• “The people who should be most angered by this are Google’s top customers, the Amazons and Temus and Expedias of the world, who spend millions a year on Google Ads just to be punished for their investment by being ‘randomly’ pushed down.”

Brennand added:

• “If this has only just been surfaced now, it begs the question of how many other harmful changes have happened under the radar that we didn’t know about.”

Handley added:

• “This poses an interesting question, how are we meant to trust recommendations from our reps? If they are in the dark as much as us, surely some of their insight is harmful to us advertisers.”

Perceived (un)fairness of ad auctions

Williams added:

• “When users believe an auction to be more about competition and less about manipulation by the auctioneer and then learn it to be otherwise, that causes a lack of trust.”

Gales added:

• “I support the principle of Randomization, as it seems to support the same principle as Quality Score: those with the deepest pockets shall not hoard all the clicks, and the most important thing is to give the user what they want – the best results.”

Ridley added:

• “For years, Google has been telling advertisers through their Google Ads Help Articles that Ad Rank determines ‘whether your ads are eligible to show and, if eligible, where on the page your ads are shown (if at all) relative to other advertisers’ ads’.”
• They even go as far as providing six factors that contribute to calculating your Ad Rank and have published and regularly updated several Google-hosted articles that double-down on the concept that “Your ad’s position on the page is determined by your Ad Rank”

Other reactions of shock and disappointment

Stemen added:

• “However, encountering statements like ‘this gives us the freedom to config pricing’ in official court documents is a real blow.”

Reeve added:

• “It’s quite shocking to see in black and white the cynical way individuals at Google have discussed how they manipulate and warp the definitions and configuration of Google Ads metrics.”

Bacchini added:

• “Advertisers and PPC pros have long suspected some of this stuff, but seeing it in these docs is still stunning.”

Why we care: The breakdown in the relationship between Google and advertisers may start with trust – but it goes beyond that. It becomes harder or impossible to trust advice from ad reps, having seen that Google is prioritizing revenue over fairness via manipulative practices. It means advertisers have an even harder job of ensuring they are not just throwing advertising budget down the drain but actually gaining incremental conversions with their ad spend.

Dig deeper. Has Google Ads lost all credibility? Why one advertiser says it’s time to leave

Courtesy of Search Engine Land: News & Info About SEO, PPC, SEM, Search Engines & Search Marketing

TikTok now testing 60-minute video uploads

Written on May 17, 2024 at 3:26 pm, by admin

TikTok is testing a new 60-minute video upload limit, which could unlock new content possibilities for brands, marketers and content creators.

Why we care. TikTok is already a powerful discovery engine, but the ability to upload 60-minute videos opens up TikTok’s potential as a platform to host long-form branded video content – rather than breaking up videos into multiple parts.

Why TikTok is testing this. TikTok wants to give creators more flexibility and the ability to experiment with new types of long-form content (e.g., cooking demos, beauty tutorials, educational lessons, comedic sketches) that don’t fit well into shorter videos.

Not widely available. This new 60-minute video upload option is being tested with a limited number of users in select markets. It is not available to all users yet and TikTok has no “immediate plans” for a wider rollout, TechCrunch reported.

Longer videos, more ads? This development could also lead the way to TikTok offering more advertising, in the form of pre- and mid-roll ads.

Keeps getting longer. In January, TikTok started testing 30-minute video uploads. That followed increases to 15 minutes in 2023 and 10 minutes in 2022.

• At launch, TikTok videos were limited to 15 seconds. TikTok later increased the maximum video length time to 60 seconds, then tripled that to 3 minutes in July 2021.

Courtesy of Search Engine Land: News & Info About SEO, PPC, SEM, Search Engines & Search Marketing

Navigating the AI wars: Winning SEO strategies for brands

Written on May 17, 2024 at 3:26 pm, by admin

As the traditional search box becomes obsolete and the vast majority of searches shift to the extreme long tail, SEO will invariably evolve in the future.

It’s actually not such a bold prediction if you have been in the search space for a while. Data has shown time and time again that searchers don’t want to “search” but “find.” AI will finally make that happen, which is why every major tech company is shifting its focus to it.

Those of us who have been around for a while remember the PC war, the OS war, the first browser war, the smartphone war, the second browser war, the search engine war and the smart speaker war.

The AI wars will make them all pale in comparison because AI is the future to which all of those technologies pointed.

Who will win the AI wars?

At this point, it’s anybody’s guess. We know the ones who captured the early buzz, such as OpenAI’s ChatGPT, Google’s Gemini, X’s Grok and Anthropic’s Claude.

But don’t count out Apple and Amazon, which late in 2023, realized how annoyingly unintelligent Siri and Alexa were and what a goldmine they’d have if they could make them smarter. They announced their own LLMs, Ferret (now MM1) and Project Olympus. 

Don’t count out the countless other AI companies. Will one of them ultimately build a better model than the big companies and either compete with them or be acquired by them? Or will the AI landscape eventually fragment so people learn to go to different LLMs depending on the subject they’re looking for?

While we don’t know exactly who the winners will be just yet, anyone who’s been in search marketing for a while knows exactly what the winning AI will eventually look like. 

Follow the yellow brick road

In L. Frank Baum’s “The Wizard of Oz,” Dorothy finds herself lost and encounters three other lost souls: the Scarecrow, the Tin Woodsman and the Cowardly Lion.

Each of them is missing something.

• A brain
• A heart
• Courage
• Home

All these also happen to be what AI is missing now. 

‘If I only had a brain’: Knowledge

“Some people without brains do an awful lot of talking, don’t you think?”

– L. Frank Baumm, “The Wizard of Oz”

While chatbots seem impressive today, if you ask them anything more than a surface level of questions, you’ll quickly find where they lack.

Here’s an example. As a parent, I love the idea of buying toys made in America. It supports local manufacturing jobs, local communities and I find the quality and safety to be better than toys made overseas.

I asked Google Gemini for suggestions for toys made in the U.S. Here’s what it told me.

Here’s the strange thing.

The Manhattan Toy Skwish is made in Thailand, the Nuby Comfort Plush Turtle in China and Mega Bloks, which used to be made in Canada, are now made in Mexico and China. K’NEX labels read “made in China of USA parts.” 

In other words, out of six toys that Google Gemini recommends that are made in the USA, only one is. It’s the Green Toys My First Stack Cup.

OK, Google.

In fairness to Google, none of the other AI chatbots got it right. The problem is the age-old problem of “garbage in, garbage out.”

Google Gemini is tapping Amazon as one of its “authorities” on the subject. But when you go to Amazon’s own toys made in USA search results page (which happens to have ranked in the top 10 of Google’s organic results since the May 2020 core update), you’ll see that out of 75 product listings, nearly half of them are not made in the USA. 

“Experience is the only thing that brings knowledge, and the longer you are on earth the more experience you are sure to get.”

– L. Frank Baumm, “The Wizard of Oz”

While Google may have gotten away with ranking sites in organic search based more on their perceived authority than objective truth, users of their AI won’t be as forgiving.

There’s a reason Google has been stressing E-E-A-T for years, and it hasn’t just been out of the goodness of their hearts. They need E-E-A-T to survive. 

For a query like this, a retailer like FatBrain, which has been accurately cataloging and displaying the country of origin for all its products, will have an outsized advantage over less precise user experiences like Amazon’s. 

AI models that can pull from the most accurate information will have an outsized advantage over their competition, and brands that can produce this information will, too.

‘If I only had a heart’: Empathy

“I had brains and a heart also; so, having tried them both, I should much rather have a heart.”

– L. Frank Baumm, “The Wizard of Oz”

Let’s say you had a question and you know two people who knew the answer. One is brilliant but tends to be pedantic, smug and self-absorbed. This person might give you the right answer but definitely isn’t the most pleasant person to talk to.

The other person may not know quite as much as the first, but takes a genuine interest in what you’re saying, is open-minded, patient and respectful, asks meaningful follow-up questions and doesn’t just deliver you a right answer but does it in a way that you understand and appreciate.

Which of the two would you go to for the answer? Which of the two would you want around you 24/7?

Everyone knows that SEO requires E-E-A-T. But in the coming world of AI, there’s going to be another “E,” which may be the most important factor of all: empathy. 

The winner of the AI war will be a great communicator. While you can see the early attempts of AI companies to give their chatbots a “personality,” all the funniest jokes and most clever side comments will be nothing but annoying if the chatbot can’t – or won’t – understand your question. 

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‘If I only had the nerve’: Courage

“True courage is in facing danger when you are afraid.”

– L. Frank Baumm, “The Wizard of Oz”

In 1998, when Yahoo was at its pinnacle of power, Rick Skrenta and Bob Truel created GnuHoo in response, which later became DMOZ. Yahoo was dominant at the time, and many of us feared that the free and open nature of the Internet would be threatened by any one corporation controlling it. 

In 2002, Dave Hyatt, Joe Hewitt, and Blake Ross started what would become Firefox in response to the increasing pressure of Netscape’s commercial requirements. It later became a bulwark against Microsoft when Internet Explorer won the first browser war.

Ironically, Google eventually controlled and shaped the web by dominating both. Today, Alphabet, Apple, Amazon, Meta and Microsoft (through OpenAI) seem to be looking to control and shape AI. 

Those of us in the search space have witnessed how Google has evolved. While updates like Medic in 2018 did a lot of good in suppressing potentially dangerous YMYL sites, there are lingering questions of whether Google has too much power to elevate established (“authoritative”) voices and drown out legitimate voices in the minority. 

Google’s recent missteps with Gemini further illustrated the potential of what might happen if Google’s internal biases have too much influence on the training and testing of its AI. 

When the United States was established, its founders rooted it in classical liberal principles. All humans are created equal. All humans are born with certain rights, including the freedom to speak, assemble and worship as they please. Those on earth who wielded the greatest power were not to infringe on these rights.

With direct control over the information that 99,000 people a second ask around the world, Google arguably has more power than any government on earth today. The power that whoever wins the AI War will have will be much greater.

Will the winners of the AI war set their principles on classic liberty (i.e., “I may not approve of what you say but I will defend the right to say it”)? Or, to maintain “order,” will they do what so many totalitarian regimes have done in world history by suppressing voices that don’t agree with them, especially those who challenge their power?

Just as it took courage for America’s founders to do what they did – and 250 years later, we are still enjoying the blessings of liberty that they put in place – it will take courage for the winner of the AI war to do the same – or for another DMOZ or Firefox to arise to challenge them.

Home

“No matter how dreary and gray our homes are, we people of flesh and blood would rather live there than in any other country, be it ever so beautiful. There is no place like home.”

– L. Frank Baumm, “The Wizard of Oz”

I’ll end with the same bold prediction I started the last article with. 

Traditional search is going the way of TV, newspaper and radio advertising. At one time, those were the dominant advertising media. They’re still relevant today, but they have a small fraction of the influence they once had.

What will the “new search” look like? It’ll be people asking their robot for an opinion and the robot giving them the best possible answer. No clicks, no SERPs, no ads.

Oh, AI companies will try to inject ads into their answer, but you’ll drop that AI faster than you drop your friend, who takes every conversation to try to sell you into their latest MLM venture.

How do you compete in this new world? How do you survive and thrive as a brand in a world where all searches are zero click, all SERPs are a single result and people won’t be able to skip or block your ads because there won’t be ads to skip or block? 

The ultimate solution is to go back to 1993, the year before Yahoo was founded. 

Build your brand.

Search engines like Google were always just supposed to be a way to get customers into your door. From there, it was really up to you to win them over to your brand and earn their loyalty so the next time they search, they’ll bypass Google and go directly to you. 

In online marketing terms, if you look at your website traffic and see that your direct traffic is growing, you’re in good shape. But if your direct traffic has been shrinking while your traffic from other channels is growing, you’re in trouble. 

In 1993, businesses grew by building great products, taking care of their customers and relying mostly on word-of-mouth to promote their brands. 

In 2024, the most successful businesses still do it this way. 

When I asked ChatGPT, Grok and Gemini where the best place to buy books is, they all mentioned Amazon. Why? Because they’d look foolish if they said anything else.

Amazon didn’t pay the AI models to mention them, and the latter didn’t arbitrarily decide to promote Amazon. These AI models looked around them and saw that more people buy books from Amazon than anywhere else and that people generally have good things to say about their experience.

There is one thing that will always be more powerful than AI, and that’s free and independent human thought.

If you want to be known as the best widget company, your job is not to convince AI or even Google that you’re the best. Your job is to convince your customers. Like any other expert, AI’s opinion will be questioned if it capriciously contradicts public opinion.

In fairness to Google, every bit of SEO advice they’ve ever given was always about building your brand, from title tag optimization to Core Web Vitals to building links to E-E-A-T. These are all things you should have always been doing as a brand, not for Google’s sake but for your customers. 

Assuming that the winner of the AI wars has a good brain, a good heart and courage, we’ll be back home to a place where building your brand is back to being the most important ranking factor – which it always was.

Dig deeper: Modern SEO: Packaging your brand and marketing for Google

Courtesy of Search Engine Land: News & Info About SEO, PPC, SEM, Search Engines & Search Marketing

How to archive your Universal Analytics historical data

Written on May 17, 2024 at 3:26 pm, by admin

Another Google Analytics 4 migration project deadline is fast approaching, and this deadline is hard set. On July 1, Google will delete all historical data from Universal Analytics properties. This deadline also affects Analytics 360 customers.

With little more than a month until the deadline, if you have not done so by now, your organization needs to prioritize archiving your historical data. There are three main phases I recommend for approaching this project.

Phase 1: Make a plan

Before archiving data, it’s important to decide:

What specific data is important to you? 

• Prioritize downloading data that you regularly refer to, such as conversion and sales data.
• Make a full list of the data you need to archive.

How many years of data do you want to keep?

• Many of us have been using Google Analytics since the mid-2000s – does your organization need to archive data from nearly 20 years ago? 
• Decide how far back you want to archive data from. I recommend, at minimum, to consider archiving back to 2018 or so to ensure you have pre-pandemic data since the pandemic really presented data anomalies for many companies.

At what cadence do you review data?

• Consider how often you typically report on your data. Is it weekly? Monthly? 
• Depending on the archiving method you choose in Phase 2, you may need to organize the data into specific time increments.

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Phase 2: Choose an archiving method

There are four main options available for archiving your Universal Analytics data. Each has its own pros and cons, so choose a method based on your team’s resources and skills.

Option 1: Manual file downloads

• Pros: Easy for almost all users to do, free
• Cons: Time-consuming, cumbersome, difficult to access data for reporting later, limited to 5000 rows

While this is the easiest process to understand, it is also time consuming.

Following your plan for years, cadence and data points, you’ll need to go into each report in the Google Universal Analytics interface, set the date, dimension and metric settings as needed.

Also, remember to change the number of rows from the default of 10 to the maximum of 5,000 rows to ensure you capture as much data as possible.

Click the export button and export data to a Google Sheet, Excel or CSV. Repeat this process until you have downloaded all of the data identified in your archive plan.

Option 2: Download data to Google Sheets using the Google Analytics add-on (best option for tech novices)

• Pros: Fairly simple to implement for most users with spreadsheet experience, free, fast to download.
• Cons: Restrictive to a set timeframe (e.g., monthly), each sheet has total data limitations, often encounters sampling issues.

This option is fairly simple for most users to perform. Create a new Google Sheet and add the Google Analytics spreadsheetadd-on.

The add-on essentially uses the Google Analytics API to download data to Google Sheets but doesn’t require API programming knowledge to operate. Google has compiled a basic overview of this approach in this help document.

The first time you use the add-on, you’ll build a report using the add-on’s interface. But after the first report has been run, you can also simply update the Report Configuration tab and create additional reports directly in columns of that sheet.

You can also conveniently use formulas in the Report Configuration sheet. Use the Dimensions and Metrics Explorer to find the proper API code to enter into each field. 

One drawback of the Google Sheets method is that you may encounter sampling if you pull too much data at once (e.g., your entire 20-year dataset for sessions) or your report is too detailed (too many dimensions pulled together for a high level of granularity). 

When you run a report, you’ll see the sampling level on the report’s data tab in cell B6. If your report contains sampled data, you may want to consider reducing the amount of data in this particular pull, for example, you might split the pull into two time frames.

However, if you just can’t avoid sampling, check the data sample percentage on the report. Then, on the Report Configuration tab, unhide rows 14-17 and the sampling size on row 15 to this level so that your data remains consistent.

Tip: The add-on defaults to 1,000 lines of data in a report. Simply delete the 1,000 under the line labeled “Limit” (typically row 11).

Another drawback of the Google Sheets option is that each file is limited to 10,000,000 cells. Typically, each sheet starts out with 26 columns (A to Z) and 1,000 default rows (or 26,000 cells).

If your downloaded data exceeds the 10,000,000 cell limitation (which can very likely happen), then you may need to have multiple Google Sheets to download all of the data.

Option 3: Download data using the Google Analytics API

• Pros: Pulls data quickly once set up
• Cons: Requires web development knowledge and resources, doesn’t solve the data sampling issue, API quota limitations

If you have web development resources that can work on the archiving project, they can pull the data detailed in your plan using the Google Analytics API directly. 

This works similarly to the aforementioned Google Sheets add-on option, but it’s a more manual process in programming the API calls.

To learn about how to use the API for this project, visit Google’s archiving information page and review the second bullet, which details several resources and considerations for using the API for this data export project.

Option 4: Download data to BigQuery (best option overall)

• Pros: Simple to access data later for reporting, increased data insights, most flexible for data
• Cons: Complicated for novices to set up initially, can involve fees for BiqQuery, may require technical resources to set up, need to involve an additional tool

The main benefit of archiving your Universal Analytics data to BigQuery is that BigQuery is a data warehouse that allows you to ask questions of the data set through SQL queries to get your data very quickly. This is especially useful in accessing this data for reporting later. 

Analytics 360 users

If you are an Analytics 360 user, Google provides a native export to BigQuery. I recommend this method. See instructions from Google.

Everyone else

If you’re not an Analytics 360 user, then you’ll need to approach the BigQuery backup differently because Google does not provide innate BigQuery backup options in Universal Analytics for non-360 users. 

Here are the steps you’ll want to follow:

• Step 1: Create a Google API Console project and enable BigQuery.
  • Log in to the Google APIs Console.
  • Create a Google APIs Console project.
  • Navigate to the APIs table.
  • Activate BigQuery.
• Step 2: Prepare your project for BigQuery export.
  • Ensure Billing is enabled for your project. You may not need to pay anything, but it will vary depending on the usage and data you have.
  • If prompted, create a billing account.
  • Accept the free trial if it’s available.
  • Validate Billing enablement. Open your project at https://console.cloud.google.com/bigquery, and try to create a data set in the project. Click the blue arrow next to the project name, then click Create data set. If you can create the data set, billing is setup correctly. If there are any errors, make sure billing is enabled.
  • Add the service account to your project. Add analytics-processing-dev@system.gserviceaccount.com as a member of the project, and ensure that permission at the project level is set to Editor (as opposed to BigQuery Data Editor). The Editor role is required in order to export data from Analytics to BigQuery.
  • If you are in the EU, please also review additional requirements.
• Step 3: Set up a free trial of Supermetrics. Similar to the Google Sheets add-on in option 2 above, Supermetrics is a tool that helps non-technical users interface with and use APIs. They offer a free 14-day trial, which is likely all you’ll need for this project since you’re only downloading the Universal Analytics data once (not regularly).
  • Connect the BigQuery data source in the Supermetrics dashboard. 
• Step 4: In BigQuery, establish the connection to Supermetrics.
  • Navigate to BigQuery, then to Data transfers.
  • Click + Create transfer.
  • Select your Google Analytics by Supermetrics as your source and click Enroll. 
  • Fill in the transfer details. See detailed instructions on how to set up a transfer.
  • Under Third-party connection, click Connect source.
  • Accept the agreement.
  • Click Authorize with your Google data source.
  • Click Sign in with Google.
  • Sign in with the Google Account you use with this data source. This doesn’t have to be the same as the Google Account you use with Supermetrics.
  • Click Allow.
  • Select the accounts you’d like to include in your reporting and define the transfer settings.
  • Click Submit.
  • Click Save.

Because you only need to transfer the Universal Analytics data one time, you can also change the schedule on the transfer to On demand and then run the transfer now. 

Phase 3: Ensure you’ve captured it all

Before you consider the project complete, be sure to double-check your archived data to ensure you’ve captured everything you planned to archive.

On July 1, you will no longer be able to access Universal Analytics data, either by API or through the interface. 

Courtesy of Search Engine Land: News & Info About SEO, PPC, SEM, Search Engines & Search Marketing

Snapchat outlines Three Es for advanced marketing measurement

Written on May 16, 2024 at 12:26 pm, by admin

With rising data restrictions, Snapchat says “Execution, Experimentation and Evaluation” are the key pillars marketers need to focus on to ensure strategic measurement evolves with the times.

Why we care. While Google keeps delaying deprecating third-party cookies, it will happen. So it’s important for advertisers to maintain accurate campaign insights and revenue accountability to conduct effective marketing measurement with tighter data privacy laws.

How it works. The framework aims to create a cycle of constant testing, learning and iteration.

• Execution refers to the core campaign components that power marketing efforts day-to-day.
• Experimentation involves methods like A/B testing to course correct along the way.
• Evaluation uses techniques like media mix modeling to quantify real performance impact.

What they’re saying. “Advertisers who adopt this robust measurement approach see better advertising outcomes,” per Snapchat.

Between the lines. The real emphasis is on evaluating actual results over chasing vanity metrics.

• Snap says brands often prioritize “easy accessible correlation metrics over causal experimentation KPIs.”
• But if experimentation isn’t tied to evaluating bottom-line impact, “media optimization may be driving negative progress.”

Zoom out. Snapchat’s push is part of a broader industry reckoning as user privacy changes upend traditional digital measurement.

The bottom line. As ad measurement evolves, Snapchat is encouraging a more holistic, cyclical approach centered on continuous optimization and tying performance to real business outcomes.

Courtesy of Search Engine Land: News & Info About SEO, PPC, SEM, Search Engines & Search Marketing