7 key 2024 search trends to watch and 3 top priorities

In 2023, we witnessed the rise of AI-powered search and significant evolution of the SERPs with the arrival of Google’s Search Generative Experience, as well as Bing Copilot (formerly Bing Chat).

Google’s new AI model, Gemini, is their largest and most advanced with the capability to understand text, code, audio, images, and video. We expect to see its full potential unleashed on Google Search in 2024.

Meanwhile, Google continues to stress the importance of quality and experience while using AI models as a key component of ranking and re-ranking. Google released several algorithm updates this year around the quality of content and page experience.

Using AI is acceptable to Google for generating content as long as it is highly relevant and offers value. Still, don’t expect thin, AI-generated content with little or no value to easily earn SERP visibility for the long-term.

A topical, entity-first strategy is now a competitive advantage. Strengthening the technical foundation of your platform to improve discovery and experience is critical.

Bottom line: futureproofing digital presence for AI search should be a major priority for all brands in 2024.

Read on to discover seven key trends that should influence your roadmap in 2024, as well as three must-haves for success.

7 trends that will influence your strategic roadmap in 2024

These are the top seven trends we will notice in 2024. Changes above can only happen when we have the right infrastructure. 

1. SERP and visual optimization

In Google SGE and the SERPs, rich results will continue to evolve. So SERP optimization will remain critical as we expect zero-click results to grow due to SGE. 

Want to get into the AI-generated answer (or snapshot)? Keep publishing fast-loading pages filled with relevant, helpful, valuable and unique content. Some specific areas to prioritize:

• Experiential/informational videos.
• Web stories.
• Podcasts.
• Webinars.
• Visual optimization.
• FAQ/PAA.

2. Helpful content and content intelligence

A rock-solid content strategy will be essential in 2024:

• Find and fill relevant content gaps.
• Review content performance.
• Create personalized content based on user intent and touchpoints.
• Creating and optimizing various types of helpful content (e.g., topical and informational, localized, visual).

You want to demonstrate high levels of E-E-A-T and publish content written or reviewed by subject matter experts or demonstrate actual hands-on experience.

Every search happens because someone wants or needs something. Your content should help searchers achieve their goals or complete their tasks. How a user interacts with your content is just as important as the content itself.

To meaningfully do this, your strategy should include creating buyer personas. Create content based on the buyer’s journey at every touch point. Survey your customers and ensure content and UX align with the strategy.

Content intelligence – knowing what type of content will perform, based on data – should become your foundation of content creation.

Several generative AI tools and plugins can quickly create content, sure, but it’s typically unclear:

• What content types will perform well.
• How to humanize content.
• How to forecast the effectiveness of a content strategy.   

Establishing a data-driven approach to measure the effectiveness of content will become crucial for content creators.  

3. Engagement and experience

User interactions and engagement are incredibly important to shaping Google’s search results.

Google wants to reward expert-level content that is compelling and meets the needs of searchers.

Your goal in 2024 should be to improve the quality and experience for searchers by improving the quality of your content and the experience of the digital assets. 

4. Personalized experience

Google CEO Sundar Pichai said search will evolve substantively in the next 10 years. 

Search will be more personalized to impact users more profoundly and meaningfully. That may be why, on Nov. 15, Google introduced a personalized search experience, including a new Follow button, to show searchers more information about what they care about directly in their search results.

You also need to give your customers personalized experiences based on who they are, what they are looking for, and where they are coming from.

This means a tighter integration with your CDP (customer data platform) and CRM (customer relationship management) systems to ensure a personalized experience.

Clean data, audience segmentation, and data-driven campaigns to personalize experience are critical strategies to win in 2024. 

5. Multichannel approach

Take advantage of all opportunities on what will become increasingly competitive SERP real estate with limited inventory for organic listings. That means optimizing the customer journey across various channels and content types:

• Videos.
• Images.
• FAQs.
• PAAs.
• News.
• Webinars.

Be everywhere. Be consistent.

6. Local Strategy needs to be more personalized, localized, and experiential. 

If your brand has a local presence, add localized experiences to build expertise, engagement and traffic. For destination-based content, think:

• Local posts.
• Quality images.
• Videos.
• Web stories. 

Listings management alone will not be enough. You must optimize the entire local consumer journey – from your landing page to audience interactions across all channels.

7. Brand mentions and social proof 

We know LLMs are trained on a variety of sources to compile results.

You will need to understand what specific questions/topics your customers are seeking answers for, where they will get this information, and ensure we create targeted strategies to garner brand mentions and citations from well-respected sources and influencers with a substantial social following within the relevant industry.

3 priorities for staying ahead in changing times

With all the changes taking place, staying ahead of the curve and the changing times is imperative. “Keep up, or you will be left behind.”

Here are three main priorities to help you stay ahead. 

1. Technical Infrastructure which Enables Integrated, Robust Experience

Having a solid technical foundation is a must-have for 2024. A solid technical foundation ensures robust experience.

This includes the ability to centralize all your data to build meaningful dashboards and customer journey insights, component-based architecture that enables one-click personalized and omnichannel experiences, security infrastructure, fast server response (CDN), and integrations.

Dig deeper. Future Proofing Digital Experiences in AI First Semantic Search.

2. Embracing New Metrics

As AI serves answers in the search results, traffic is likely to decline. As more content is served within search results from Google properties, organic listings will continue to get more fragmented and will be pushed lower down on the page.

Traditional metrics like rankings will mean even less than they do today.

New metrics are emerging, and brands must consider adopting these as part of success criteria. New success metrics should include:

• Rich snippet visibility.
• Pixel height and width.
• Impressions.
• Clicks.
• On-site engagement.
• Conversions.

3. AI-Enabled Worker and Organization Alignment 

By learning how to apply AI in your daily life, you can become more efficient and better in creating content outlines, image creation, custom images, summaries, designs, and so many other places where AI should be used. 

• “A common fear has been around since the advent of AI – with many people asking ‘Will AI take my job?’  Not to worry! With the current technology, there is no actual intelligence in the AI, and it’s not coming for your job. However, there is a key need to adapt because AI can be used to do your job better,” according to Eric Enge.

Are you ready for 2024?

Smart organizations in 2024 will:

• Integrate channels to enable intelligent decisions.
• Connect customer journeys across touchpoints when creating an omnichannel strategy.
• Measure the right metrics, including zero-click and AI results.
• Prioritize training across the organization.

Some individual and organizational transformations will be needed. For example:

• Content writers should evolve into content strategists. 
• Developers should create exceptional experiences.
• Analytics teams should become business analysts.

Get familiar with AI. Learn to use large language models for forecasting, content generation and analyzing user behavior.

There are many ways to use AI to simultaneously improve your day-to-day efficiency and the quality of your work. 

AI-enabled workers and organizations will have the advantage. They will be more valuable than those that haven’t learned and leveraged AI tools.

Use the trends and strategies from this article to help decide what to prioritize and why and how to align organizations cross-functionally. 

from Search Engine Land https://ift.tt/QrjmqcJ
via IFTTT

Google Search is investigating reports of delayed indexing issues

Google posted an indexing issue with Google Search, saying it is investigating reports of indexing delays for content. Google said this issue is “affecting a small number of sites” and they are “working on identifying the root cause.”

What Google wrote. Google posted, “Google is investigating reports about delayed indexing in Google Search that’s affecting a small number of sites. We’re working on identifying the root cause. Next update will be within 12 hours.”

Google also posted these responses on X:

It's being looked at.

— Google SearchLiaison (@searchliaison) December 21, 2023

We added one now: https://t.co/UyuwtQqkrA

— I am John – Say no to cookies – biscuits only (@JohnMu) December 21, 2023

Started early this morning. The reports of these indexing issues started to come in around 1:30 am ET on Thursday, December 21. I initially posted about it on the Search Engine Roundtable, several hours prior to Google confirming the issue. You can see that some of the complaints came in as early as 1:30 am ET and continued to come in throughout even as I write this story.

Who is impacted. Initial thoughts were that only sites in India and specific regions were impacted but that is not exactly correct. Others thought it had to do with sites that publish both normal HTML pages, as well as offer an AMP alternative solution.

The sites I write at, here and the Search Engine Roundtable do not appear to be impacted. The Wall Street Journal, NY Times, Washington Post and other large publications also do not seem to be impacted.

Google said it is only “affecting a small number of sites.” Google will update us when it figures out the “root cause” of the issue. But I do not expect Google to share which sites were impacted and which were not.

What now. If you are impacted, there is not much you can do right now but wait it out. Google is investigating the issue on their end and will hopefully resolve the issue sooner than later. Google did say it will provide an update within the next 12 hours, but hopefully we will see an update sooner.

Why we care. If you are noticing issues with indexing of your content and thus traffic issues to your site from Google Search, then this may be why. Again, this specific issue is new, as of this morning. If you have been having indexing and ranking issues over the past several days or months, that is likely more of an issue with one of the Google Search algorithm updates and Google thinking your site is not worth ranking and indexing at this point.

from Search Engine Land https://ift.tt/hoVtExc
via IFTTT

6 books to help make your marketing more successful in 2024

One of the joys of living in a place where the winters tend to be long and dark is the time it allows for reading. Make a fire in the fireplace, pour yourself a drink and open a good book.

I often do the bulk of my reading for the year between October and March because then it’s outside time (which isn’t to say you can’t read outside).

We live in a time when we’re surrounded by marketing. Everything and everyone seems to be vying for our attention.

If you work in marketing, the idea of reading a book about something you do all day and that surrounds you every waking moment might sound unappealing. Yet, there are still new things to be said and new things to learn about marketing.

As you head into 2024, here are six books to put on your reading list.

The first thing you’ll likely notice is they aren’t all actually about marketing. But marketing is an essential part of every business and every leader must be a marketer to be successful.

1. Impossible to Ignore: Creating Memorable Content to Influence Decisions

The central focus of Dr. Carmen Simon’s book is the creation of memorable presentations, which is an area where many people have just enough knowledge of PowerPoint and Google Slides to be dangerous.

The problem with many of the day-to-day presentations we see in sales and business, in general, is they try to function as both a presentation and a leave-behind. That leaves them packed with information and light on strong visuals and stories, and those are the exact elements that stick in our memories and promote recall.

As evidence that the techniques in the book work, I like to refer to how Simon uses them in the book itself.

Years after first reading “Impossible to Ignore,” I remember her anecdote about standing in line at a store when she was a child in Soviet-era Romania. Food was in short supply, so the workers had to limit the number of people in line. They decided to send home everyone behind the girl who stood out in a bright red coat, which was a young Simon. The combination of strong visuals and a powerful story burned that in my mind.

2. Running with Purpose: How Brooks Outpaced Goliath Competitors to Lead the Pack

Why would a memoir by the CEO of an athletic shoe company make the list? Because marketing, at its essence, is about identifying and creating markets for whatever you’re selling.

When Jim Weber took over as CEO of Brooks, the company was trying to be everything to everyone who wore sneakers. That’s a lot of people in a market with many big brand names.

Weber and team decided to drop a large portion of the market by leaving the “athleisure” business, which consists of the low(ish)-cost sneakers people wear around the house or when they’re doing chores. They decided instead to focus on serious runners.

This one also has a great marketing play involving luxurious portable toilets Brooks brought to major races. To gain entry, runners had to be wearing Brooks footwear.

There’s a lesson on market disruption, too. Remember the craze over five-finger running shoes? Yeah, that was fun.

3. Unreasonable Hospitality: The Remarkable Power of Giving People More Than They Expect

Will Guidara has a unique resumé. Among his roles: restaurant owner, creative agency leader, conference host and the author of four cookbooks.

His specialty is hospitality. One of his guiding beliefs is that hospitality need not be limited to what we think of as the hospitality industry (i.e., restaurants, spas, hotels). Instead, businesses across industries can create experiences that delight customers and drive more business.

As Guidara rose to prominence in the restaurant business in New York City, his business became legendary for providing experiences like sledding in Central Park for a family that had never before experienced snow.

The moments of brilliance and generosity in the book could serve as a lesson for corporations across the business spectrum. Americans have relatively dim views of large corporations and financial institutions in general. They feel much better about small businesses, which are more nimble and structured in a way that makes personal touches possible.

Many marketers will tell you their brand is more than a logo or color palette, it evokes emotions and, most importantly, trust. In “Unreasonable Hospitality,” you get a view of what this truly looks like in practice.

4. The Power of Moments: Why Certain Experiences Have Extraordinary Impact

We can’t remember every detail of every experience. If you’ve ever watched a courtroom drama, you’ve seen this play out.

“So what you’re saying is, you’re not sure if the suspect had a beard or not when you saw him on that misty, moonless night?”

We remember the peaks of our experiences most of all. Sometimes, we remember the valleys of our experiences. Everything else gets labeled as “just not important enough to remember” by our memory.

In “The Power of Moments,” Chip Heath and Dan Heath help readers understand how our minds process and classify experiences. Once you understand how this all works subconsciously, it’s much easier to be deliberate in creating moments that matter for our audiences.

As a blueprint, the book looks at events that weren’t necessarily designed to be memorable, such as a “Signing Day” ceremony for graduating high school seniors where they announced which college they were attending. It then deconstructs the events to see what exactly made them memorable.

5. Humanizing B2B: The new truth in marketing that will transform your brand and your sales

Download a whitepaper. Get calls from sales reps. Receive email after email.

For years, the B2B marketing playbook was pretty boring – even a bit annoying. It’s improved to some extent but still has a long way to go. You probably know the feeling if you have friends who work in B2C marketing.

“Oh, you’re doing a Super Bowl ad? That must be exhausting for you…”

What if it didn’t have to be this way? (Spoiler alert: it doesn’t.)

Instead of being the boring part of marketing, Paul Cash and James Trezona say, B2B should appeal to the emotions of people trying to transform organizations and create change.

They draw heavily on research from The B2B Institute at LinkedIn to make the case that B2B buyers rely on emotions just as much as their B2C counterparts.

That makes a great deal of sense, when you think about it. Because they aren’t actually counterparts. They are the same people, and they don’t take off their B2B hat and put on a B2C hat when they finish their workday.

6. Obviously Awesome: How to Nail Product Positioning So Customers Get It, Buy It, Love It

Part of what I enjoy about April Dunford’s story is that, like me, she never set out to be a marketer. As someone without a formal marketing education, she asked a lot of questions. The answers left her unsatisfied.

“Trust me, it works.”

“Because we’ve always done it that way.”

The result is “Obviously Awesome,” a book that re-thinks product marketing from an outsider’s perspective.

The most difficult part for people trying to turn their product into a story that resonates with customers is where to start. Do you craft a story that starts with your features? Or do you focus first on the customers’ needs? What about differentiation?

You’ll have to read the book to find out.

from Search Engine Land https://ift.tt/9aAh5PD
via IFTTT

Google’s shifting approach to AI content: An in-depth look

The prevalence of mass-produced, AI-generated content is making it harder for Google to detect spam. 

AI-generated content has also made judging what is quality content difficult for Google.

However, indications are that Google is improving its ability to identify low-quality AI content algorithmically. 

Spammy AI content all over the web

You don’t need to be in SEO to know generative AI content has been finding its way into Google search results over the last 12 months.

During that time, Google’s attitude toward AI-created content evolved. The official position moved from “it’s spam and breaks our guidelines” to “our focus is on the quality of content, rather than how content is produced.”

I’m certain Google’s focus-on-quality statement made it into many internal SEO decks pitching an AI-generated content strategy. Undoubtedly, Google’s stance provided just enough breathing room to squeak out management approval at many organizations.

The result: Lots of AI-created, low-quality content flooding the web. And some of it initially made it into the company’s search results.

Invisible junk

The “visible web” is the sliver of the web that search engines choose to index and show in search results. 

We know from How Google Search and ranking works, according to Google’s Pandu Nayak, based on Google antitrust trial testimony, that Google “only” maintains an index of ~400 billion documents. Google finds trillions of documents during crawling. 

That means Google indexes only 4% of the documents it encounters when crawling the web (400 billion/10 trillion).

Google claims to protect searchers from spam in 99% of query clicks. If that’s even remotely accurate, it’s already eliminating most of the content not worth seeing.  

Content is king – and the algorithm is the Emperor’s new clothes

Google claims it’s good at determining the quality of content. But many SEOs and experienced website managers disagree. Most have examples demonstrating inferior content outranking superior content.

Any reputable company investing in content is likely to rank in the top few percent of “good” content on the web. Its competitors are likely to be there, too. Google has already eliminated a ton of lesser candidates for inclusion.

From Google’s point of view, it’s done a fantastic job. 96% of documents didn’t make the index. Some issues are obvious to humans but difficult for a machine to spot.

I’ve seen examples that lead to the conclusion Google is proficient at understanding which pages are “good” and are “bad” from a technical perspective, but relatively ineffective at decerning good content from great content.

Google admitted as much in DOJ anti-trust exhibits. In a 2016 presentation says: “We do not understand documents. We fake it.”

A slide from a Search all-hands presentation prepared by Eric Lehman

Google relies on user interactions on SERPs to judge content quality

Google has relied on user interactions with SERPs to understand how “good” the contents of a document is. Google explains later the presentation:  “Each searcher benefits from the responses of past users… and contributes responses that benefit future users.”

A slide from a Search All Hands presentation prepared by Lehman

The interaction data Google uses to judge quality has always been a hotly debated topic. I believe Google uses interactions almost entirely from their SERPs, not from websites, to make decisions about content quality. Doing so rules out site-measured metrics like bounce rate. 

If you’ve been listening closely to the people who know, Google has been fairly transparent that it uses click data to rank content.

Google engineer Paul Haahr presented “How Google Works: A Google Ranking Engineer’s Story,” at SMX West in 2016. Haahr spoke about Google’s SERPs and how the search engine “looks for changes in click patterns.” He added that this user data is “harder to understand than you might expect.”

Haahr’s comment is further reinforced in the “Ranking for Research” presentation slide, which is part of the DOJ exhibits:

A slide from “Ranking for Research” DOJ exhibit

Google’s ability to interpret user data and turn it into something actionable relies on understanding the cause-and-effect relationship between changing variables and their associated outcomes.

The SERPs are the only place Google can use to understand which variables are present. Interactions on websites introduce a vast number of variables beyond Google’s view.

Even if Google could identify and quantify interactions with websites (which would arguably be more difficult than assessing the quality of content), there would be a knock-on effect with the exponential growth of different sets of variables, each requiring minimum traffic thresholds to be met before meaningful conclusions could be made.

Google acknowledges in its documents that “growing UX complexity makes feedback progressively hard to convert into accurate value judgments” when referring to the SERPs.

---

Get the daily newsletter search marketers rely on.

Business email address

See terms.

---

Brands and the cesspool

Google says the “dialogue” between SERPs and users is the “source of magic” in how it manages to “fake” the understanding of documents.

A slide from “Logging & Ranking” DOJ exhibit

Outside of what we’ve seen in the DOJ exhibits, clues to how Google uses user interaction in rankings are included in its patents.

One that is particularly interesting to me is the “Site quality score,” which (to grossly oversimplify) looks at relationships such as:

• When searchers include brand/navigational terms in their query or when websites include them in their anchors. For instance, a search query or link anchor for “seo news searchengineland” rather than “seo news.”
• When users appear to be selecting a specific result within the SERP.

These signals may indicate a site is an exceptionally relevant response to the query. This method of judging quality aligns with Google’s Eric Schmidt saying, “brands are the solution.”

This makes sense in light of studies that show users have a strong bias toward brands.

For instance, when asked to perform a research task such as shopping for a party dress or searching for a cruise holiday, 82% of participants selected a brand they were already familiar with, regardless of where it ranked on the SERP, according to a Red C survey.

Brands and the recall they cause are expensive to create. It makes sense that Google would rely on them in ranking search results.  

What does Google consider AI spam?

Google published guidance on AI-created content this year, which refers to its Spam Policies the define define content that is “intended to manipulate search results.”

Google spam policies

Spam is “Text generated through automated processes without regard for quality or user experience,” according to Google’s definition.  I interpret this as anyone using AI systems to produce content without a human QA process. 

Arguably, there could be cases where a generative-AI system is trained on proprietary or private data. It could be configured to have more deterministic output to reduce hallucinations and errors. You could argue this is QA before the fact. It’s likely to be a rarely-used tactic.

Everything else I’ll call “spam.”

Generating this kind of spam used to be reserved for those with the technical ability to scrape data, build databases for madLibbing or use PHP to generate text with Markov chains.  

ChatGPT has made spam accessible to the masses with a few prompts and an easy API and OpenAI’s ill-enforced Publication Policy, which states: 

“The role of AI in formulating the content is clearly disclosed in a way that no reader could possibly miss, and that a typical reader would find sufficiently easy to understand.”

OpenAI’s Publication Policy

The volume of AI-generated content being published on the web is enormous. A Google Search for “regenerate response -chatgpt -results” displays tens of thousands of pages with AI content generated “manually” (i.e., without using an API).

In many cases QA has been so poor “authors” left in the “regenerate response” from the older versions of ChatGPT during their copy and paste.

Patterns of AI content spam

When GPT-3 hit, I wanted to see how Google would react to unedited AI-generated content, so I set up my first test website.

This is what I did:

• Bought a brand new domain and set up a basic WordPress install.
• Scraped the top 10,000 games that were selling on Steam.
• Fed these games into the AlsoAsked API to get the questions being asked by them.
• Used GPT-3 to generate answers to these questions.
• Generate FAQPage schema for each question and answer.
• Scraped the URL for a YouTube video about the game to embed on the page.
• Use the WordPress API to create a page for each game.

There were no ads or other monetization features on the site.

The whole process took a few hours, and I had a new 10,000-page website with some Q&A content about popular video games.

Both Bing and Google ate up the content and, over a period of three months, indexed most pages. At its peak, Google delivered over 100 clicks per day, and Bing even more.

Google Search Console Performance data from this site presented by Lily Ray at PubCon

Results of the test:

• After about 4 months, Google decided not to rank some content, resulting in a 25% hit in traffic.
• A month later, Google stopped sending traffic.
• Bing kept sending traffic for the entire period.

The most interesting thing? Google did not appear to have taken manual action. There was no message in Google Search Console, and the two-step reduction in traffic made me skeptical that there had been any manual intervention.

I’ve seen this pattern repeatedly with pure AI content: 

• Google indexes the site.
• Traffic is delivered quickly with steady gains week on week.
• Traffic then peaks, which is followed by a rapid decline.

Another example is the case of Casual.ai. In this “SEO heist,” a competitor’s sitemap was scraped and 1,800+ articles were generated with AI. Traffic followed the same pattern, climbing several months before stalling, then a dip of around 25% followed by a crash that eliminated nearly all traffic.

SISTRIX visibility data for Causal.app

There is some discussion in the SEO community about whether this drop was a manual intervention because of all the press coverage it got. I believe the algorithm was at work.

A similar and perhaps more interesting case study involved LinkedIn’s “collaborative” AI articles. These AI-generated articles created by LinkedIn invited users to “collaborate” with fact-checking, corrections and additions. It rewarded “top contributors” with a LinkedIn badge for their efforts.

As with the other cases, traffic rose and then dropped. However, LinkedIn maintained some traffic.

SISTRIX visibility for LinkedIn /advice/ pages

This data indicates that traffic fluctuations result from an algorithm rather than a manual action. 

Once edited by a human, some LinkedIn collaborative articles apparently met the definition of useful content. Others were not, in Google’s estimation.

Maybe Google’s got it right in this instance.

If it’s spam, why does it rank at all?

From everything I have seen, ranking is a multi-stage process for Google. Time, expense, and limits on data access prevent the implementation of more complex systems. 

While the assessment of documents never stops, I believe there is a lag before Google’s systems detect low-quality content. That’s why you see the pattern repeat: content passes an initial “sniff test,” only to be identified later.

Let’s take a look at some of the evidence for this claim. Earlier in this article, we skimmed over Google’s “Site Quality” patent and how they leverage user interaction data to generate this score for ranking. 

When a site is brand new, users haven’t interacted with the content on the SERP. Google can’t access the quality of the content.

Well, another patent for Predicting Site Quality covers this situation. 

Again, to grossly oversimplify, a quality score for new sites is predicted by first obtaining a relative frequency measure for each of a variety of phrases found on the new site. 

These measures are then mapped using a previously generated phrase model built from quality scores established from previously scored sites.

Predicting Site Quality patent

If Google were still using this (which I believe they are, at least a small way), it would mean that many new websites are ranked on a “first guess” basis with a quality metric included in the algorithm. Later, the ranking is refined based on user interaction data.

I have observed, and many colleagues agree, that Google sometimes elevates sites in ranking for what appears to be a “test period.” 

Our theory at the time was there was a measurement going on to see if user interaction matched Google’s predictions. If not, traffic fell as quickly as it rose. If it performed well, it continued to enjoy a healthy position on the SERP.

Many of Google’s patents have references to “implicit user feedback,” including this very candid statement: 

“A ranking sub-system can include a rank modifier engine that uses implicit user feedback to cause re-ranking of search results in order to improve the final ranking presented to a user.”

AJ Kohn wrote about this kind of data in detail back in 2015.

It is worth noting that this is an old patent and one of many. Since this patent was published, Google has developed many new solutions, such as: 

• RankBrain, which has specifically been cited to handle “new” queries for Google.
• SpamBrain, one of Google’s main tools for combatting webspam.

Google: Mind the gap

I don’t think anyone outside of those with first-hand engineering knowledge at Google knows exactly how much user/SERP interaction data would be applied to individual sites rather than the overall SERP. 

Still, we know that modern systems such as RankBrain are at least partly trained on user click data. 

One thing also piqued my interest in AJ Kohn’s analysis of the DOJ testimony on these new systems. He writes: 

“There are a number of references to moving a set of documents from the ‘green ring to the ‘blue ring.’ These all refer to a document that I have not yet been able to locate. However, based on the testimony it seems to visualize the way Google culls results from a large set to a smaller set where they can then apply further ranking factors.”

This supports my sniff-test theory. If a website passes, it gets moved to a different “ring” for more computationally or time-intensive processing to improve accuracy.

I believe this to be the current situation:  

• Google’s current ranking systems can’t keep pace with AI-generated content creation and publication.
• As gen-AI systems produce grammatically correct and mostly “sensible” content, they pass Google’s “sniff tests” and will rank until further analysis is complete. 

Herein lies the problem: the speed at which this content is being created with generative AI means there is an unending queue of sites waiting for Google’s initial evaluation.

An HCU hop to UGC to beat the GPT?

I believe Google knows this is one major challenge they face. If I can indulge in some wild speculation, it’s possible that recent Google updates, such as the helpful content update (HCU), have been applied to compensate for this weakness.

It’s no secret the HCU and “hidden gems” systems benefited user-generated content (UGC) sites such as Reddit. 

Reddit was already one of the most visited websites. Recent Google changes yielded more than double its search visibility, at the expense of other websites. 

My conspiracy theory is that UGC sites, with a few notable exceptions, are some of the least likely places to find mass-produced AI, as much content is moderated. 

While they may not be “perfect” search results, the overall satisfaction of trawling through some raw UGC may be higher than Google consistently ranking whatever ChatGPT last vomited onto the web.

The focus on UGC may be a temporary fix to boost quality; Google can’t tackle AI spam fast enough.

What does Google’s long-term plan look like for AI spam?

Much of the testimony about Google in the DOJ trial came from Eric Lehman, a former 17-year employee who worked there as a software engineer on search quality and ranking.

One recurring theme was Lehman’s claims that Google’s machine learning systems, BERT and MUM, are becoming more important than user data. They are so powerful that it is likely Google will rely more on them than user data in the future.

With slices of user interaction data, search engines have an excellent proxy for which they can make decisions. The limitation is collecting enough data fast enough to keep up with changes, which is why some systems employ other methods.

Suppose Google can build their models using breakthroughs such as BERT to massively improve the accuracy of their first content parsing. In that case, they may be able to close the gap and drastically reduce the time it takes to identify and de-rank spam.

This problem exists and is exploitable. The pressure on Google to address its shortcomings increases as more people search for low-effort, high-results opportunities.  

Ironically, when a system becomes effective in combatting a specific type of spam at scale, the system can make itself almost redundant as the opportunity and motivation to take part is diminished.

Fingers crossed.

from Search Engine Land https://ift.tt/zdTM1JR
via IFTTT

Join a masterclass on data storytelling by Cynthia Ramsaran

Data storytelling helps marketers present complex information in a relatable and compelling format – which plays a heavy hand in engaging consumers, influencing decisions and creating brand loyalty.

Join experts from Marigold for a 20-minute data storytelling masterclass and learn how to increase your conversions using data storytelling.

Register and attend “Data Storytelling Masterclass,” presented by Marigold.

---

Click here to view more Search Engine Land webinars.

from Search Engine Land https://ift.tt/srxPHQB
via IFTTT

Campaign management software: Everything you need to know

Campaign management software helps you automate the manual tasks of planning, launching and measuring the impact of your marketing campaigns.

Modern marketing campaigns often have many moving parts. Campaigns may involve multiple:

• Internal departments (e.g., creative, media, brand, legal).
• External partners (e.g., agencies, media, co-marketing).

Campaign management software helps keep stakeholders organized. Once the campaign is live, these tools help:

• Automate data collection on performance
• Generate insights.

Understanding the role of campaign management software

The biggest benefit of campaign management tools?

Organization.

All team members working on a marketing campaign must be organized before, during and after launch to be efficient and informed.

The right campaign management tools will improve collaboration and help teams move faster at each campaign stage, from preparing assets before launch to summarizing results after the campaign.

However, no true end-to-end, plug-and-play campaign management tool really exists.

But you can look for best-of-breed solutions that integrate well with existing tools and skill sets to build an ecosystem that meets your campaign management needs.

Key features and capabilities of marketing campaign management software

Marketing teams will benefit from campaign management solutions that help them across the campaign lifecycle of planning, tracking and analyzing.

The more tightly the tools are integrated, either out of the box or through the efforts of developers or marketing operations professionals, the better the experience will be for the marketers who use them.

Adopting several point solutions that cannot share information won’t create the efficiency you’re looking to gain from campaign management tools.

Campaign planning and scheduling

Aligning all the people and assets poses a significant challenge for teams, especially in distributed workforces.

Project management tools from several vendors can be used to track progress, assign work and send notifications. These tools offer automation, integrations and personalization capabilities that allow your team members to use them in a way that fits their work style.

The vendors with tools that will help your team with its campaign planning and scheduling include:

• Asana
• Monday.com
• SmartSheet
• ClickUp
• Trello
• Wrike

Audience segmentation and targeting tools

Using data and segmentation helps you avoid the inefficiency inherent in spray-and-pray marketing tactics. But you must have detailed audience and tool data to help segment that data into lists.

Many well-known cloud-based marketing tools can build lists based on certain criteria. Many also include the functionality to engage with the list members via email or create campaigns running on other channels (like paid ads) and connect to data sources to import data from those channels.

The vendors that make tools to help with audience segmentation and targeting include:

• HubSpot
• Salesforce
• Adobe
• ActiveCampaign
• Keap
• Klaviyo

Content creation and personalization

Many segmentation and targeting vendors also offer personalized marketing outreach. Customer data platform (CDP) vendors also help marketers craft personalized messages.

The combination of data and personalization functionality allows you to deliver the right message to the right person at the right time, which is a powerful combination for influencing prospects.

Multi-channel campaign execution

“Marketing cloud” vendors also offer visibility into your campaigns across channels, though it will likely require some work from the tool’s administrator or a marketing operations pro to get this working.

Leadership teams love high-level, holistic views, so the fewer data sources for your team to track down the better. You don’t want your team to spend valuable time collecting data from disparate sources to put in a slide deck for campaign updates and reviews.

Tracking and analytics

You might find that your existing campaign management software can’t work with all the data generated by their campaigns.

If that’s the case, you can pull together reporting tools from vendors like SAS, Tableau, SmartSheet and others to help manage your data and monitor campaign results.

Benefits of campaign management software

It’s difficult to coordinate, optimize and report on your campaigns without campaign management software.

While the exact tools and functionality you need will depend on many factors (i.e., your existing martech stack, your budget and your team), the right combination of tools will increase your efficiency and contribute to better outcomes.

Among the benefits of using campaign management software:

Improved efficiency and productivity

Some tools will help your team automate the often-mundane tasks that are simply part of marketing campaigns (e.g., deadlines, reporting). Other tools will help improve collaboration between the various roles that come together to create a marketing campaign.

Enhanced collaboration

Planning a marketing campaign often involves an assembly line that takes ideas from concept to reality and then introduces them to the market across various channels. That requires some job functions, and depending on your organization, possibly several departments.

Campaign management tools that establish deadlines and responsibilities keep the assembly line moving.

Data-driven decision making

Campaign management tools that collect and analyze data are important for quickly identifying how a campaign or portion of a campaign is performing. Having this data readily available allows for optimizations, such as diverting budget from an under-performing channel to an over-performing channel or making adjustments to creative units.

Software that helps analyze data also plays a key role in explaining the outcomes of a campaign to leadership teams that just want to know what they got for their investment in a campaign.

Considerations for choosing the right campaign management software

If you’re like most marketers, you’re trying to navigate lofty business goals, resource shortages and a variety of tools in a martech stack you inherited from someone else.

Licensing costs will play a critical role in investing in any technology. Here are four other criteria you can use to help make sound decisions around campaign management tools.

Scalability and flexibility

Tools that are too rigid and can’t grow with the organization make for poor investments.

Marketing is constantly changing, from the channels to the regulations that govern data collection and use, to new leadership with new ideas. You need to focus on tools designed to withstand these changes.

A constant cycle and ripping and replacing tools will hinder progress toward your goals.

User-friendliness and training

Many marketing teams are filled with people who can do a little bit of everything.

Deploying campaign management software with a steep learning curve delays progress but also creates bottlenecks when only certain people are capable of using it correctly.

Everyone needs training when a new tool is deployed, so make sure the vendor supports it. But the easier tools are to use the better.

Customer support and service

Even with training, your team is likely to hit some snags along the way. Good customer service from your campaign management software vendor can help your team keep moving, share best practices and introduce new features and functionality.

Look for the areas where your team has the most need. Start there.

If your campaign is getting stuck at the same point in the assembly line, then that’s your first area to address.

While software is certainly one way to solve a problem, don’t neglect other opportunities to increase efficiency.

If it’s a problem with people or processes, software alone is unlikely to fix it.

from Search Engine Land https://ift.tt/KVdFBf0
via IFTTT

Google evaluating more PMax brand safety tools following Adalytics report

Google is actively looking into improving brand safety controls for Performance Max (PMax) following a damning report by Adalytics.

The research, which was published last month, accused the search engine of serving ads on inappropriate non-Google websites through the Search Partner Network (SPN). Google denied the accusations but began giving advertisers the choice to opt out of the SNP a week later.

However, with this temporary measure set to end on March 1, 2024, Google Ads liaison officer Ginny Marvin has now confirmed that new safety controls are being considered.

Why we care. With Google removing the ability to opt out of the SPN, advertisers will want reassurance that their ads wont appear alongside inappropriate content that will unlikely reach their target audience and could damage their brand’s reputation.

What Google is saying. When Marvin was asked about PMax brand safety during a PPC Chat Q&A, she said:

• “As you probably saw, there’s a temporary option to request to opt out of Search Partner Network at the account level through March 1st. I don’t have any updates to share at this time, but this is temporary as the teams evaluate additional controls to put in place.”
• “As an FYI, looking at data from October, over 90% of SPN impressions were from Top 100 sites and apps, including YouTube.”

What did Adalytics say? Numerous ad buyers, expecting their campaigns to run on Google.com, found that their ads were actually appearing on compromising websites within the SPN, according to Adalytics. The GSP network websites include:

• Sites containing pirated content.
• Hardcore pornographic sites.
• Websites of companies located in countries such as Iran and Russia which may be under sanctions by the US government.

However, Dan Taylor, Vice President of Global Ads at Google, denied the allegations, claiming Adalytics has as a track record of publishing inaccurate reports that misrepresent Google’s products and make exaggerated claims.

Existing brand safety controls. As Google looks into adding more brand safety controls, you currently have tools at your disposal to manage the types of content your PMax ads can be displayed alongside in Search, Shopping, Display, and Video inventory:

• Search & Shopping suitability controls
  • New PMax campaign-level brand exclusions prevent your ads from serving for specific brand queries in Search & Shopping.
  • Account-level negative keywords prevent your ads from showing for those queries in Search & Shopping.

• Display & Video suitability controls
  • Content labels allow you to narrow the maturity level of YouTube & GDN content your ads can show on or next to. This is where you’ll find the one-click “content suitable for families” option, for example.
  • Inventory type – expanded, standard, limited – allows you to quickly choose the type of content best suited to your brand on YouTube & GDN.
  • Content type exclusions prevent ads from showing on certain areas of video content such as live streaming or embedded YouTube video.
  • Sensitive content categories allow you to exclude certain types of GDN content such as tragedy and conflict.
  • Exclude up to 1000 content keywords to prevent ads from showing on YouTube & GDN content related to those exact words.
  • Placement exclusions prevent your ads from showing on specific YouTube and GDN content. PMax respects account- and MCC-level placement exclusions.
  • PMax placement reports show the sites & apps where your ads appeared and are built expressly for GDN brand safety tools.
  • And new Search Terms Insights updates include more categories, API integration, custom date ranges & downloading.

---

Get the daily newsletter search marketers rely on.

Business email address

See terms.

---

Deep dive. Read our brand safety tips for YouTube and Google advertisers for more information on how to protect your brand.

from Search Engine Land https://ift.tt/ZlQwe2C
via IFTTT