SiteVisibility: Recent Episodes
SiteVisibility
We are eager to share some incredible news with you all today – SiteVisibility has officially been acquired by Crafted, an independent, performance-driven digital agency. This marks the beginning of an exciting new chapter, filled with tremendous growth opportunities.
Crafted has consistently demonstrated long-term sustained and healthy growth and together we look forward to building on that momentum further in the year ahead.
As part of Crafted, we’re excited to expand our capabilities and service offering, as we continue to deliver outstanding results for our valued clients.
For now, you can find more details on the acquisition the Crafted website.
Thank you for your ongoing support, and we can’t wait to share this journey with you!
In the ever-changing world of digital marketing, a significant shift is happening with the ongoing deprecation of third-party cookies. This is one of the biggest changes in marketing over the last 20 years and it aims to put an end to the pervasive tracking of users across the web for advertising purposes.
As the industry prepares for these upcoming changes, the importance of first-party cookies and data sources becomes clear for marketers. Unlike third-party cookies, first-party cookies are not easily blocked by ad blockers and browser restrictions, offering a more robust foundation for data collection. While obtaining consent for data collection remains necessary, the reliability and future-proofing offered by first-party data is significant.
Yet, the specifics of a world without third-party cookies remain somewhat uncertain. Discussions about change are everywhere, but the practical details are unclear. The Privacy Sandbox initiatives by Google are still in development; it’s uncertain what changes they will bring to Chrome and Google Ads.
In this article, we delve into the details of browsers and platforms, figuring out which ones have embraced or resisted the depreciation of third-party cookies. We also explain the impact this deprecation will have on marketing and websites.
Read on to learn how you can get ready for this upcoming change. There’s a lot to digest, so grab a coffee and a mince pie, and settle down for a while!
Cookie DefinitionsLet’s first understand the differences between the two types of cookies before we discuss the upcoming changes.
Third-party cookies: The cookie from a website you aren’t browsing at the time.
First-party cookies: The cookie from the website you are browsing at the time.
Third-party Cookie Deprecation TimelineThe depreciation of third-party cookies has been gradual over the last few years. The below timeline contains the key milestones since 2019, including information on the platforms that haven’t been forthcoming on how and when they’ll make this change.
- 2019: Google announced it plans to phase out support for third-party cookies in Chrome by 2022
- 2019 – 2020: Firefox and Safari blocked third-party cookies by default
- 2021: Google introduced Privacy Sandbox, an initiative to develop privacy-friendly technologies that will replace third-party cookies
- 2022: Google delayed its plan to phase out third-party cookies in Chrome until 2023, stating it required more time for testing and getting input from developers and marketers
- 2023: Google intends to deprecate third-party cookies in Chrome in the second half of 2024; the deprecation will be gradual and begin in the first quarter of 2024
The above shows what some of the big tech providers like Google have done. In spite of this, Meta and Microsoft Ads haven’t followed in their footsteps.
Meta doesn’t appear to have said they’ll phase out third-party cookies. A few years ago, it released a first-party tracking pixel to enable tracking in browsers like Safari, where third-party cookies are blocked. The pixel allows you to continue measuring ad performance across browsers. So far, this seems to be the only indication that Meta is preparing for a time without these cookies.
Microsoft Ads uses third-party cookies and doesn’t appear to have said when they’ll phase these out. The Microsoft Audience Network allows you to use either its own first-party data (e.g. search data from Bing) or your own (e.g. your Customer Relationship Management (CRM)). As with Meta, this appears to be Microsoft’s only indication that it’s preparing for this cookie change.
Google Analytics hasn’t been referenced above because it uses first-party cookies. So you can be reassured that Google Analytics 4 (GA4) will continue to collect data throughout the above changes.
The Impact of Third-party Cookie Deprecation & What To Do about ItOur research shows there are still many unknowns, particularly regarding the changes in Chrome and Google Ads. Google Ads will undergo changes as part of the ongoing development of Google’s Privacy Sandbox. However, the specific details of these changes have not been revealed yet.
From what we’ve been able to uncover so far, there are 7 areas of change to prepare for. In this section, we’ve summarised what these changes are likely to be and how you can prepare for them. You probably won’t be surprised to know that Paid Advertising and Analytics are the areas where you’ll see the biggest impact.
Ad TargetingAudience Targeting will Rely on First-party DataAdvertisers should use first-party data sources, such as GA4, to create audiences that can be shared with advertising platforms. You can use features like Google Ads’ ‘customer match’ to upload contact information of customers from your clients’ CRMs. Google then matches the information to that of Google users, so you can serve ads to them. You can use ‘similar audiences’ to create groups of people who are like your ‘customer match’ audiences. These audiences are made up of people who are likely to respond well to your ads.
This will extend to remarketing, i.e. you’ll need to rely on first-party data sources like your clients’ CRMs to build remarketing audience lists. You won’t be able to track users around the web and serve them with ads based on first-party data. You should still be able to target people who have visited your website and then show them ads when they’re on a different website. Google is still working on how they’ll enable this without third-party cookies though.
Contextual Targeting will Replace Behaviour-based TargetingFor years, the typical way of reaching website users with ads is by targeting them based on how they behave on those websites. For example, a user visits a page on pink shoes, so you serve them with an ad for pink shoes.
When third-party cookies are no longer used, we won’t be able to track users as they navigate between websites. As a result, we’ll need to depend on the contextual advertising methods below. This involves targeting people based on the content of websites. For example, if we’re selling pink shoes, we can decide to run ads for our shoes on websites that have content about shoes. Ad platforms like Google enable these methods with third-party cookies at present, but we suspect this will change. This is ultimately a move away from more precise targeting, but Google hasn’t provided details on how these changes will work or when they will happen.
Methods for Contextual Advertising:
- Keyword Targeting: Serves ads based on the keywords present on the page where the ad appears
- Topic Targeting: Serves ads based on the topic of the page where the ad appears
- Placement Targeting: Serves ads based on the specific website or app where the ad appears
Machine-learning Solutions will Provide Ad MeasurementWithout the ability to track users across websites, it becomes impossible to understand their interactions with websites or competitors’ ads. You’ll need to rely on alternative methods like conversion modelling, which estimates conversions based on the likelihood that a user with certain behavioural characteristics will have converted. Conversion modelling is now easier with the introduction of GA4. It uses machine learning to bridge the gaps in conversions when users haven’t consented to data collection. Therefore, it’s very likely that Google will release more machine-learning solutions to help measure your ads’ performance.
Smart Bidding Strategies will become The NormThese strategies optimise bids in real-time by using various signals like the below to show users highly relevant ads. Analysing and optimising for so many signals isn’t something that can be achieved by one person doing this manually.
- Operating system
- App
- Browser
- Language
- Query
- Ad creative
- Time of day
- Location
- Search partner
Smart bidding however, uses machine learning to read the user’s search query and signals like the above that help indicate the user’s intent, allowing the best possible ad to be served to that user. This approach is both highly effective and designed to last because it doesn’t depend on third-party cookies or data sources.
Frequency CappingLimiting the number of times an ad is shown to a user to prevent ad fatigue will become more challenging. This is because it currently depends on tracking individual users using third-party cookies. Users might see the same ads over and over again, which could make users tire of them and cause click-through rates to decrease.
Personalisation Without the ability to track user behaviour, ad personalisation will be less accurate. Users can disable ad personalisation in the browsers and apps they use. As a result, the impact of deprecating third-party cookies may not be as significant. Customising ad copy or images based on user behaviour or search queries will become more challenging. Tailoring ads based on demographic information will also be harder if ad platforms no longer have access to this information.
Analytics Platforms & TrackingAttribution & Performance MeasurementAttribution models will be affected due to the difficulty in connecting each user’s online touchpoint in their journey. This makes it more challenging to determine the effectiveness of each channel at generating conversions.
As third-party cookies are no longer available, machine learning models and predictive analytics will be used more to estimate missing conversions.
Encourage users to sign in to your website or app to collect data using first-party cookies. These cookies can be used to store each user’s session ID, which can be used to recognise the user across sessions. This will help increase the accuracy of user, session and conversion data.
Server-side TrackingMove away from client-side/browser-based tracking by using server-side tracking, which doesn’t use cookies. Tracking blockers, such as browser-based ones for ads and Apple’s Intelligent Tracking Prevention (ITP) for cross-site tracking, are bypassed. This improves the reliability of data collection. The cost of purchasing a server and employing resources to maintain it must be considered though, and consent to data collection is still required.
Privacy-centric PlatformsUse platforms that don’t rely on third-party cookies. GA4 is an example of this because it uses first-party ones. There are also platforms that don’t use cookies at all, e.g. Plausible and Fathom.
These types of platforms will help future-proof your data collection strategy because they don’t rely on third-party cookies. Instead, they can use machine learning to estimate online conversions when first-party cookies are limited. These limitations include:
- Being unable to identify a user if they’ve signed in to a website via a different device or browser to the one that set the cookie
- When a user has deleted the cookie
Consent ManagementSecuring consent from users to data collection will still remain non-negotiable for remaining compliant with privacy regulations. Keep using a Consent Management Platform (CMP) like Cookiebot to ask for consent and manage which tools can/can’t set first-party cookies. Continue to be open and honest with users about the data you collect and how it’s used. This will allow them to make informed decisions about giving their consent.
Chrome already has controls that let you enable/disable features, such as ad measurement and the collection of interest topics. These features are used by websites to display personalised ads. The controls are only likely to expand for users.
Website FunctionalityFunctionality could be affected if it relies on third-party cookies. For example:
- Login authentication
- Login to Social Media accounts
- Embedded content from third-party sites, e.g. videos, maps and Social posts
- Widgets from third-party sites, e.g. functionality for payments, calendars, bookings and reservations. Social sharing buttons that are provided via widgets could also be affected
Your developers will need to understand how your website uses third-party cookies, so they can find a different solution.
Audience ProfilingDetailed user profiling will be reduced if your profiles are built with third-party cookie data. It will be difficult for you to understand how users behave, and their views and preferences without access to extensive information about their behaviour across the web. Using more zero-party data sources, such as customer interviews and surveys, can provide you with an alternative way to profile your audience.
Greater Ad Budget Allocation to Big Players like GoogleGoogle, Facebook and Amazon already dominate online advertising because of how well-used they are for finding and buying products/services. Advertisers may become more dependent on them due to their extensive first-party data. This will result in a greater portion of advertising budgets being allocated to them.
Return to Traditional Measurement MethodsIn recent times, there’s been a resurgence of the more traditional measurement methods below:
- Incrementality Testing: It identifies the causal impact of a marketing campaign through testing. The tests are similar to A/B ones that are used in conversion rate optimisation. Half of your audience sees the campaign and the other half doesn’t. The different result between the two segments is the incremental impact of the campaign
- Media/marketing Mix Modelling: This identifies the effectiveness of marketing channels through multiple linear regression, which uncovers the relationship between marketing spend and conversions
Small and medium-sized businesses (SMEs) often aren’t able to easily access these methods. This is because they either lack the expertise to develop and manage the technology in-house, or they lack the budget to hire external agencies to conduct the testing. Interpreting the results still requires expertise within the organisation to assist clients and colleagues in understanding the testing and modelling conclusions. In the future, these will be affordable SaaS products with user-friendly interfaces that marketers and data analysts can easily use.
Potentially, Google Ads’ ‘conversion lift’ feature will allow businesses to start experimenting with incrementality tests. It’s not yet available for all accounts and you’re limited to running tests for ‘video action’ or discovery campaigns for now.
Conclusion The impending deprecation of third-party cookies is a pivotal shift in digital marketing. Marketers should plan to transition towards using first-party cookies and data sources as a future-proof data collection method. Their immunity to ad blockers and browser restrictions means they’re invaluable assets in this way.
While discussions about a post-third-party cookie world continue, the practical details remain unclear. This is especially true for Chrome and Google Ads. Google’s Privacy Sandbox initiatives will offer answers, but we’re uncertain about when and how much information will be provided.
Contact UsEnsure your marketing team and developers know about the themes discussed in this article and are getting ready for the upcoming changes. If you need advice on what more you can be doing, leave a message via the contact form below or call us on 01273 733 433.
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In this episode we’re joined by Robert Patin, Managing Partner of CreativeAgencySuccess. In his words, Robert is on a mission to eradicate the phrase ‘the starving artist’, and part of this mission involves helping creatives to conserve their creative energy by learning what to say yes to, and when to say no.
EXCLUSIVE LISTENER DOWNLOADRobert is giving 3 free resources for listeners of this podcast.
Hit creativeagencysuccess.com/sitevisibility where you’ll find:
- A link to download Robert’s book, ‘The Practical Agency’
- A guide to creating Capabilities Presentations
- The opportunity to book in an Agency Profitability Accelerator call
Referenced in this episode:* [Book] The Agency Blueprint by Robert Patin: https://amzn.to/3Qxlm8q * [Book} The Practical Agency by Robert Patin & Darren D. Ward: https://amzn.to/3QxPO2n
Connect w/ Robert/Creative Agency Success* creativeagencysuccess.com/sitevisibility
Connect with Scott:* https://www.linkedin.com/in/scottcolenutt/
Connect w/ SiteVisibility:
- https://www.sitevisibility.co.uk/
- https://twitter.com/sitevisibility
- https://www.linkedin.com/company/sitevisibility-a-division-of-ai-digital-ltd/
- https://www.instagram.com/sitevisibility/
- https://www.tiktok.com/@sitevisibility
- https://www.youtube.com/@SiteVisibility/
- https://www.threads.net/@sitevisibility
If you’d like to work with us, you’d like to feature on the podcast, or you have a guest or topic recommendation, please email marketing@sitevisibility.com
In this episode we’re joined by our former host, Kelvin Newman.
Kelvin runs Rough Agenda, a specialist marketing events company, based here in the UK. Rough Agenda is well known for housing the world’s largest search marketing conference, brightonSEO. brightonSEO has been running for 13 years and welcomes over 3000 marketers twice a year in Brighton, UK.
…and it’s about to get even bigger.
Kelvin and his team are heading to San Diego on the 9th and 10th November 2023 for the very first brightonSEO US event.
In this episode Kelvin joins us to share a behind the scenes look at what it’s taken to organise brightonSEO US, and a preview of what attendees can expect.
If you have any questions that you’d like to ask the keynote speaker at the event, Danny Sullivan, Public Liaison for Search at Google, you can add them here.
COMPETITIONKelvin is giving away 5 tickets for each day of brightonSEO US, taking place on 9th & 10th November 2023 at the Manchester Grand Hyatt in San Diego.
To enter, email Kelvin at kelvin@brightonseo.com with the subject line ‘Podcast Competition’ and note the day you want to attend in the email.
Kelvin will keep the competition open for a week after this podcast airs, with winners being selected at random and contacted shortly afterwards.
Connect w/ Kelvin/brightonSEO:* us.brightonseo.com * https://twitter.com/brightonseo * https://www.linkedin.com/company/brightonseo/ * https://www.linkedin.com/in/kelvinnewman
Connect with Scott:* https://www.linkedin.com/in/scottcolenutt/
Connect w/ SiteVisibility:
- https://www.sitevisibility.co.uk/
- https://twitter.com/sitevisibility
- https://www.linkedin.com/company/sitevisibility-a-division-of-ai-digital-ltd/
- https://www.instagram.com/sitevisibility/
- https://www.tiktok.com/@sitevisibility
- https://www.youtube.com/@SiteVisibility/
- https://www.threads.net/@sitevisibility
If you’d like to work with us, you’d like to feature on the podcast, or you have a guest or topic recommendation, please email marketing@sitevisibility.com
We recently helped one of our clients boost the number of leads from their ads by introducing lead forms.
The approach was designed to retain customers and collect their contact information, like email and phone number. Plus, if users have this information on their Google profile, it can be filled in automatically.
The campaign wanted to make it easier for the target audience to stay on the platform and simplify the process to match their preferences and behaviour.
The campaign brought remarkable success and as such, in this post, we thought we’d share some of our secrets.
We’ll be discussing best practices for using Google Ads Lead Forms, and outline common scenarios where they’re likely to perform the best.
Understanding Google Ads Lead FormsIn the world of paid advertising, things are always changing and evolving.
Businesses and marketers are constantly on the lookout for better ways to optimise their ads, connect and engage with potential customers, and convert those connections into sales.
One solution that has become an indispensable tool in the arsenal of advertisers is Google Ads Lead Form extensions, but before we dive in, it’s essential to understand what they are, and the benefits of using them.
Google Ads Lead Forms are essentially pre-filled forms that appear when a potential customer clicks on your ad.
Rather than taking the user to a landing page, they integrate seamlessly with Google Ads and improve the user experience by allowing customers to easily share their information with you directly from the ad.
What are the benefits of Google Ads Lead Forms?There are a number of benefits for businesses using Google Ads Lead Forms including:
- Streamlined Lead Generation: Google Ads lead forms simplify the lead generation process. When users click on your ad, they can submit their information without leaving the platform, reducing friction and increasing conversion rates.
- Mobile-Friendly: Lead forms are designed to work seamlessly on mobile devices, making it easy for users to submit their information on the go. This is especially important as mobile traffic continues to grow.
- Pre-Filled Information: Google Ads can pre-fill some user information based on their Google account. This reduces the effort required from users, which can help to increase conversion rates.
- Customisable Questions: You can customise the questions on your lead forms to gather the information that is most valuable to your business. Note: you want to avoid adding too many questions as this could negatively impact the conversion rate.
- Integration with CRM Systems: Google Ads lead forms can be integrated with Customer Relationship Management (CRM) systems, making it easy to manage and follow up with leads efficiently. This integration ensures that leads are not lost and can be nurtured effectively.
- Real-Time Responses: You can set up automated responses to thank users for their submission or provide additional information immediately after they submit the form. This can enhance user experience and engagement.
- Cost-Effective: Lead forms can be a cost-effective way to generate leads as you only pay when a user submits their information. This means you’re not paying for clicks that don’t convert.
- Quick and Easy Setup: Creating lead forms within Google Ads is relatively simple and doesn’t require extensive technical expertise.
Leveraging the power of lead forms can not only simplify your lead generation process but also improve the overall performance of your ad campaigns.
Despite the advantages, it’s important to note that there are some downsides to using lead form extensions. It means that you’ll experience less traffic to your website and as such, less chance to showcase more about your business and provide the user with more information.
They also have limited options for customisation and design. You can’t fully control the look and feel of the form, which may not align with your brand’s aesthetics.
There is also the potential for inaccurate data. This is because the pre-filled information from users’ Google accounts can lead to inaccuracies if users have outdated or incorrect information associated with their accounts.
When to Use Google Ads Lead Forms?It might sound obvious, but lead forms can be a great tool when you are running Google Ads campaigns with a strong focus on lead generation.
For example:
- Event Registrations: If you’re hosting webinars, seminars, workshops, or any type of event, lead forms can help you capture attendee registrations efficiently.
- Newsletter Sign-ups: Encourage users to subscribe to your newsletter or email list directly from your Google Ads.
- eBook or Whitepaper Downloads: Offer valuable resources like eBooks, whitepapers, or research reports in exchange for user contact details.
- Product Demos or Trials: If your business offers software or services, use lead forms to collect information from users interested in requesting demos or free trials.
- Request for Quotes: If you provide products or services that require customised pricing, lead forms can be used to gather user requirements and contact details for a personalised quote.
- Service Appointment Booking: Businesses in the service industry (e.g., healthcare, beauty, auto repair) can use lead forms for appointment scheduling requests.
- Product Information Requests: If you sell complex or high-ticket products, offer users the option to request more information or a call from your sales team through lead forms.
- Membership or Subscription Sign-ups: Encourage users to become members or subscribers to your platform or service directly from your Google Ads.
- Recruitment: Businesses looking to hire talent can use lead forms to collect contact details from potential candidates.
- Customer Feedback: Gather feedback and reviews from customers through lead forms, allowing them to share their experiences.
In these scenarios, Google Ads lead forms can simplify the process of capturing user information and enable you to tailor your follow-up and marketing efforts effectively.
It’s important to design your lead forms to align with your specific objectives and provide clear value to users in exchange for their information.
Best Practices for Using Google Ads Lead FormsNow that we have understood their importance, and some use case examples, let’s explore some of the best practices that can help you extract maximum value from your Google Ads Lead Forms:
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Craft Compelling Call-to-Actions (CTAs)Your CTA is often the first point of engagement with potential customers. Make sure it is compelling and incites action. Tailor it to align with what you are offering – be it signing up for a webinar, requesting a quote, or downloading a resource.
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Optimise the Lead Form FieldsKeep the lead forms succinct to avoid users from abandoning the process midway through. Only ask for the information that is absolutely necessary at the initial stage of the customer journey.
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Create Enticing Headlines and DescriptionsA headline that grabs attention coupled with a description that clearly communicates the value proposition can significantly increase conversion rates. Make sure it aligns with the messaging in your ad to maintain consistency.
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Testing is Your FriendTest different variations of lead forms. Test different CTAs, headlines, and form fields to find out what works best for your target audience. This will help you refine your strategy and optimise your ads for higher conversions.
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Follow-Up PromptlyOnce a user has filled out a lead form, it’s imperative to follow up promptly. Quick follow-ups increase the likelihood of conversions. Integrate your lead forms with your CRM system to automate the follow-up process, if possible.
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Utilise Analytics to Refine Your StrategyMake use of analytics to analyse the performance of your lead forms. Monitor metrics such as conversion rates, cost per lead, and form abandonment rates to continually refine your strategy and improve your results.
Bringing It All TogetherGoogle Ads Lead Forms can be a potent tool in your digital advertising toolkit, particularly when generating high-quality leads with ease. When utilised optimally, they can streamline the user journey, offering a hassle-free method for potential customers to connect with your business.
Remember, the key to success with lead forms lies in crafting engaging CTAs, optimising form fields, creating resonating landing pages, and following up promptly with leads. Employ A/B testing to hone your strategy further and utilise analytics to make data-driven decisions.
In a landscape where user experience is paramount, integrating Google Ads Lead Forms can indeed be a game-changer, paving the way for higher conversions and successful ad campaigns.
Embark on your journey with Google Ads Lead Forms, and watch your campaigns flourish!
Contact UsIf you’d like support with your Google Ads or any part of your paid media advertising, leave us a message via the form below and we’ll get back to you asap.
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In this episode we’re joined by actor, filmmaker, singer, podcaster and soon-to-be author, Armando Leduc.
Armando also owns Leduc Entertainment, a social media marketing agency and content studio that help to bring business stories to your screens.
In this episode we discuss:
- The benefits of adopting video recording tools like Loom
- Motivations behind his upcoming book, ‘Scaling’
- The duality of life
- How to relax before going on camera
- Practising vs. publishing
- What is screen presence?
Referenced in this episode:
- https://www.loom.com/
- https://www.8figurefirm.com/
- [Book] Who Not How by Dan Sullivan https://amzn.to/3ZTAtMw
- [Film] ‘Bourbon Whiz’: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nt0oKXoO0fg&ab_channel=Sketchycharacters
- [Book] Daring Greatly by Brené Brown: https://amzn.to/3PXyAtJ
- [Book] The Artist’s Way by Julia Cameron https://amzn.to/3ZTKn0y
- [Book] Irreverant Acting by Eric Morris: https://amzn.to/3rRlK8i
Connect w/ Armando/Leduc Entertainment:
- https://www.leducentertainment.com/
- https://www.youtube.com/user/sketchycharacters
Connect with Scott:
- https://www.linkedin.com/in/scottcolenutt/
Connect w/ SiteVisibility:
- https://www.sitevisibility.co.uk/
- https://twitter.com/sitevisibility
- https://www.linkedin.com/company/sitevisibility-a-division-of-ai-digital-ltd/
- https://www.instagram.com/sitevisibility/
- https://www.tiktok.com/@sitevisibility
- https://www.youtube.com/@SiteVisibility/
- https://www.threads.net/@sitevisibility
If you’d like to work with us, you’d like to feature on the podcast, or you have a guest or topic recommendation, please email marketing@sitevisibility.com
In this episode, I (Scott) share the benefits of marketing retainers for clients that are often overlooked.
Connect with Scott:
- https://www.linkedin.com/in/scottcolenutt/
Connect w/ SiteVisibility:
- https://www.sitevisibility.co.uk/
- https://twitter.com/sitevisibility
- https://www.linkedin.com/company/sitevisibility-a-division-of-ai-digital-ltd/
- https://www.instagram.com/sitevisibility/
- https://www.tiktok.com/@sitevisibility
- https://www.youtube.com/@SiteVisibility/
- https://www.threads.net/@sitevisibility
If you’d like to work with us, you’d like to feature on the podcast, or you have a guest or topic recommendation, please email marketing@sitevisibility.com
Here on our blog, we’ve been showcasing some of our expert partners, who’ve been providing expert tips and advice on subjects they specialise in.
In this post, we’ve got another fromLocal SEO experts and software providers BrightLocal, with their Content Marketing Manager, Sammy Paget, discussing how generative AI might impact Local SEO and some of the ways that you can prepare
So what are you waiting for!? Read on…
Ahhh, artificial intelligence. It’s not exactly a new term (remember Robin Williams in Bicentennial Man?), but the emergence of generative AI in the digital marketing world at the start of 2023 caused such a stir that even non-marketing friends have started conversations with “have you heard about all this ‘AI’ stuff?”
If your inbox is anything like mine, you likely won’t be able to go a day without seeing various subject lines teasing controversial statements and new time-saving tools.
With a constant flurry of buzzwords, from AI and SGE to ChatGPT and Bard, you may even find yourself glossing over them absent-mindedly.
And who can blame you?
When your head is busy in the marketing of your own services, or those of your clients, carving out space to get to grips with something that feels so big seems like a hefty investment of your time. You’ve made it this far without AI, right?
The truth is, the landscape is changing fast and, as already highlighted, more and more people are aware of it – even if they don’t really get it. Being aware of its use cases and limitations can at least help you tackle questions from clients, managers, and other stakeholders.
What’s more, even if you’re not currently in the camp of using generative AI to simplify certain tasks, it’s likely that you won’t be able to avoid it soon because the search giants have other plans.
A quick word on generative AII’m sure you don’t need an introduction to ChatGPT, at least. In fact, the recent Local Search Industry Survey found that, of the 93% of local marketers that have experimented with generative AI tools, 92% stated they’d used ChatGPT.
But before we go any further, I’d like to stress what I believe to be the most important thing to note about generative AI – and that sits in its namesake: generative. Generative AI uses machine learning models and is trained to generate original content.
It is not an omniscient fountain of knowledge and should not be relied upon as factual or accurate. Importantly, it does not even know if it is correct.
I tested this out in a recent case study for BrightLocal, analysing the capabilities of ChatGPT, BingGPT, Google’s Bard and its Search Labs experimental version of Search Generative Experience (more on that later) for local search queries.
In three out of five instances, I identified incorrect or inaccurate information provided by ChatGPT, and in four out of five cases for Bard.
So, you might be wondering why you would use generative AI for the purpose of search queries.
That… is a good question.
What you need to know about the big playersWhen Microsoft entered the chat with ChatGPT, Google unsurprisingly scrambled to release a rival in Bard. While the two operate similarly in terms of their generative capabilities, Bard, despite initially failing to impress, continued to evolve and incorporate familiar search functionalities, such as site links and maps, to boost the credibility of its responses.
You can see the lines start to get a little blurry here already, but Microsoft took it a step further by incorporating GPT-4 technology into Bing (yes, people do use Bing!).
Although you need to download the Bing app or install Microsoft Edge, Bing AI (or Bing Chat or BingGPT) is the first example of a search engine integrating generative AI within its search results.
As with ChatGPT and Bard, the idea is that you generate results through prompts, which you can refine in a ‘conversational’ manner. The ‘Chat’ tab is currently optional, but you can see upon entering a local search query that Bing pushes the option to ‘Chat with Bing AI’ at the top of the results page. For some queries, an AI-generated result is presented alongside traditional organic results.
The trouble with SGE2024 is set to bring a lot more. Google will likely roll out the previously announced Search Generative Experience (SGE), incorporating experimental AI-generated results into SERPs, and placing them front and centre.
The biggest problem? Aside from the impact on organic search results being unclear currently, it turns out most local marketers either don’t understand what SGE is, or haven’t heard of it at all.
And if marketers are struggling to get to grips with SGE, what does this mean for the typical searcher?
Building on from the conversational concept that generative AI uses, Google believes that SGE will enable users to enter super longtail queries to return the most specific results.
Personally, this method of searching does not feel natural to me, and I feel like it takes too many prompt refinements to get the information I’m really looking for, compared to a typical Bing or Google search.
Right now, whether we as consumers will adapt to conversing with search engines remains to be seen, but there is no denying that the search landscape is going to look very different, very soon.
But for search giants Google and Bing, the conversational element of generative AI is a good attempt at keeping the user within its search results. So, you can look at this several ways.
Users could click through to other sites less often as a result, impacting organic traffic. But that could also mean the organic traffic resulting from click-through is further down the funnel, having a higher intention of converting.
Expert opinions around the implications on organic search are pretty split, and it’s likely that what does roll out will be different to some of the experimental versions we’ve seen so far.
How you can prepare for SGE and other gen AI in searchIf the new AI-generated search results do indeed eat up those all-important organic ranking positions, you need it to see your business or your clients as an option. Basically, you want generative AI to know you.
The good news is that if you’re focusing on core local SEO tactics, you’re already doing some of the work.
Bard, Bing AI and SGE source business information from a variety of online sources, including user reviews, business directories, social media, and even localised sources such as your area’s council website.
Bearing that in mind, here are our top tips for how you can prepare:
Diversify your business reviewsFrom my brief interactions with the tools, I’ve seen review information pulled from Google, Facebook, TripAdvisor and Yelp.
Unsurprisingly, Bard and SGE run on Google’s information, so Google Business Profile (GBP) data is the main source here, while Bing tends to rely on other key sources such as Facebook and TripAdvisor.
In Bing AI’s case especially, the sources vary based on industry rather than just using Google reviews as standard.
So, you don’t want to place all of your eggs in one basket (for most, that’s Google). Just like browsers and devices, different users have their preferences for how they like to browse online.
It’s good practice to broaden your focus when it comes to review platforms to maintain a consistent reputation. If your GBP reflects a review rating of 4.7, but has a couple of negative reviews on Facebook, it won’t look good to prospective customers doing their research.
Structured and unstructured business listingsAs with different review sources, generative AI tools also tend to return a variety of web sources, including traditional structured listing sites (many of which double as review platforms), and unstructured listings sites from things like blogs, lifestyle publications and news sites.
Ensuring your business information is correct and consistent across your business listings is crucial for maintaining local presence. Not only for ensuring customers can actually find you, a consistent name, address and phone number (NAP) signals to search engines like Google that it is reliable, correct information – and therefore that your business is trustworthy.
This information will be feeding results for generative AI platforms, so review where your business is listed, and ensure your information is up to date. At the same time, look out for new opportunities to get listed on structured and unstructured citation sites.
Sync and maintain your social profilesJust as search engines recognise the affiliation between your business’s site and/or GBP with various social profiles, generative AI tools are also sourcing information from social media.
It’s now easier to sync your social profiles to your GBP, so be sure to check you’ve added these correctly, as well as to any other profiles you manage such as a Bing pages – and don’t forget your on-site links!
Social profiles are essentially business listings – and Facebook acts as a structured citation, for one.
As with your business listings, ensure your business information is correct and uniform across your social profiles – from NAP and website links to imagery and logos.
Customer-focused contentWhile it may be Google’s golden rule to prioritise helpful, quality content, arguably you should always keep this is mind as it’s essentially what serves your potential and existing customers best.
Website sources often surface within generative AI search results, indicating that they are deemed relevant and helpful in terms of matching the searcher’s intent.
It’s going to look different for every business, but at the core, consider if your content is accurately reflecting:
- How it meets your audience’s needs or solves their problem
- Why your business is the best option for them
- What evidence is available to back this up (e.g. reviews, testimonials, awards, case studies, social media presence)
- Visual representation (e.g. products, services, team members, physical location, facilities)
- Straightforward next steps (e.g. reservations and booking, contact, purchase)
By all means use generative AI for helpChatGPT and Bard, as well as plenty of other generative AI platforms specialising in content creation, can be a useful starting point when you need to create content from scratch. For brands with multiple locations in particular, you can use generative AI to produce unique, location-specific content and then tailor it to your needs.
You could use it to suggest options for article or webinar titles, social media captions, or even to spruce up something you’ve already written. Prompt it for information around your industry, and maybe even summarise some information about your competitors to give you some inspiration.
Yet be aware, as mentioned earlier, this content is not always factually accurate. There have been cases where generated responses have been not just incorrect, but offensive or potentially harmful. So I’m sure I don’t need to emphasise this point too much, but always take the time to review what you’re given – with a subject expert if necessary – and ensure that anything you do decide to use can be turned into something of your own.
So, that’s a whistlestop take on preparing yourself for whatever the integration of generative AI and search brings. BrightLocal has a variety of resources on getting the most out of local marketing, so be sure to check out our Learning hubs, whether you’re kickstarting your efforts or looking for more advanced tips. Plus, our dedicated BrightLocal Academy offers engaging courses on a variety of local marketing topics, completely free of charge!
In this episode we’re joined by Bryan Clayton, Co-founder of GreenPal. GreenPal has been dubbed ‘Uber for lawn care’ by Entrepreneur magazine and currently boasts over 300,000 users, with ambitions to make that figure 1 million in the next 5 years.
Bryan joins us to share his lessons in building and growing GreenPal, as well as diving into the insights that helped him achieve a successful exit from his first business, Peachtree, in 2013.
In the episode we discuss:
- The concept of mentorship vs. asynchronous mentorship
- The benefits of hiring pirates vs. romantics
- What’s not taught in business school?
- Creating your own roadblocks to force re-evaluation of your products and services
- Immersing yourself in industry research to accelerate your growth
- Functionality that’s been critical to the reliability of GreenPal’s platform
Referenced in this episode:
- [Book] Grinding It Out by Rac Kroc: https://amzn.to/3tb8USz
- [Movie] The Founder on Netflix: https://www.netflix.com/gb/title/80101899?source=35
- [Book] The Lean Startup by Eric Ries: https://amzn.to/45eLwAW
- [Book] The Four Steps to the Epiphany by Steve Blank: https://amzn.to/46v2gF0
- [Book] The Startup Owner’s Manual by Steve Blank: https://amzn.to/3PAehCj
Connect with Bryan/GreenPal:
- https://www.yourgreenpal.com/
- https://www.linkedin.com/in/bryan-clayton-a96b33214
- https://www.instagram.com/bryanmclayton/
Connect w/ SiteVisibility:
- https://www.sitevisibility.co.uk/
- https://twitter.com/sitevisibility
- https://www.linkedin.com/company/sitevisibility-a-division-of-ai-digital-ltd/
- https://www.instagram.com/sitevisibility/
- https://www.tiktok.com/@sitevisibility_
- https://www.youtube.com/@SiteVisibility/
- https://www.threads.net/@sitevisibility
If you’d like to work with us, you’d like to feature on the podcast, or you have a guest or topic recommendation, please email marketing@sitevisibility.com
In this episode we share some simple methods, software and services that can help you track the immediate conversion impact of magazine ads.
Referenced in this episode:
- https://bitly.com/
- https://bitly.com/pages/products/qr-codes
- https://tinyurl.com/
- https://short.io/
- https://qrfy.com/
- https://uqr.me/
- https://apps.shopify.com/coupon-detective
- https://apps.shopify.com/promopirates
- https://apps.shopify.com/cleancart
- https://www.capterra.co.uk/
- https://www.g2.com/
Connect w/ Scott:
- https://www.linkedin.com/in/scottcolenutt/
Connect w/ SiteVisibility:
- https://www.sitevisibility.co.uk/
- https://twitter.com/sitevisibility
- https://www.linkedin.com/company/sitevisibility-a-division-of-ai-digital-ltd/
- https://www.instagram.com/sitevisibility/
- https://www.tiktok.com/@sitevisibility_
- https://www.youtube.com/@SiteVisibility/
- https://www.threads.net/@sitevisibility
If you’d like to work with us, you’d like to feature on the podcast, or you have a guest or topic recommendation, please email marketing@sitevisibility.com
In this episode we’re joined by Claire Croft & Phil Lewis of Corporate Punk. Claire and Phil are passionate about helping businesses thrive through the power of their people.
Claire and Phil have a shared passion for unlocking the potential of individuals to help drive long-term commercial success. Claire specialises in eliminating barriers to potential and creating positive and sustainable impact through meaningful conversations and a strategic approach. Phil is an expert in human-centered ways to improve business performance, emphasizing the importance of embracing human strangeness, creativity, and emotion.
In the episode we discuss:
- How to create a culture that embraces change
- How to approach challenging conversations with a business partner
- How to respond when in receipt of feedback
- How to embrace creativity in business
- The importance of giving your people time to think
Connect with Claire, Phil & Corporate Punk:
- https://corporatepunk.com/
Connect w/ Scott:
- https://www.linkedin.com/in/scottcolenutt/
Connect w/ SiteVisibility:
- https://www.sitevisibility.co.uk/
- https://twitter.com/sitevisibility
- https://www.linkedin.com/company/sitevisibility-a-division-of-ai-digital-ltd/
- https://www.instagram.com/sitevisibility/
- https://www.tiktok.com/@sitevisibility_
- https://www.youtube.com/@SiteVisibility/
- https://www.threads.net/@sitevisibility
If you’d like to work with us, you’d like to feature on the podcast, or you have a guest or topic recommendation, please email marketing@sitevisibility.com
In this episode we’re joined by Aimee Schuster, Founder of Bandwidth Strategy. As the founder of Bandwidth Strategy and fractional COO, CMO, and CRO at current top-performing e-commerce and SAAS ...
In this episode, Scott shares his favourite tools that help make podcast production, editing and process more enjoyable and efficient. Referenced in this episode: https://alitu.com/ https://www.remastermedia.com/ https://bouncecast.app/ https://www.castmagic.io/ https://www.chopcast.io/ https://www.clipgen.io/ ...
In this episode we share lessons in advertising and creativity from the 2009 documentary, Art & Copy. Art & Copy was produced by renowned documentary maker, Doug Pray, and features ...
In this episode we’re joined by William Gadsby Peet, Chief Strategy Officer at Literal Humans. William joins us to share his thoughts on the current state of Web 3.0, including ...
In today’s episode, Scott shares 5 ChatGPT prompting tips that will instantly improve the outputs you’re receiving from ChatGPT. These tips are suitable whether you’re a beginner with ChatGPT ...
I (Scott) was recently in a discovery call with a prospect when we asked them what their USPs are. They couldn’t answer. This made me nervous. It also got me ...
In this episode we’re joined by local search expert Claire Carlile. Claire joins us to discuss how to level up your Google Business Profile. In the episode we discuss: How ...
Here on our blog, we’ve been showcasing some of our expert partners, who’ve been providing expert tips and advice on subjects they specialise in. In this post, we’ve got another ...
We recently faced an issue where users were telling us that they’d left Google reviews for our business, but the reviews weren’t appearing in search results. During the process of ...
Smart bidding is a transformative advertising strategy that has revolutionised the way advertisers can optimise their Google Ads campaigns. It’s also something that Google has been pushing advertisers towards over ...
On this week’s episode of the Internet Marketing Podcast, Scott discusses what he learnt from attending the Podcast Show 2023 event earlier in May. On the show you’ll learn: Why ...
Google reviews are highly valuable and essential for businesses as they can: Help to establish trust Influence purchasing decisions Improve search engine visibility Provide feedback on your business Foster engagement ...
On our blog, we’ve looked at some of the top challenges facing numerous industries, including:
- Retail
- Electric Vehicles
- Travel
- Food Delivery
- Digital News Publications
- Health & Fitness Apps
- Cinema Chains
In this blog post, we’ll be looking into the top challenges facing the hotel industry today. We’ll be unmasking the obstacles that hinder their progress and exploring the solutions that can lead hotels to triumph.
The hotel industry has always been a dynamic sector that’s all about creating unforgettable experiences for customers. However, in today’s rapidly evolving landscape, the industry faces an array of challenges that demand careful attention and strategic planning.
These include:
- Personalisation & evolving consumer expectations
- Increased Competition
- Sustainability
So whether you’re an industry insider, a passionate traveller, or simply curious about the inner workings of the hospitality world, read on to discover the secrets of creating memorable experiences for guests.
Let’s dive in and look at what these challenges are and how hotels can overcome them.
H2: Personalisation & Evolving Consumer Expectations
In today’s fast-paced world, the expectations of consumers have evolved significantly.
They no longer settle for cookie-cutter experiences; instead, they crave something truly special and tailored to their individual tastes and desires.
Whether they are embarking on a holiday or travelling for business, modern consumers demand a level of personalisation that goes above and beyond.
This presents a challenge for many in the hotel industry.
Imagine stepping into an Airbnb, hotel, or resort and feeling an immediate connection, as if the place already knows you. The moment you arrive, you’re greeted with a warm smile and a bespoke welcome package curated specifically for you.
How did they know you prefer a cosy room with soft lighting and your favourite scented candles? It’s as if they’ve been anticipating your every desire.
Throughout your stay, the establishment goes beyond the ordinary to create an extraordinary experience. They provide recommendations for local attractions and activities that align perfectly with your interests.
Whether you’re a food enthusiast, an adventure seeker, or a culture connoisseur, they understand your preferences and offer tailored suggestions to make your stay truly unforgettable.
But how can hotels achieve this level of personalisation? Well, it all starts with a deep understanding of their guests’ data. By analysing your previous bookings, social media activity, and even your online reviews, hotels are able to gain valuable insights into your preferences and needs.
Armed with this knowledge, they can leverage advanced technology and implement effective customer relationship management (CRM) systems to create a seamless and customised experience.
Integrating technology solutions can often be complex and resource-intensive, but there are some in the hotel industry already rising to the challenge. By using cutting-edge innovations like AI and machine learning, they are now able to process vast amounts of data and can anticipate their guests requirements before they even express them.
According to the HotelTechReport:
“Artificial intelligence is set to revolutionize the hotel guest experience in the next 10 years by providing more personalized and efficient service through the use of personalization and recommendation engines, automation of repetitive tasks, virtual assistants, smart room technology and concierge services.
AI will also enhance safety and security by monitoring for potential threats and proactively providing guests with the services and amenities they desire. Additionally, AI will be integrated with virtual reality and augmented reality to provide guests with immersive experiences such as virtual tours, virtual room selection, and virtual events. Furthermore, AI will enable automated check-out, allowing guests to check out from their room using their mobile device or voice commands and receive their bill via email or text message.”
Imagine receiving a personalised message on your smartphone, suggesting a spa treatment that perfectly aligns with your relaxation preferences, just when you need it most. Or having a digital concierge who knows your dietary restrictions and offers a tailored menu for your in-room dining experience.
These technological advancements bring a new dimension to hospitality and travel, elevating it to a realm where every aspect of your stay is carefully designed to cater to your unique preferences and needs.
As Hospitality Net report:
“AI technology in the hospitality industry can help you leverage the power of personalization and help you pave the way for better service efficiency and effectiveness.
You can create a personalized communication experience with your guests and strengthen the relationship and trust. Personalization helps to connect with the customers in a better way and improve your loyal customer base for business scalability.
You can send personalized messages to ask about their staying experience and periodically send discount offers and other coupons to stay connected with your loyal customers.”
Of course, the journey towards this level of personalisation is not without its challenges.
Gathering and analysing data, implementing CRM systems, and integrating technology solutions require significant resources and expertise.
In a world where personalisation is no longer a luxury but an expectation, hospitality businesses that rise to the occasion and go the extra mile to understand and cater to their guests’ preferences will undoubtedly thrive.
By harnessing the power of data and technology, they can create memorable experiences that leave an indelible mark on their guests’ hearts and minds, fostering a sense of loyalty that goes far beyond a mere transaction.
Rising CompetitionThe hospitality industry also faces a significant challenge in rising competition.
It’s no longer just traditional hotels and resorts battling it out; they now have to contend with new players like home-sharing platforms and alternative accommodations.
The market has become saturated with an abundance of options, making it increasingly difficult for individual businesses to attract and retain guests.
To make matters worse, consumers have gained more power in this competitive landscape.
Nowadays, travellers have diverse preferences and priorities when it comes to selecting their accommodation. They have the luxury of exploring different choices until they find something that perfectly suits their needs.
This means businesses must identify their target market and find ways to stand out from the crowd. Failure to do so can result in losing market share and missed revenue opportunities.
However, there are a number of strategies that hospitality businesses can employ to overcome these challenges and thrive in the face of rising competition.
According to Hospitality Net, these include:
- Maintaining the direct connection with guests
- Incentivising direct bookings
- Investing in automation and technology
- Making sure your hotel is optimised on Google
- Highlighting sustainable practices
- Utilising social media as another direct traffic source
- Increasing your hotels visibility on the global distribution systems
Essentially, it all boils down to differentiation, innovation, and as previously mentioned, providing exceptional guest experiences
In order to stand out from the competition, many hotels have found success by investing in unique amenities that go beyond the basics. They go the extra mile to provide guests with special features and experiences that make their stay truly memorable.
Like Hospitality Net have mentioned, leveraging technology has become a crucial aspect of the hospitality industry. Hotels have embraced innovative solutions to streamline operations and enhance guest experiences.
This can include:
- Digital check-in/check-out processes
- Mobile apps for room service or concierge requests
- Smart room features like voice-controlled devices or personalized entertainment systems.
By integrating technology effectively, hotels can create a seamless and convenient experience for their guests and help them to stand out from their competitors.
Another way in which hotels can stand out, is by understanding the importance of building strong partnerships with local attractions and businesses.
By collaborating with nearby tourist spots, restaurants, and entertainment venues, hotels can offer their guests exclusive deals, access to events, or packages that combine accommodation with local experiences.
This not only enhances the overall guest experience, but also helps promote the local community and fosters a sense of connection with both locals and the chosen destination.
By combining these strategies, investing in unique amenities, emphasising personalised services, leveraging technology, and building strong partnership, hotels can differentiate themselves from their competitors.
The key is to continuously adapt to evolving consumer demands and preferences. By doing so, hospitality establishments can not only survive but also secure their position in the market.
It’s all about staying ahead of the game, embracing change, and consistently delivering outstanding experiences to guests.
Sustainability and Environmental ConcernsToday, consumers of all forms are much more environmentally aware and when it comes to travel and hotels, it’s no different.
The expectations of modern travellers have transcended traditional luxuries and now encompass a deep desire for eco-friendly practices that align with their values.
As PressReader states: “fighting climate change is no longer optional for hotel operators; it’s table stakes for the survival of any business in the travel, tourism, and hospitality industries.”
And according to a recent Booking.com survey of global travelers, more than half (53%) report that they are more determined to travel sustainably than they were a year ago.
Hotels face several challenges when it comes to sustainability, including:
- High energy and water consumption
- Waste generation
- The environmental impact of their operations
- Encouraging sustainable behaviour with guests
- Sourcing local, organic, and sustainably produced goods
However, there are ways to overcome these and many hotels have already been actively implementing strategies to overcome these challenges and promote sustainability.
Recycling programs are one of them. From the humble recycling bin in guests rooms to the sophisticated systems behind the scenes, hotels need to be proactive when it comes to implementing measures to reduce waste.
They should also consider composting food waste, and minimising single-use items by using refillable toiletry dispensers and eliminating plastic water bottles.
Water and energy consumption is another area that hotels will need to look at, with many hotels now utilising showers equipped with water-saving technologies, providing a refreshing experience while significantly reducing water consumption.
They might also want to look into implementing water-saving measures such as low-flow fixtures, water-efficient laundry practices, and educating guests on responsible water use. Some hotels even recycle and reuse water for non-potable purposes like irrigation or cleaning.
When it comes to energy, LED lighting, energy-efficient appliances, and smart controls for heating, cooling, and lighting systems could be used.
True sustainability, however, often goes beyond the confines of the hotel’s walls and reaches out to the surrounding community.
Many hotels nowadays are working together with local sustainability projects to safeguard the environment, protect the cultural heritage, and better the lives of the people who live nearby.
Hotels may also want to focus on sourcing local, organic, and sustainably produced goods for their operations, including food and beverages, toiletries, and cleaning supplies. They may also consider collaborating with local farmers and suppliers to support the community and reduce transportation-related emissions.
This is mutually beneficial as not only will they be providing a more authentic experience for their guests, but helping the local community at the same time.
In this era of environmental consciousness, the hospitality industry needs to step up and embrace sustainability as a vital consideration.
By implementing recycling programs, reducing water consumption, utilising renewable energy sources, and partnering with local sustainability initiatives, hotels can help to pave the way for a greener and more responsible future, whilst at the same time providing unique and memorable stays for their customers.
ConclusionWhile the hospitality industry faces various challenges, they also present opportunities for growth and innovation.
By embracing technology, personalising guest experiences, prioritising sustainability, and staying responsive to evolving consumer expectations, hotels can overcome these hurdles and thrive in a competitive market.
The future of the hotel industry is filled with potential and exciting possibilities.
By approaching challenges as catalysts for transformation and staying committed to delivering outstanding service, hotels can shape their own destiny in this ever-evolving landscape.
Contact UsIf you’d like to support with any of your marketing efforts, book in a free consultancy call with our experts here or leave us a message via the form below. We’d love to help!
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On today’s episode of the Internet Marketing Podcast, Scott speaks to Steve Wild, Head of Sales for Sky AdSmart, to discuss what’s new in TV advertising.
On the show you’ll learn:
- What Addressable TV is
- The requirements for businesses to use AdSmart
- Why a really good understanding of your target audience is needed to be successful with TV ads and some of the targeting options available
- Why it’s important to test and learn with your ads and budget
- Some of the reasons businesses have avoided TV ads in the past and why it’s more affordable and accessible than ever
- Some of the common myths about modern TV advertising and why they aren’t true
- Which sectors are most successful when it comes to modern TV ads
- What Steve is really excited about when it comes to the future of TV advertising
CONNECT WITH STEVE/SKY ADSMART
- https://www.adsmartfromsky.co.uk/
- https://www.linkedin.com/in/steve-wild-90a58014/
- stephen.wild@sky.uk
- https://www.adsmartfromsky.co.uk/case-studies-selection/
CONNECT WITH SCOTT:
- scott.colenutt@sitevisibility.com
- https://www.linkedin.com/in/scottcolenutt
CONNECT WITH SITEVISIBILITY:
- https://www.sitevisibility.co.uk/
- https://www.youtube.com/user/SiteVisibility
- https://twitter.com/sitevisibility
- https://www.facebook.com/SiteVisibility
- http://instagram.com/sitevisibility
This post is written by one of our partners, Joe Brown, Marketing Executive at StraightIn, who create non-automated B2B LinkedIn lead generation campaigns to deliver leads for businesses. In this post, Alex looks at why B2B businesses should be using LinkedIn to generate sales and how they can do so, as well as introducing their services.
So what are you waiting for, lets dive in…
Earlier this month, LinkedIn celebrated its 20th anniversary, having launched all the way back on May 5th, 2003. Back then, it was purely a platform where people could share their CVs, plan their next career moves, and connect with others who shared their interests. From the very beginning, it displayed remarkable potential.
Microsoft was among the first to notice LinkedIn’s potential, officially acquiring LinkedIn in 2016 for $26.2 billion in what was, at the time, one of the largest social media deals in history. Since then, LinkedIn has gone from strength to strength.
Whilst Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram have been grabbing headlines – often for the wrong reasons – LinkedIn has been quietly working away, expanding its user base to over 930 million in more than 200 countries and territories worldwide.
During that time, LinkedIn has expanded its range of services. While it remains a valuable platform for networking and job searching, its offerings have gone well beyond that, making it an attractive platform for B2B businesses looking to do business.
But how can businesses use it to generate sales? Let’s take a look…
Up Your Sales Game with Sales NavigatorFirst, there is Sales Navigator, LinkedIn’s flagship product for sales teams, which empowers representatives, managers, and operations leaders to enhance their approaches and strategies by harnessing the extensive data, insights, and relationship-building tools available on LinkedIn.
Sales Navigator seamlessly integrates with other sales technologies, such as CRM systems, providing a foundation of trusted, reliable, real-time data. But that’s just the beginning. Sales Navigator offers a range of impressive features that make it an essential tool for sales teams.
With its powerful search capabilities, Sales Navigator allows you to navigate the sales landscape efficiently. You can uncover hidden opportunities, target your ideal prospects, and open doors to new possibilities. It also expands your network visibility, giving you a broader reach and deeper insights into potential connections. It enables you to tap into a vast pool of valuable contacts that can drive your sales forward.
We cannot forget about the personalised algorithms that work behind the scenes. These intelligent tools make it easier for you to connect with decision-makers at the right time. It ensures that you reach out to them precisely when it matters most. And we’re just scratching the surface here. There is so much more to Sales Navigator than this. It is a comprehensive solution with tremendous potential for sales teams trying to elevate their prospecting efforts, expand their networks, and achieve impressive sales results.
Sales teams have seen impressive results from using LinkedIn Sales Navigator. According to LinkedIn, on average, modern selling leaders are seeing:
- +17% higher win rates when saving leads on Sales Navigator
- +42% larger deals when using Sales Navigator to connect with decision-makers
- +15% more pipeline when using Sales Navigator to find customers
These statistics highlight the real value that Sales Navigator brings to sales teams. With its powerful features and capabilities, Sales Navigator equips sales teams with the resources they need to excel, exceed targets, and achieve remarkable success throughout their sales journey.
Content is King on LinkedInIt is not just sales teams who can benefit from using LinkedIn, but marketing teams as well. LinkedIn is a versatile platform that allows marketers and B2B businesses to share various forms of content, whether it be amusing gifs and entertaining videos, or PDFs and documents such as thought-provoking white papers or promotional one-pagers.
LinkedIn also offers the opportunity to publish articles, whether on personal profiles or Company Pages, allowing users to showcase their expertise and interests.
For personal users, publishing articles on LinkedIn allows them to position themselves as thought leaders. By sharing their knowledge and insights through well-written and thought-provoking content, individuals can build credibility and gain recognition among their professional network. This establishes a strong personal brand and enhances their professional reputation, attracting new connections and opening doors to potential career opportunities.
On the other hand, businesses can leverage LinkedIn’s article publishing feature to establish their brand as knowledgeable, reliable, and trustworthy. By crafting articles that showcase their industry expertise, provide valuable insights, or offer solutions to common challenges, companies can position themselves as thought leaders within their target market. This boosts brand credibility, and fosters trust among potential clients and partners, increasing the likelihood of business opportunities and conversions.
This can also bolster your sales outreach efforts. As your sales team engages in prospecting on LinkedIn, the users they contact will often visit their profiles to learn more about them. If the content published on your profile is engaging, informative, and relevant to them, it significantly increases the likelihood of a positive response to your sales message. Compelling content not only captures their attention but also encourages them to follow your LinkedIn page, actively engage with your content, and ultimately establish a fruitful business relationship with your company.
LinkedIn also provides the capability to send newsletters to your followers and connections on a daily, weekly, bi-weekly, or monthly basis. These newsletters serve as valuable opportunities to nurture relationships with your connections, keeping them informed about the latest industry news and updates while positioning your brand as a leader in your industry. By consistently delivering insightful content through newsletters, you can strengthen connections, establish thought leadership, and foster a trusted reputation with your connections.
Get Noticed with LinkedIn AdvertisingLinkedIn also boasts an impressive range of advertising features. Since the first advertisements ran on LinkedIn in 2005, LinkedIn Marketing Solutions — the division that enables marketers to reach their audiences with targeted messaging at scale — has undergone remarkable changes. It has introduced an impressive range of ad formats, including single-image ads, video ads, carousel ads, document ads, and much more. Each of these formats serves distinct purposes and offers unique advantages, allowing advertisers to leverage the platform’s diverse range of options for their specific goals.
While LinkedIn Ads offer numerous advantages, it’s worth noting that advertising tends to be pricier compared to some other platforms on the market. As with any paid social platform, LinkedIn allows businesses to have control over their budget and expenditure; however, when comparing the average cost-per-click (CPC) with other platforms, LinkedIn typically has a higher CPC.
There is a reason for this: LinkedIn Ads deliver exceptional results.
In fact, ads on LinkedIn have been shown to generate a significant 33% increase in purchase intent for brands. When brands advertise on LinkedIn, they can experience a notable 2-3x boost in their brand attributes. Marketers also enjoy a conversion rate up to 2x higher on LinkedIn compared to other platforms. Moreover, audiences exposed to brand and acquisition messages on the platform are an impressive 6x more likely to convert.
LinkedIn’s audience is also different to other social networks. LinkedIn is built for business professionals, unlike other social media platforms like Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram, which are designed more for B2C businesses. LinkedIn’s users are typically business professionals looking to do business. LinkedIn provides a substantial reach in the business world, with 58 million registered companies and 930 million working professionals using the platform. More importantly, these users hold significant sway in their respective industries and actively seek out business opportunities. 4 out of 5 LinkedIn members drive business decisions for their business. Moreover, audiences on LinkedIn boast double the buying power of the average web audience and are six times more likely to convert. These compelling reasons make LinkedIn Ads an obvious choice for B2B businesses.
With all this in mind, LinkedIn Ads are a no-brainer for B2B businesses.
LinkedIn has evolved into a powerhouse platform for B2B businesses, offering considerable opportunities to drive success. Whether leveraging Sales Navigator to empower your sales teams, harnessing the versatility of content marketing to establish thought leadership, or unlocking the potential of LinkedIn advertising to reach a highly engaged professional audience, the possibilities are endless.
At this point, you may think that this sounds like a lot of hard work and involves a significant amount of effort – and you would be right; it certainly does.
As a business owner, or marketer, you’ll have numerous responsibilities that demand your attention, leaving little time for extensive research and to send hundreds of InMails to prospects on LinkedIn. The idea of sitting down to write an article for publication on LinkedIn may seem impossible, given the dozen other tasks awaiting completion. While you would love to share captivating images, infographics, and other engaging content on LinkedIn, you may lack the necessary resources and skills to do so. Moreover, LinkedIn Advertising can be overwhelming, as numerous intricate steps are involved, making it a daunting endeavor to embark upon. On top of all that, LinkedIn is consistently improving, and introducing new features and updates makes it challenging to stay up to date.
This is precisely where StraightIn can help.
Why B2B Businesses Should Choose StraightIn for Maximising LinkedIn’s PotentialAs a LinkedIn lead generation and marketing agency based in Manchester, with offices in Portsmouth and Chicago, we possess a unique specialisation in LinkedIn marketing that sets us apart from other digital and social media marketing agencies. While others attempt to cover multiple platforms, our singular focus on LinkedIn has made us true experts in maximising its potential for B2B businesses – all without using any automation, making us the only agency of our kind to do so.
Over the past four years, we have worked with countless B2B companies, connecting them with key decision-makers and implementing bespoke lead-generation strategies. Through our comprehensive range of services, including profile optimisation, conversion management, content marketing, and LinkedIn advertising, we help our clients stand out on LinkedIn and achieve their goals.
We take great pride in our recent nominations for two prestigious awards at the Prolific North Champions Awards, which highlights our commitment to delivering exceptional outcomes for our clients.
So, if you’re ready to unlock the full potential of LinkedIn and drive your B2B business forward, trust StraightIn as your trusted partner. Let us navigate the ever-evolving LinkedIn landscape on your behalf while you reap the rewards of increased visibility, valuable connections, and remarkable business growth.
We are pleased to have partnered with SiteVisibility. If you are interested in our services or would like to learn more about what we do, please contact the SiteVisibility team, and they will put us in touch, or feel free to contact us directly.
For direct assistance, please feel free to reach out to one of our Business Development Managers, Alex, at a.wain@straight-in.co.uk or call 07403618516.
In April 2023, Google Analytics 4 (GA4) started to offer two methods for counting conversions: Once per event and once per session. If you saw the update, which might have gone under the radar if it wasn’t for Charles Farina and Search Engine Journal, you might have thought the following:
- Ugh, another thing in GA4 I need to learn about!
- Should all my conversions use the same method?
- How do I determine which method is right for each conversion?
We hear you (especially on point 1), so this article aims to answer your questions and alleviate your frustration.
Counting Methods: What They MeanIn GA4, you can select how you want each conversion on your site to be counted. The below table details what each method means and which types of conversion they apply to by default.
Universal Analytics used the ‘once per session’ method for goals and whilst using this method in GA4 will make UA and GA4 match more closely, it doesn’t feel like a good enough reason to use this method to us.
As a site that produces regular downloadable resources, we always found that using a goal for measuring those downloads was limiting. Our audience would typically come to our site looking for guidance on a particular topic, so they’d inevitably download multiple resources on that topic. Only the event allowed us to see that; the goal gave a very different and more misleading perspective.
Recommended Counting Methods for Measurement ScenariosBoth counting methods have their uses though, so we’ve broken them down by common measurement scenarios:
1. Scenario: A user might download multiple resources/files in a session, e.g. all my guides on site migrations.
Recommended Counting Method: Once Per Event
Rationale for Counting Method: You want to know all the content that resonates with each user, not just the first resource they downloaded.
2. Scenario: A user might submit a contact form multiple times because they haven’t realised the first submission was successful.
Recommended Counting Method: Once per event OR Once per session
Rationale for Counting Method: Once per event: You want to know whether lots of users are submitting the form multiple times because your site isn’t making it clear that the submission has been successful, which allows you to improve your site.
Once per session: You don’t have the resource to analyse the number of form submissions per user and/or you have site limitations that mean you can’t make it clearer to users when their form has been successfully submitted. If you receive lots of spam form submissions, this option will limit the number that inflate your conversion reporting.
Tip: If you’re measuring all form submissions via the enhanced measurement event form_submit, you’ll be recording two very different forms with the same event, e.g. a general enquiry form and a newsletter sign up form. Avoid setting this to ‘once per session’, so you record submissions from all your form types.
Tip: Ensure you have CAPTCHA enabled on your forms to prevent spam submissions.
3. Scenario: A user purchases a product.
Recommended Counting Method: Once per event
Rationale for Counting Method: If you don’t offer the option to amend orders, and it’s possible a user could make more than one transaction in the same session, this counting method ensures you don’t miss out on counting the second transaction and subsequent revenue. It’s unlikely that ‘once per session’ will cause you huge troubles though, should you choose that instead.
4. Scenario: A user clicks on an email address link.
Recommended Counting Method: Once per event OR Once per session
Rationale for Counting Method: Unless a user is likely to visit your site with two purposes in mind (e.g. enquire about your services and enquire about being a guest on your podcast), which requires them to enquire to two email addresses, you’ll likely be fine with either counting option. To be on the safe side, ‘once per event’ will be best at mirroring the actions your users took.
5. Scenario: A user clicks on a phone number link.
Recommended Counting Method: Once per event
Rationale for Counting Method: Assuming most calls take place from a mobile phone, users are likely to click the link on the site once. If they need to redial because the line was engaged, they’ll probably redial from their call history, not by clicking the link on the site a second time. So you’ll likely be fine with either counting option, but to be on the safe side, once per event will be best at mirroring the actions your users took.
6. Scenario: A user watches an embedded video.
Recommended Counting Method: Once per event
Rationale for Counting Method: Depending on how many videos you use on your site and the purpose of the user’s visit, they could easily watch more than one video in their session.
7. Scenario: A user clicks a link that takes them to a third-party site.
Recommended Counting Method: Once per event
Rationale for Counting Method: Depending on how many third-party links you have in your content and the purpose of the user’s visit, they could easily click more than one link in their session. If you provide research and guides that contain links to external sources, this will be particularly applicable.
8. Scenario: A user uses on-site search functionality to look for content related to a keyword or phrase.
Recommended Counting Method: Once per event
Rationale for Counting Method: It’s best to assume that not everyone will find the information they’re looking for easily. These people will use site search, and they’ll probably refine their query if the first one doesn’t provide the results they want. The quality and accuracy of search functionality can vary by site; when it’s poor, users will refine their search.
People can also search for multiple queries in a session, particularly if they’re looking for specific SKUs and you have a huge inventory that makes it time-intensive to filter products on a category page.
Breaking each conversion type down by thinking about what user action it’s measuring and whether your users are likely to make it more than once in a session will tell you which counting method is right. Hopefully your measurement scenarios have been covered in this post, and you now have the answers you need.
If they aren’t, feel free to leave a comment and we’ll do our best to get back to you with a recommendation.
Happy reporting!
Contact UsIf you’re looking for support with your analytics or any part of your GA4 set up and management, please don’t hesitate to get in touch. You can book in a free consultancy call with our experts here, or leave us a message via the form below. We’d love to help!
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Until Google announced that Universal Analytics (UA) would be going away, my use of Google Analytics 4 (GA4) was mostly experimental. As a marketing analyst, it was fun to explore the new data model and analysis tools available to me. The world was full of opportunities.
Things got a lot less fun when I started using GA4 as our main reporting platform for our clients. Don’t get me wrong, I believe that GA4 can be a very powerful tool for data analysis, but the learning curve is steep.
The 1st of July 2023 deadline for when UA stops processing data is approaching, so we’re providing training and transitioning our clients to use GA4 as their main reporting platform. Click here if you want to know how we can help you too.
The most frustrating part of this transition has been using GA4 as the main data source for our Looker Studio (formerly Data Studio) reports.
I’ve heard marketers mentioning they’ve used Looker Studio to build reports that are easier to read in comparison to GA4’s dashboards, but I haven’t heard them mention how frustrating the process can be.
Buckle up, I have a lot to say.
The Challenge with GA4 & Looker StudioIn many ways, GA4 still feels like it is in development, with many changes launching regularly, which are hard to keep track of. As a result, we’re monitoring their update page closely and keeping our clients in the loop about the major changes.
A lot of the features requested by marketers have been released by Google, such as the landing page report and date dimensions, but there is a disconnect between what’s released in GA4 and the integration with Looker Studio. Let me explain.
When new metrics and dimensions are released in GA4, they might not be available in Looker Studio straight away. This means the report you were so excited to create for your client isn’t available yet.
You now have to wait, keep checking, and constantly make iterative changes to your reports as you never know what features are about to be released.
Now, I don’t think of reports as static pieces of work. I want to continuously improve the reports I build for our clients. What I don’t want though, is to feel like I’m building a sub-par report now and playing catch up for months.
The level of detail we could previously achieve with UA, and the reliability of the Looker Studio connection that had fewer data quota limits, is something I can’t yet replicate with GA4.
In my 10 years as a marketer, I’ve never experienced a platform change that has felt as challenging as this one. At the time of writing this article (May 2023), the integration between Looker Studio and GA4 feels like Google’s afterthought.
Limited Available Metrics & DimensionsThis is by far the biggest source of my frustration.
When GA4 introduces a new metric or dimension, I naturally start thinking about how I can use it to drive insights for our clients. In some instances, I’ve been waiting for these metrics/dimensions to be released for a long time.
However, as I mentioned, when a metric/dimension is released in GA4, it doesn’t mean it’s readily available in the Looker Studio integration. I can use them in explorations or to customise reporting dashboards in GA4, but I can’t build a Looker Studio report with them. So far, this has happened with bounce rate, landing page, average session duration, and more.
One of the most annoying situations, and this isn’t yet available in both Looker Studio and GA4, is the missing ‘Month of Year’ dimension. For measurement periods that span across multiple years, this dimension is crucial to report on monthly performance. Shoutout to Marek Rost who shared a custom dimension that recreates this successfully for Looker Studio reports.
In the screenshot below we can see all available date dimensions at this time.
Even though there may be workarounds, like in the example above, I would much rather Google release this dimension to begin with, or at least when the hour and date dimensions became available in November 2022.
Small things like these add up and it becomes challenging to build the report I envisioned would answer my clients’ marketing questions. I’m finding that both our internal team and the client require more support after delivering a report, and I often have to explain how the data doesn’t quite answer all their questions.
So, what can we do?
The solution: Use the new metrics/dimensions to customise your explorations and reports inside GA4. Ensure you share them with others in your team or business who will need to analyse the specific data set. Keep monitoring your Looker Studio/GA4 integrations and update your report as the new metrics/dimensions become available.
Data Quota Limits Something that started happening quite often late last year was that I’d configure and test the report, send it to the client, and they would email me to say the visualisation wasn’t working for them. I thought I was going crazy when this started happening.
I later found out that if you’re seeing error messages in visualisations that were previously working, the issue might be related to the data quota limits. On the 7th of November 2022, Looker Studio reports that were connected to GA4 started being subject to the Google Analytics Data API quotas.
To increase the data threshold, you would need to subscribe to Google Analytics 4 360, which is rumoured to start at $50,000 per annum. This pricing is quite prohibitive for small and medium-sized companies, which will push them to choose other, more affordable analytics solutions or opt to simplify their Looker Studio reports.
A scenario as simple as the following can break your report: Your single-page report containing more than 10 charts and tables pulling data from GA4 will hit the concurrent request quota for a single view.
The below ‘Data Set Configuration Error’ message can start appearing quite often in visualisations, and we typically find them during our reporting week as more users access the report, which frustrates us and our clients.
The solution: Build reports with the data quotas in mind (e.g. more pages with fewer visualisations). Ensure all stakeholders are aware the reports may break if the quota limits are met. Consider using BigQuery or other reporting solutions if you are frequently impacted by the quotas.
The BigQuery PushAs mentioned above, one of the ways to get around the data quota limitations is to use BigQuery before sending your data to Looker Studio.
You don’t have to worry about the tokens you’ve consumed as long as you don’t directly pull the GA4 data into Looker Studio.
Free GA4 Properties have a daily limit of 1 million events exported to BigQuery, which is a lot more than Looker Studio can handle.
This incentive to use BigQuery isn’t a bad thing in itself. BigQuery is what Google describes as a ‘cloud data warehouse’ and allows you to run Structure Query Language (SQL) queries on large data sets. For most small businesses, it wasn’t needed until now, but it is quickly becoming something to consider.
In terms of pricing, BigQuery costs $0.020 per GB of active storage and the first 10GB of data to be processed each month is free. It can be paid for on-demand or at a flat rate depending on your business’ needs. You can access Google’s pricing calculator here.
We will be having a lot more conversations with our clients about the use of BigQuery in the near future, depending on their needs.
The solution: Consider BigQuery if you’re frequently meeting your data quotas with Looker Studio, but keep in mind that you may need a data analyst with SQL knowledge to work the integration. Alternatively, you may want to find another reporting solution that integrates with GA4.
Final Thoughts Phew, rant over.
I want to end on a positive note: Change is good. In many ways, GA4 will allow everyone to make more insightful decisions and its powerful data modelling features will allow marketers to thrive in a privacy-centric world.
We don’t know what’s coming next for GA4, but we’re expecting a lot of new releases as we approach the deadline. Google seems to be listening to the community and is gradually releasing widely requested reports, metrics/dimensions and features. Two good examples are the re-launch of the bounce rate dimension and landing page report (if any Google reps are reading this article, can we have annotations back please?).
All I hope for is that the Looker Studio integration gets a bit more TLC from Google, and then I’ll be one happy marketer.
Thank you for sticking with me if you read this far and do let me know your thoughts. Tag us at @sitevisibility on LinkedIn or Twitter to continue the conversation.
Alternatively, if you’re looking for support with your reporting or GA4 account, please don’t hesitate to get in touch. You can book a free consultancy call with our experts here, or leave us a message via the form below. We’d love to help!
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If you didn’t already know, we’re co-founders of the world’s largest search marketing conference, brightonSEO.
brightonSEO takes place twice a year in Brighton, UK. It attracts over 4000 attendees and some of the smartest minds in search marketing.
In this episode of the Internet Marketing Podcast, we’re joined by SiteVisibility team members Jo, Jason and Aaron, who share their insights and takeaways from the latest brightonSEO conference that took place across the 19th, 20th and 21st April 2023.
In this episode, they answer:
- What were the hot topics at brightonSEO?
- Which talks inspired them?
- Which exhibitor attracted the biggest crowds?
- What new tools did they learn about?
- What was their #1 key takeaway?
Referenced on this episode:
- brightonseo.com
- https://openai.com/blog/chatgpt
- Greeta Munari, ‘The Redemption of Content Automation’: https://www.slideshare.net/GretaMunari1/gretamunari-the-redemption-of-content-automation-257451144
- Areej AbuAli, ‘The Future of SEO’: https://www.crawlina.com/blog/the-future-of-seo
- https://www.brightlocal.com/
- https://www.uklinkology.co.uk/
- https://www.glimpsehere.com/
You can also find all the speaker slides from brightonSEO April 2023 here: https://www.sitevisibility.co.uk/blog/2023/04/20/brightonseo-slides-april-2023/
Connect with us:
- https://www.sitevisibility.co.uk/
- https://twitter.com/sitevisibility/
- marketing@sitevisibility.com
In this episode, Scott reflects on the rapid development of ChatGPT and AI content generation tools, what this all means for copywriters and content producers, and how we can cut through the noise, upskill ourselves and prepare for the future.
In this episode, Scott discusses:* The current status of ChatGPT and GPT4 * The differences between ChatGPT, Bard and AI content production tools * Can content created using ChatGPT be successful in organic search? * How copywriters and content producers can be successful in the future * What is the new ‘minimum bar’ for content? * How ChatGPT impacts organic search
Referenced in this episode:* https://sparktoro.com/blog/ai-generated-content-is-the-new-floor/ * https://developers.google.com/search/blog/2023/02/google-search-and-ai-content * https://www.bing.com/create * https://bard.google.com/ * https://www.bing.com/
GA4:If you’d like to find out how we can help you move from Universal Analytics to Google Analytics 4, or if you need any help with GA4 set-up, auditing or training, then get in touch via the contact form below or book in a free consultancy call with our experts here.
Contact us:* https://www.sitevisibility.co.uk/contact/ * scott.colenutt@sitevisibility.com * https://twitter.com/sitevisibility
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BrightonSEO was back again on the 20th and 21st of April, and as is now customary, we’re collating each of the speaker’s slides from the conference, right here on the blog below.
If you couldn’t make it to the event yourself, missed out on some of the talks, or just want to recap some of the awesome marketing tips and advice shared, we’re here to help!
So, in alphabetical order, here are the slides from the April 2023 BrightonSEO conference.
You’ll notice that we haven’t quite collated them all yet, so if you have any you’d like us to add, please send me an email and I’ll make sure to get them added.
BrightonSEO Speaker Slides: Thursday 20th AprilAlex Wright – The 3 pillars of high performance teams
Anna Morrish – The Boss Baby – overcoming the fear of taking time off
Louise Ali – Self esteem optimisation: the most important type of SEO
Sean Butcher – Listen up SEOs! Here’s why you need to get involved in your new employee’s onboarding
Cheryl Luzet – We must have equality by now? Why unconscious bias in the agency world is holding you back
Ian Benjamin – The future of work starts with you
Azeem Ahmad – How do you align digital marketing with equality?
Fabio Embalo – How to align Equality with SEO
Andi Jarvis – Where does Equality fit in your marketing strategy?
Sally Raymer – Crawl budget: everything you need to know
Patrick Stox – Everything you really need to know about canonicalization
Kristina Azarenko – eCommerce internal linking: into the spider-verse
Claudia Higgins – Breaking down silos: how integrated data sets enhance SEO strategies
Claudia O’Shea and Sergey Lesnikov – How to create a culture of search
Will Critchlow – How to generate 8 million SEO test ideas
Michael Boosalis – Winning Google’s heart with CMS
Chris Spann & Anna Uss – Succeeding at scale: How Snyk doubled their traffic using Lumar & programmatic SEO
Jon Earnshaw – Optimising for the SERP multiverse: a 4-step process for success
Anna Moragli – Taking your business to the next level with nthe power of ecommerce SEO
Emanuel Hoch – How PPC opened up the most efficient Content Monetization Approach for SEO
A. J. Ghergich – Ensuring findability in the new search era
James Ball – ChatGPT: Localisation friend or foe
Rachel Pearson – TikTok for search marketing
Carlos Meza – Is content the king in modern SEO?
Dale Bertrand – Stop writing SEO articles: templated content that ranks
Sam Oh – Fully automated link building – is it really possible?
Tom Pool – Basic automation hacks for SEO
Robin Allenson – Automation recipes for SEO success
Emma Russell – Exploring the psychological theory, Cognitive Load
Giulia Panozzo – Neuroscience of search
Thomas Grange – The evolving state of search
Nitesh Sharoff – Hacking GA4 for SEO
Nitin Manchanda – Data driven approach to scale SEO
Jason Yip – Using UTM codes like a boss and building beautiful dashboards
KEYNOTE:
Areej AbuAli – The future of SEO: What the past decade can teach us about the next
Nick Vines – Why page speed matters, WITHOUT mentioning conversions once
Aymen Loukil – What your Google Lighthouse score hides from you
Amir Glatt – Optimizing 1 million websites for Google core web vitals
Helen Pollitt – SEO-first organisations – how to focus your business on growth
Rebecca Berbel – Why you need technical SEO to build a great online strategy
Steve Paine – Blueprint strategies for success
Genie Jones – Entity SEO: how to use the SameAs tag in schema to completely revolutionise the game
Ian Helms – How to convince even the pickiest editors to take SEO more seriously
Anthony Barone – How to future-proof SEO strategy for SME businesses
Isa Lavahun – Showing the value of digital PR beyond coverage and links
Brenton Thomas – How to generate backlinks without breaking the bank
Lauren Henley – Do product page links = impact? What I learned from building 2,000 in a year
Duane Brown – How to automate data from Shopify to Google Ads!
Kestra Walker and Sam Rutley – Making Magento magnificent for marketing
Issie Hannah – SEO Autopilot: turbocharge your everyday ecommerce tasks with automation
Kathryn Bevan – How to ace your website migration: overcoming common red flags
Damien Robert – Domain consolidation: propel your rankings without touching your content
Judith Lewis – Lessons learned from a mass of migrations
Manuel Martín Morante – Building an IA with graph theory and data science
Kavi Kardos – Extreme makeover: site architecture edition
Dan Taylor – Influencing discovery, indexing strategies for complex websites
Jessica Maloney – Help! My site has been hit by an algorithm update
Adriana Stein – How to combat SERP volatility
Simon Lesser – Google Bard, ChatGPT, the sky is falling, and SEO is dead (again)
Contact UsIf you’re looking for support with your Digital Marketing efforts, get in touch! With over 20 years of experience in SEO, we’ve helped some of the biggest brands achieve organic growth. Just check out our case studies here.
You can give us a call on 01273 733433 or leave us a message via the form below. We’d love to help!
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Each week for our clients, we send a round-up of the weekly digital marketing news they need to know about. In this week’s round-up, we included an article about the attribution models that Google is sunsetting in both Google Analytics 4 (GA4) and Google Ads.
This is quite a big change, especially if you’ve been using one of the models that will be removed. So we thought we’d share this post, which details exactly what’s happening, our view, important dates for these changes, and our recommendation. So, let’s dive in and take a look at what’s going on.
Google announced on the 6th April 2023 that they’ll be deprecating several attribution models in GA4 and Google Ads over May – September 2023. The exact dates for each stage of the change are below.
The models that will remain available are data-driven and last-click. Google explained this is because adoption of the data-driven model has been extremely high, causing the other models to be used very little.
We think this is a good move by Google because the data-driven model (now the default in both platforms) should provide the most accurate attribution of conversions to each channel/touchpoint in your users’ journeys. So reporting should be more reliable than ever.
By bringing GA4 and Google Ads more in line with each other, reporting differences between the two should be greatly reduced as well.
Google’s reasoning for keeping the last-click model could indicate it’s still used by enough companies that it wouldn’t go down well with them for it to be taken away (there’s already quite enough that isn’t going down well because of GA4 and Looker Studio). Although saying that, we suspect Google will remove the last-click model in the near future because its benefits are far outweighed by what the data-driven model offers.
Which Attribution Models are Staying & Which are Going? Staying:
- Data-driven
- Last-click
Going:
- First-click
- Linear
- Position-based
- Time decay
Important Dates:
May 2023: Time decay, position-based, linear and first-click attribution models will no longer be available to new conversion events in GA4. Google’s actual wording on this was ‘conversion actions’, which is Google Ads terminology. We believe they’re actually referring to ‘conversion events’ and we suspect it means the attribution models won’t be available in properties created after April 2023. We’ll be keeping an eye on what happens in GA4 from May, but hopefully Google will provide more clarity on this before then.
June 2023: Time decay, position-based, linear and first-click attribution models will no longer be available to new conversion actions in Google Ads.
September 2023: Time decay, position-based, linear and first-click attribution models will no longer be available in GA4 and Google Ads.
Our RecommendationWe recommend using the data-driven model in GA4 and Google Ads for the reasons mentioned above.
You should expect results between models to differ, so your top-performing channel under last-click may not be top under data-driven. Likewise, a low-performing channel under linear may be high-performing under data-driven.
It’s important to note that if you don’t make the switch to either data-driven or last-click before the deadlines, Google will automatically switch to data-driven for you. Don’t wait for Google to force it on you, make the switch now so you can start making more informed decisions about the channels you allocate budget and resource to based on their TRUE contribution to your marketing.
If you need help with GA4 or Google Ads, or any aspect of your digital marketing efforts, don’t hesitate to get in touch! You can book in a free consultancy call with our experts here, or leave us a message via the form below.
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In this episode of the Internet Marketing Podcast, we’re joined by Darren Teague, Senior Account Executive and B2C Team Lead @ Spotler, the group that houses the popular email marketing platform Pure360. Darren joins us to share his thoughts on using business learnings to inform email marketing success (and vice versa!).
As one of our partners, we’re extremely excited to have recorded this show with Darren!
Spotler is Europes leading Marketing Automation and Customer Experience software group, providing over 5000 companies globally with the technology, strategy and tactics to be better marketers.
You can find out more about what they do and why they do it here. They’re also offering a free Marketing Automation Audit to help time-constrained marketers identify where to focus their energy most. You can book in for a free audit by the amazing Darren Teague here and there’s also the chance to win a pair of brightonSEO tickets!
Alternatively, you can contact Darren directly on darren.teague@spotler.co.uk or on LinkedIn here.
In this episode we discuss:
- Do brands have to have dedicated email marketers to be successful with email marketing?
- Email marketing myths that Spotler look to debunk
- Looking beyond beyond the email marketing channel to inform email marketing campaigns
- How email marketing can inform ideas for other marketing channels
- The importance of sharing business learnings across departments
Referenced on this podcast:
- [Book] Start with Why by Simon Sinek on Amazon UK: https://amzn.to/3JAXhsz
- https://www.blacktomato.com/
- https://www.patchplants.com/gb/en/
CONNECT WITH SPOTLER:
- https://spotlergroup.com/
- https://www.pure360.com/
CONNECT WITH SCOTT:
- scott.colenutt@sitevisibility.com
- https://www.linkedin.com/in/scottcolenutt
CONNECT WITH SITEVISIBILITY:
- https://www.sitevisibility.co.uk/
- https://www.youtube.com/user/SiteVisibility
- https://twitter.com/sitevisibility
- https://www.facebook.com/SiteVisibility
- http://instagram.com/sitevisibility
If you have feedback, you’d like to be a guest, you’d like to recommend a guest or there are topics you’d like us to cover, please send this info to marketing@sitevisibility.com
In this episode of the Internet Marketing Podcast, Scott discusses the topic of confidence in marketing and how you can find yours…
CONNECT WITH SCOTT:
- scott.colenutt@sitevisibility.com
- https://www.linkedin.com/in/scottcolenutt
CONNECT WITH SITEVISIBILITY:
- https://www.sitevisibility.co.uk/
- https://www.youtube.com/user/SiteVisibility
- https://twitter.com/sitevisibility
- https://www.facebook.com/SiteVisibility
- http://instagram.com/sitevisibility
If you have feedback, you’d like to be a guest, you’d like to recommend a guest or there are topics you’d like us to cover, please send this info to marketing@sitevisibility.com
In this episode, we’re joined by Robin Christopherson MBE. Robin is also the Head of Digital Inclusion at AbilityNet and joins us to discuss how marketers can create a business case for accessibility.
In this episode we discuss:
- What is inclusive design?
- Is awareness of inclusive design improving?
- The biggest changes to accessibility legislation in the UK and Europe over the last decade
- What is ambient computing?
Referenced on this podcast: * W3C Web Accessibility Resources: https://www.w3.org/WAI/ * Google’s Lighthouse tool: https://developer.chrome.com/docs/lighthouse/overview/ * Accessibility features in Microsoft Office: https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/office/improve-accessibility-with-the-accessibility-checker-a16f6de0-2f39-4a2b-8bd8-5ad801426c7f * The Click-Away Pound report: https://www.clickawaypound.com/ * My Computer My Way from AbilityNet: https://mcmw.abilitynet.org.uk/ * TechShare Pro Information and Highlights: https://abilitynet.org.uk/techsharepro-2022
CONNECT WITH ROBIN/ABILITYNET:* AbilityNet’s website: https://abilitynet.org.uk/ * AbilityNet’s free telephone number: 0800 048 7642
CONNECT WITH SCOTT:* scott.colenutt@sitevisibility.com * https://www.linkedin.com/in/scottcolenutt
If you have feedback, you’d like to be a guest, you’d like to recommend a guest or there are topics you’d like us to cover, please send this info to marketing@sitevisibility.com
Show Transcript:Scott (Host):
Hello and welcome to the Internet Marketing Podcast, brought to you by SiteVisibility. I’m your host, Scott Colenutt, and with me today is Robin Christopherson, and we’re going to be discussing creating a business case for digital accessibility. Welcome to the podcast, Robin.
Robin Christopherson:
Thank you so much. Thanks for having me.
Scott (Host):
No problem. So can you talk me through a little bit about AbilityNet, the company that you work for, your goals at AbilityNet, and then a little bit about your specific role in AbilityNet?
Robin Christopherson:
Great. So yes, I work for AbilityNet, as you say. It’s a charity to do with technology and disability or impairments of all kinds. We’re fortunate enough to have been around for a while. This is our 25th anniversary this year, and it’s like being paid to play with tech and the best kind of tech that actually helps people in really fundamental ways.
So people with disabilities for whom choices would be really, really limited otherwise, it’s such a leveler, it’s such a door opener. For me, I’m blind, for example. I can’t do many careers, but technology enables me to work as an IT consultant for AbilityNet. For other people, it might be to be a coder or whatever it might be using speech output.
And if you look at all the other disabilities, all the other impairments as well, it might be some special equipment, it might be voice recognition, it might be helping with mobility to overcome some sort of physical issue to be able to get around, to get to work or to get to the shops or whatever it might be.
So AbilityNet is all about helping make sure that people can have as many opportunities, as many choices as other people do. So I’m really, really lucky to be working for such a brilliant organization.
My role, head of digital inclusion is more on the advocacy and consultancy side of things, although I do help with delivery. We have a range of services to help organizations make sure that their websites and apps are inclusive. We do assessments for individuals in the workplace or at home or in university for example.
So there’s a range of services and I’m slightly involved in most of the areas of AbilityNet, but my main role is in advocacy, making sure that it’s always on the agenda of government and other policymaking bodies, etc. And speaking to people like yourselves on brilliant podcasts like this to help get the message across about how accessibility is absolutely relevant and important to anyone working in IT. And marketing is absolutely no exception and hopefully we’re going to be able to explore that.
Scott (Host):
And so what’s your experience just in the marketing side and the marketing industry?
Robin Christopherson:
So marketing is all about reach. It’s all about having a relevant message. If you spend a lot of time curating and crafting what your messages are that you’re going to get out there, making sure that you have done as much as you can to reach people where they are, etc. social media, email, newsletters, all that sort of thing, just imagine if a fifth of the people that you are reaching out to can’t access that messaging, can’t take advantage of those discount codes or whatever it might be because they can’t access that technology either visually or from a reading point of view or from a cognitive understanding point of view, or they physically can’t click on the discount link or whatever it might be because you’ve done it in an inaccessible way.
Now hopefully we’re also going to talk about how accessibility is actually for a much broader audience than just people with disabilities who need to have things coded or sufficient color contrast, having things in a certain way which will help them overcome their impairment or will work properly with their assistive technology.
But it’s much, much broader than that and it will actually make your comms, your messaging, your content better for Google, better SEO, better platform compatibility. It’s able to be ported over to a range of different uses that you might want to put your efforts in marketing too. And it also makes it easier for people to see, comprehend, access, who have got no impairments at all, and we can talk about that.
Scott (Host):
Congratulations by the way on the 25th year in, well, for AbilityNet, for your role in that as well. I’m curious to know a little bit more. As you were talking now, I didn’t know much about the offline aspects of what you do at AbilityNet. So could you give me an estimated percentage split of the amount of companies that you help with offline challenges or solutions versus online?
Robin Christopherson:
That’s mostly with individuals, not companies, but it could be employees within companies. It’s basically helping disabled people get the right tech, the right software solutions, the right tweaks to their devices to help them perform at their best, whether it’s in education, in the workplace, or just being able to order those groceries online. That was literally a lifesaver during COVID for people who needed to get groceries to the door and who were vulnerable and isolating and that sort of thing.
So I would probably say half and half. So half of what we do is aimed at the disabled individual. Half is aimed at corporates and public sector to make sure that their digital offerings are inclusive. And being a charity, any surplus as we call it, we don’t call it profits, gets plowed right into those free services to disabled individuals.
So we’ve also got an advising information line. You can email inquiries@abilitynet.org.uk. There’s a free phone number as well. So there’s loads of ways in which we deliver our charitable mission and we don’t get any funding from government or anything like that. So the services that we have, the consultancy services around making digital more inclusive is a brilliant model to pay for the free stuff that we do.
Scott (Host):
I’m already sensing from the way that you’re speaking about this, that your role is encompassing of everything that you’ve just described there. So it sounds like you are very keen and interested in support on the technology side and equipment side, but equally interested, experienced in the accessibility when it comes to websites and apps, and as we’re going to be talking about the business case for those things as well.
Robin Christopherson:
Absolutely. So I started as an assessor back in the mid ’90s, going out to people in the home, in their colleges or wherever they might be, and looking at the technology that might help them overcome their particular challenges. And then in 2003, which was the first year that it became clear that there was a legal requirement for digital accessibility, I started the accessibility consultancy team, which now is 30 odd strong and delivering a lot of services.
A recent development in that area is that we now work with companies to be much more proactive to embed accessibility in everything they do because up until now we’d been delivering audits and doing diverse user testing and stuff like that to make sure their products are compliant, but also real life usable for disabled people.
But it was only ever on an ad hoc basis, “Well, we’ve got this new project, we know that it needs to be made accessible, so we’ll bring in AbilityNet to assure that element of it.” But really organizations need to think about accessibility right from the start of any project, and that certainly goes for marketing as well.
Accessibility isn’t something that you want to get sign-off on, on a particular marketing campaign or a website article or whatever it might be. You really want to think about building that in from the start and have an awareness of what the kind of key elements there are so that you’re not having to look at retrofitting, or making choices early on in the content that you’re using that means that, “Oh, well, okay, we didn’t think about captions or we didn’t think about the color contrast in the video. Ah, let’s put it out anyway because it’s the 11th hour.”
And marketing in particular is very high turnover, agile, so it’s not like it’s something that you’re working on for two years to overhaul a website. So shifting left in the process and thinking about accessibility or inclusive design as I like to call it, all the way through, means that you don’t get any horrible surprises and that the content that you produce on a day-to-day basis is going to be pretty good.
Now you can have checks and balances in place after that as well, and you can get third party organizations like AbilityNet involved, but it’s really important to embed accessibility maturity into what you do, in your capabilities, in your processes, in your tooling, etc., training.
And that’s what we’ve been doing increasingly in recent months and years with helping organizations look at every corner of what they do and to find the gaps in, “Oh, well, when we procure things, we don’t actually ask them if they’re going to be accessible.” And that’s just buying in accessibility.
So there’s lots of areas where you can shine a light on something and say, “Okay, we need to do that slightly better.” And we’ve got formalized processes that can help organizations do that.
Scott (Host):
I think, did you say you were undertaking website usability testing from maybe the mid to late ’90s? Was that right?
Robin Christopherson:
So we did a certain amount of looking at organization’s websites and that sort of thing, but you might be aware, the Disability Discrimination Act came into effect in 1995, and that was a massive milestone for people with disabilities because you could quite happily discriminate against them in the workplace, in education, in services before that and not really have any comeback.
Now that was brilliant, but because in that legislation it didn’t call out digital because digital was still quite nascent, it was quite young, particularly online, then there was this big hole. So it was only in 2003 when they published a code of practice as it was called, which specifically said, “This includes digital, it includes websites. You must make sure that your digital services are inclusive.”
That saw a massive increase in people needing services to help them with that process because anyone out there listening to this podcast who has looked at the accessibility guidelines for web, for example, they’re not a walk in the park, absolutely would agree with that. There’s quite a lot to it.
There are some brilliant projects that have distilled them down into a simpler checklist that you can use for the basics. And so if you’re not a web developer who needs to deep dive, there are some easy wins that people who are just content creators on a daily basis can make sure that they do to check for accessibility of their content.
So you don’t have to be a coder or anything like that to, for example, run the accessibility checker in Word. That is incredibly informative. And if there’s one takeaway guys that you can have from today’s show, it’s to have a look and have a play with the accessibility checker in Office because it’s absolutely brilliant.
I know a lot of SEO boards out there will be familiar with Lighthouse. Well, there is some accessibility features in Lighthouse as well. So go and have a play with those two. There is absolutely an overlap and a very big one between SEO and accessibility. So Google will give you lots of brownie points if you think about accessibility as well.
Scott (Host):
We’re definitely going to come back to this point as well in a moment. But before we do, this concept of inclusive design, I think is the phrase you used to describe it, ensuring you’re thinking about accessibility from the start of X, a project, an initiative of some sort. Because you have been in the field a long time, have you seen that awareness improve in any way?
Robin Christopherson:
Absolutely. And I’m going to quote Larry Goldberg here from Verizon. He, I think coined the phrase, born accessible, and you’ve probably heard of shift left. Well, if you can consider accessibility, in the case of a new digital project, for example, right from the wire frame and design mockup stage right through to coding templates, right through to populating page content, right through UAT before you go live doing some actual diverse user testing and double checking the code, that sort of thing, then you can have a brilliantly inclusive project.
If it’s creating marketing materials, then it’s what I was talking about before, checking headings, alternative text, making sure that links are clickable from the keyboard, that the particular CMS that you’re using doesn’t produce links that need to use a mouse, that sort of thing. So there’s a checklist that you can use.
And a lot of CMSs have built in accessibility functionality, some better than others. A lot of content starts off in Word, for example, as I mentioned before or in an Outlook email, then there’s brilliant accessibility features in there too with the accessibility checker that I talked about.
So there’s some simple things that you can do, but this idea of being aware of accessibility and the key dos and don’ts and bearing it in mind as part of your day job and not delegating it to any accessibility champions you might have within your team or within your organization, but to own it yourself, that is going to be massive. That’s going to make your content so much more inclusive.
And the reason why I like the idea of inclusive design as the phrase to think about rather than accessibility is because yes, it’s about accessibility and yes, it’s the accessibility guidelines that you would look at, there are ones for web, there’s ones for iOS apps, there’s ones for Android.
So yes, it’s the accessibility guidelines at the end of the day, and yes, they’re aimed at disabled people, but if you follow those guidelines, then you’re going to make products that are so much easier for every single user, and that is without exaggeration. And you might be thinking, well, how on earth are the accessibility guidelines going to help every single one of our consumers of the messaging that we’re putting out there?
Well, mobile is definitely the … It’s a mobile-first age that we’re living in. Google put out figures saying that 60 plus percent of websites that people visit are from mobile devices. So it’s a mobile-first world in that respect. And mobile in particular is like extreme computing.
So everyone listening to this podcast has probably used their phone one-handed today, if not multiple times, and that could be for a number of reasons. It could be because you’ve only got one hand, or it could be for something much more mundane like you’ve got a cup of coffee in the other one, or you just happen to pick up your phone and use your thumb and not think about holding your phone in the other hand, etc.
So there’s loads of times when you have those requirements of being not as dextrous as someone who’s doing it carefully with both hands or they’re using a desktop operating system with a mouse, that sort of thing. And so whether you’re juggling your phone one-handed out of choice or whether you’ve only got one hand or whether you happen to have a broken wrist for a while, you have exactly the same requirements that somebody with Parkinson’s or a tremor has 24/7.
And the guidelines that accessibility outlines for that group, things like separating tappable areas with white space so you don’t hit the wrong one, having minimal tappable area size of 44 by 44 PX, if you’re interested, so that they’re not too small to aim at, those requirements will help every single user who’s using a mobile device in a casual way. And obviously it’ll help people who need those requirements because of an impairment or disability be able to access your content at all.
And those same ideas of situational impairment go for vision, whether it’s a small sheet of glass on a sunny day, you need the same color contrast and decent default font choices. Hello iOS 7, where Jony Ive decided to make all the fonts really, really slender. As someone with a vision impairment 24/7 or if you’re in a noisy cafe or whether you’re a student who’s sneaky, watching a video under the desk in the lecture theater and they have the YouTube captions turned on.
Google said that 65% of people watching YouTube videos have captions turned on, and that’s not that they all have a hearing impairment, it’s that they are watching it in a noisy environment, or maybe it’s all of those screens in bars or stations or restaurants where they have the sound turned off and just the subtitles on.
I could go on and on. If you’re trying to order an Uber after a good night out, then you are cognitive impaired and you need to have extreme UX, just like somebody with a cognitive impairment 24/7 needs to be able to successfully order an Uber at all.
So if you apply those same messages, those same concepts to the marketing comms that you’re putting out, make sure you follow the accessibility guidelines and everybody will have a better time in accessing your content. And some people will be able to access it, full stop, when otherwise they wouldn’t have been able to, but everyone will have a better time.
There was some brilliant research, I’ll just finish off.
Scott (Host):
Yeah, that’s fine.
Robin Christopherson:
The RNIB, the Royal National Institute for the Blind, they did some research and they got a group of visually impaired people to look at a number of different websites and surprise, surprise, the ones that were compliant, that were accessible were much easier to use, but that wasn’t the big finding.
They also had a control group of able-bodied testers, which all good research studies should have so that you can compare and contrast. And the able-bodied group actually found the accessible websites much easier to use as well. On average, they performed the tasks that they were given 35% more quickly. And who wouldn’t bite someone’s hand off for a 35% usability bonus in what you’re doing?
So there are very real benefits for doing things in an inclusive way, and that’s why I like to think of doing things according to the accessibility guidelines as making them inclusive. So digital inclusion is what I’m talking about here because accessibility absolutely is at the heart of it, but there’s too much baggage associated with it. People think it’s only for disabled people, whereas actually if it’s a numbers game, it’s for everybody and you will get disabled people, the 15% of your audience that absolutely need it, but everybody will benefit from it.
Scott (Host):
Digital inclusion, and I’m thinking back to … Did you say the Disability Discrimination Act was finalized in 2003? Is that when it came in?
Robin Christopherson:
It came in 1995. But they didn’t mention digital. 2003 was when they had an appendix to it, which said, “Oh, by the way, guys, digital’s covered as well.” Because there was a lot of organizations that were prevaricating before then, “I don’t think it’s covered.”
Scott (Host):
So in the last … It’s been 20 years now, and what I’m thinking here is there are a lot of messages that you shared there about the benefits of digital inclusion beyond just the accessibility needs of a subset of users, it’s really the benefits to everyone that you talked about there. But do you think this concept of digital inclusion has improved over the last 20 years? And if it has improved, have there ever been any milestones in the last 20 years that you can point to and say, “Ah, that made a big difference”?
Robin Christopherson:
Absolutely it’s improved. It’s been incremental with the rise of digital generally, and in 20 years that has come on in leaps and bounds. I mean, just imagine a computer in front of you or your phone and you have no internet connection. It’s just, what would you do with it? A bit of word processing, that sort of thing. It just isn’t a useful device.
So with the ubiquity of the internet and now with everything going online, it’s just like a portal to the world, and that’s why it’s such an enabler. If you can’t use a standard keyboard, use an ergonomic one or use voice recognition. If you can’t use a mouse, then use the keystroke alternatives or again, voice command it. If you can’t see the screen, use speech output or a braille display, I could go on and on.
The redundancy, which is the technical term for choice that’s built into computers is astronomical. It’s breathtaking. And now you can control computers by thoughts, the Neuralink project of Elon Musk, etc., and others. So there’s such a variety of ways of interfacing, which is incredibly empowering, but what you’re interfacing has just mushroomed beyond people’s wildest imagination, I would’ve thought 20 years ago.
So digital is absolutely important. I can’t stress that enough and I’m sure your listeners will agree. It’s all about the internet and digital. And who could imagine a world without it? So the need for things to be done in an inclusive way has grown with digital. And the 15% of the population that would literally be locked out from the digital world otherwise has become proportionately louder and better appreciated.
But it’s really the advent of the smartphone, which is in the sort of last 10 years massively that, like I said before, has led to this age of extreme computing and that means that people are consuming digital everywhere. And then obviously we could talk about wearables and stuff like that, but it’s only going to proliferate.
So the more you’re taking devices with you, the more extreme your requirements are and the more of a need there is to do things in a really inclusive way. So getting the message out to people with whatever campaign you’re working on at the moment, you need to be much more aware of the number of platforms and the variety of platforms that people will be accessing them on.
And then the next age of computing, I would argue, is the age of ambient computing, where in the last five years or so, with the rise of smart speakers and virtual assistants, you can just talk to the air and you’ll get a response, information, the service that you want, whatever it might be, the function to perform, turning your heating on or off, whatever it might be. Often don’t even know where the device was that reacted to that or in many cases, which one of them will respond.
But this idea of just talking to the air and things happen, we’re so far away from the idea of having one device, having to read a manual and a steep learning curve. You just talk to the air now. And we could talk about the idea of AI making that simpler still, and things like ChatGPT, which towards the end of last year I think is going to be a milestone.
So I think that with the proliferation of platforms, if you have content that is going to be inclusive, for example, able to be spoken well, for someone like myself who can’t see at all, if you bring up a webpage and you click on that immersive reader mode, most browsers have them these days, you strip out all the gubbins and stuff, then that is basically how the content will be scraped by a smart speaker to give the response when somebody asks about information on your company, for example.
And if you hit the play button on that in your browser and you start listening and horror of horrors, you can’t see it on the screen, but it suddenly starts reading out a load of JavaScript, then I’ll get that, and I do on a daily basis because there’s a lot of hidden horrors on webpages for speech output software, and the smart speaker person will get that as well in their response from their Echo or whatever it might be.
So you really do need to think about how this content’s going to be repurposed and accessible. It just keeps on coming back to accessibility as being at the heart of what will improve your content for the broadest possible audience regardless of impairment or device or environment.
Scott (Host):
There’s so much that I want to break down there, but I want to go back a little bit to AbilityNet and the types of companies that contact you because you mentioned there that you think digital inclusion over the last 20 years, the awareness of that has gradually improved.
And just paraphrasing a little bit, it sounds like there are a greater number of companies now that appreciate that digital inclusion is from the start, not something that you try and tack on at the end for some kind of box-ticking exercise. What are the triggers that cause companies to contact AbilityNet now? Are there any commonalities in that?
Robin Christopherson:
I think that compliance is still a big factor, and certainly in the last few years when the public sector regulations have come in. Your listeners may or may not be aware of the legislative landscape. We talked about the DDA. They’ve probably heard of the Equality Act, which came in, in 2010, and that was massive because with the DDA, there was no requirement for proactivity.
So if a disabled person went for a job interview and the employer said, “Oh, well, we haven’t got any wheelchair users or blind users or deaf employees, and we haven’t actually got the systems in place or the ramps in place, or whatever it might be.” So they might not say it to their faces, but we’re not going to have you, and there was no recourse there.
So the Equality Act helped there, which said that even if you haven’t got those employees today, or you’re not aware of those customers today, you absolutely need to make reasonable adjustments to make sure that your premises, your services, your practices are inclusive so that you can’t turn people away with a reason that oh, it’s going to be too much of a wrench to accommodate you because you’re our first one, for example. So that was absolutely a landmark shift in legislation.
Then just before Brexit, the EU’s really good legislation that took it one step further was brought into the UK, but unfortunately it only covered public sector. Then the other one that is in the EU for other sectors didn’t make it before Brexit, the guillotine of Brexit. So unfortunately we only have the public sector one.
Now how does that differ? Well, the Equality Act brilliant as it was, wasn’t enforced, so it had no teeth. So it required people with a disability taking an organization to court, like Domino’s was in the US when it had an inaccessible app. And that’s really challenging for a disabled person or even a group of disabled people that are helped by an organization like the RNIB, for example. And often they weren’t successful because the company had better lawyers basically.
So when the public sector regulations came along, the government for the first time ever would monitor websites in the public sector and would find them. So that made them really sit up and listen. So four or five years ago when that came into effect, we saw a massive shift in public sector organizations, so that’s local authorities, FE and HE colleges, government, central government and stuff suddenly pulling their finger out and really doing a good job because otherwise they might be fined.
And people could find out because you can put in a freedom of information request and find out which local authorities or universities have been fined for not being inclusive. So that was brilliant but unfortunately, Brexit put paid to the other one.
But imagine if there was no traffic wardens or speed cameras, if that area of the law wasn’t enforced, it would be chaos. But there’s never been an army of traffic wardens for the internet, but we’re seeing a bit of a change now. Considering how important this is, absolutely vital to be a leading digital-first country, it’s about time.
Scott (Host):
What do you think is the most impactful way in which you’ve communicated some of these key messages about digital inclusion to companies? So you’re on the podcast now, you’re using this as a marketing medium. Are there any marketing mediums or messages that have been particularly effective in communicating what you feel is important about digital inclusion?
Robin Christopherson:
I think just like with marketing in general, go where the people are and pretty much use all the channels. So social media, we’re very active there. We have a newsletter. We put up loads of articles on our website. But we also sit on government committees and things, on party parliamentary groups, and we would be involved in government consultation processes and stuff like that.
But when we’re out there trying to get the message across, we would absolutely cover both the carrots and the sticks. So we were talking about the sticks a moment ago, and thankfully they’re getting bigger and more knobbly to hit people with, but the carrots we would argue are even more important and compelling to the business case. There’s been some brilliant surveys and research done on things like the Click-Away Pound. And so it’s really, really important to cover that as well, because there’s significant ROI here.
Scott (Host):
I’ve not heard of that report. Did you say the Click-Away Pound?
Robin Christopherson:
Yeah. So I think it was the Shaw Trust who did a report a couple of years ago where they estimated the purple pound, so that’s the disposable income of disabled people and their families. So this is where people have money to spend. So this is over and above, once they’ve earned their crust and they’ve paid their bills. They’ve got money to spend, they might spend it on your services or they might spend it elsewhere. And that’s estimated at 274 billion pounds in the UK per annum of disabled people and their families. So that’s a lot of money to spend. That’s a big sector. It’s 15% of the population, as I’ve said.
And the Click-Away Pound basically surveyed that sector, and there were some really interesting findings, not surprising to us, but hopefully eye-opening for other people. 76% of them said that if they met inaccessibility in an online transaction they were trying to do, or a website, they’d go elsewhere. So if there is another choice, they’ll go there and you’ll lose their custom.
There’s lots of other useful findings in there, but it’s basically saying you will lose this very significant customer base or consumer base if you don’t think about inclusive design. A lot around brand damage, word of mouth recommendation and that sort of thing. All of those things go out of the window if you have ruined the trust with your consumers by excluding them or making it incredibly frustrating for them to use that site.
I mean Amazon, absolutely brilliant, but imagine guys, if the images weren’t loading on a webpage, how much would you trust the description of the manufacturer or the comments in the reviews before you hit buy now on that product if you couldn’t actually see it? Well, that’s what it’s like for me because none of those images have alternative text descriptions to them. So they’re not there for me.
Well, in fact, they are, but they’re this horrendous string, which is probably an auto-generated file name of the image, which by the way, guys, if you don’t label your images, people are probably going to hear in a number of situations.
So it’s very easy to erode trust with your consumers. And because it’s a digital-first world and there’s so much choice out there in many areas, they will go elsewhere. So that’s another reason to really think carefully about how you prioritize accessibility and digital inclusion.
So really, really important that you think about not just making your products inclusive because you would otherwise be locking people out, but thinking of that much bigger 35% usability bonus for everybody else as well. And that makes the numbers really start to pop, if that 274 billion wasn’t eye-opening enough.
Scott (Host):
As you’ve been talking, we’ve been referencing websites, maybe apps a little bit as well. But on the technology side, coming into this podcast, I was thinking about the question, in the last 20 years then, what milestones may there have been in this space of digital inclusion? And actually, a smartphone came to mind for me in the mid to late 2000s.
And then I was thinking, well, actually smart speakers and virtual assistants in that respect, which you referenced, would probably have been a huge development. And then you referenced it and you started to talk about how … I think you referenced it as ambient technology. What was the phrase?
Robin Christopherson:
Ambient computing.
Scott (Host):
Ambient computing, yeah. Has it been a huge development for you? Just speaking from your personal experience, has it changed the way in which you interface with businesses?
Robin Christopherson:
Absolutely, and how disabled individuals interface with the digital world. Entirely. I mean you mentioned those different kind of milestones, wearables as well, I would say, where you’ve got a lot more data that’s being collected about an individual, the quantified self, which can really help with health and making sure that people are able to monitor their own health because there’s only so many talking blood pressure monitors or talking exercise bikes out there.
But as long as you’ve got something on your wrist, which can tell you your heart rate, tell you whether you’ve got A-fib or an irregular heartbeat or whatever it might be, that’s incredibly empowering for people that otherwise wouldn’t be able to access those using a less accessible or inclusive device.
Oh, and by the way, I know that the Apple Watch doesn’t measure your blood pressure yet. But anyway, there are talking blood pressure meters out there. But to be able to take all of that data via Bluetooth and whack it into one central place like the Health app is incredibly empowering.
But also I think that the mainstreaming of what was before specialist and very expensive technologies. So before, if I as a blind person wanted to make my computer talk, I would have to spend hundreds of pounds, in fact, the same amount again as the price of the computer to get a really good screen reader on it.
Obviously, Narrator has always been built into Windows and VoiceOver on the Mac, but until quite recently they’ve been the screen reader that was just good enough to help you download the better one so that you could actually do something with your computer that was productive, etc. So nowadays, everything is almost there in the box.
And AbilityNet has got a brilliant website called mycomputermyway.com. And if you go there, you’ll find step-by-step guides on how you can customize your devices, Windows, macOS, iOS, iPadOS, Android, etc. and popular suites like Office where everything that’s there to be customized and tailored to help you is outlined in those terms.
And unlike a lot of guides online, which might say, “Okay, now click on this and now click on that,” that’s no good for someone like myself, for example. So it’ll also say, “Or press Alt plus F and then C,” or whatever it might be. So usually there are keystroke ways of doing it as well. So it’s a very inclusive resource.
And we would invite anyone to play with the accessibility settings on their devices because like I was saying before about accessibility not just being for disabled people, the accessibility settings on your devices are absolutely not just for disabled people, they’re for everybody.
And that’s why Apple have brought accessibility out up from under general to the main level in the Settings app in iOS, for example. And if you did a spider diagram of all of the settings in the Settings app, the accessibility section would be well over half of the whole of the Settings app. So that’s a whole bunch of functionality that you’re ignoring. Go for it. We’re all different shapes and sizes. Nobody should settle for the vanilla out of box experience on their devices. So there’s some really, really powerful stuff in there.
So I think that’s another major advance, which is the mainstreaming of accessibility features of really powerful accessibility solutions being built into devices and all of the different devices, wearables, etc., that again, are really inclusive, that have given people a lot more ways of interfacing with the digital world, but also integrating their information with it as well.
And for me as a blind person, to be able to unlock my Mac just from my wrist or authenticate something with a biometric rather than having to dig out a password a bit like everybody else, it’s a much easier way of doing it. But when you have a disability, those kind of fiddly processes can often be much more challenging as well. Biometrics and easy ways of being able to authenticate yourself have played a massive part in making the lives of disabled people easier as well.
Scott (Host):
I know you’re not solely responsible for marketing at AbilityNet, but I am curious now having you said all of that, I was thinking about all of the devices around me and the fact that even now when we’re thinking about working with companies, we don’t necessarily think automatically of the website and how we’ll support them with their website development, sometimes it might be an app. And that could be a smartphone app or it could be a voice app of some sort.
Has the development in that technology and the new interfaces that are available changed, or is it changing the way that AbilityNet are thinking about marketing?
Robin Christopherson:
I would lie if I said yes in a big way, because we’re probably still focusing on channels that we were five years ago or even 10 years ago. There are new ones, a new hot app on a smartphone that you need to also target in your comms, etc. But as far as radically new ways of doing things, I don’t think so. I mean we, for example, aren’t targeting smart speakers as yet with marketing. But how would you do it? I mean, it’s not really an open enough platform yet.
We have been in discussions with Amazon to make sure that if people ask about AbilityNet, and you can guys at home, you can pause and you can just ask any loose question about who AbilityNet are and what they do, and you’ll get really good responses. So we have done that and you get calls to action in those responses as well.
And interestingly, Amazon, were perfectly happy to have really quite hardcore calls to action in those, even to the extent that, I mean, we haven’t done this yet, but they are happy for you to have a card sent to the A-L-E-X-A, I’m not going to say her name, app with links and other things that could include discount codes and stuff like that. So they’re up for it.
Scott (Host):
Good.
Robin Christopherson:
I don’t think it’s just because we’ve got a really good relationship with them. If anyone out there is working for a company that doesn’t have a strategy or something to say about the smart speaker platform, for example, then they should, because it’s here to stay, it’s got a lot of potential and people do use it for more than just the weather and listening to music and stuff like that. So you absolutely should be thinking along those lines.
And often when I’m doing presentations, I talk about future platforms like AR or MR, where potentially any sheet of glass that you pass by or that you’re enclosed in, in a driverless car or something where you’ve got someone’s eyeballs, even if it’s just for a few seconds, might well be seen as a canvas for advertising and messaging and stuff like that. And there are actually accessibility considerations that are unique to that kind of transparent canvas as well. So you’d want to be bearing those in mind too.
But I mean, I think that the platforms are only going to get more and more diverse. So as long as you’re always thinking in an inclusive way and thinking, well, what are the implications here for people with these particular impairments, or if it’s a really sunny day, or they’re accessing it on a bumpy bus and they’re not quite so dextrous as they would normally be?
The good news though is that all of those things are covered in the accessibility guidelines. So you don’t have to stress about them, you just need to follow the guidelines.
Scott (Host):
One of the reasons I asked that question is because I was thinking about how I interact with my A-L-E-X-A device. I need to spell it as well because there is one in front of me and I’ve not turned it on do not disturb mode. But I was thinking about it’s very useful having all of these devices and having that ambient technology to work with, the ambient computing to work with, but only on the condition, like you said, that digital inclusion is built in from the start.
And actually from what I’ve found, I’ve found apps on Amazon difficult to configure and experiment with. It might be easier now, when I tried a couple of years ago. But I was thinking that I’m reasonably technically savvy and it wasn’t particularly accessible. It wasn’t particularly easy. So actually for me, maybe there was some ground to make up there with any voice assistant and any voice app in making that process of creating voice apps and interfaces a little bit easier. That was what was going through my mind.
Robin Christopherson:
There are loads of different developer platforms or environments to create skills for the Echo. And the Echo is definitely the kind of go-to smart speaker platform for developers because it’s in most homes, it’s incredibly affordable. And like I say, the dev tools are quite mature now. So I would definitely look at that as being the first one that you would target.
The smarts within the smart speaker itself have come a long way and discoverability is a lot better. You can just ask her a bunch of stuff about, oh, what such and such have you got? What reminder skills have you got? What games can I play? Or even just, what can I do? What new things have you got? You can just be quite freeform about what you ask her. But I mean, I think it’s a really flourishing platform. And I was going to make some other point, but it’s gone. I’ll come back.
Scott (Host):
No worries. Well, in closing for this episode, you had mentioned at the beginning, you seem so excited, I could hear the energy as you were talking about your experimentation with, I think you said technology, well, I’m assuming software and hardware, and I just wanted to know if there’s anything that you’re experimenting with at the moment that you would just highly recommend or that you’re excited about that you think, oh wow, this really represents what the kind of … It’s just an excellent device or something that represents where digital inclusion is going from a technology standpoint.
Robin Christopherson:
I mean, I think mainstream, the fact that mainstream devices are so inclusive these days, I’m particularly thinking of Apple. Disabled people really aren’t treated as second class citizens when it comes to Apple devices. You know that the new hotness that comes out, whether it’s a VR headset this year or an AR headset, which is looking like it’s been pushed back a couple of years, you know that regardless of your impairment, even if it’s someone like myself who’s blind, there will be something in that new platform for us.
So LiDAR, for example, is making a huge difference for people who need to have pinpoint ranging accuracy. Now obviously in the pandemic, there was social distancing and stuff like that. But as a blind person to have LiDAR in your phone or in the long-awaited Apple Glasses, as and when they come out, there is already software built into the camera app on your phone, which will not only tell you how close you are to other people, where they are. If you’ve got the AirPods, then you’ve got the spatial audio and it can give you information there as to exactly where those people are.
But you can also find doors. Door detection is really, really good these days. And so it’ll then not only guide me to the door, it will also tell me where the handle is that I can actually put my hand out and actually find that knob, and that’s a LiDAR thing, plus a camera thing where it’s looking at any text in the view finder and doing optical character recognition on it. And it will tell you if it’s a pull or a push or it’ll tell you the opening times and stuff like that.
So I think we are absolutely surrounded by really, really cutting edge tech. And the thing that I’m most excited about is what is the next new gadget that will put that on my face instead of just in my pocket or on my wrist. Or I mentioned ChatGPT earlier, and for a lot of people, that level of AI is just going to explode in its uses both for good and nefarious purposes.
But if we thought that our smart speakers were half decent today, then as soon as there are some APIs that can be leveraged around the level of smarts that we’ve got in something like the OpenAI projects that are out there in beta at the moment, which are frankly breathtaking, we won’t believe what ambient computing and our virtual assistants are going to be able to do for us tomorrow.
And I know everyone’s thinking, well, Siri’s been around for 10 years and it’s absolutely hopeless and that is absolutely true, but it’s still very, very useful in many ways too. But I think we’ll look back at this time and we’ll think blimey, we thought things were smart today, but it’s really, really turned a corner. So I think AI and the devices that can help us leverage AI in the day-to-day things that we do, that’s the thing that I’m really most excited about.
Scott (Host):
Amazing. Before I let you go, Robin, well, firstly I just wanted to say, because I don’t think I covered this at the beginning, but Robin Christopherson MBE no less, so congratulations for that. But if people want to learn more about you and AbilityNet, where can they find you?
Robin Christopherson:
Brilliant. So AbilityNet, all one word, and that’s abilitynet.org.uk. Check us out. We’ve got loads of brilliant resources there. We’ve got loads of free webinars. You don’t have to have accessibility in your job title or JD, anything to do with technology in the broadest sense, any content creator, you marketers out there, we’re absolutely talking to you as well.
We’ve got a brilliant set of sessions that were recorded at our November, our annual TechShare Pro conference, and several of those are around SEO and marketing. So go and have a listen to those. We had a brilliant discussion with two guys from Google about the overlap between SEO and accessibility. Basically accessibility’s pushing in the same direction and ignore it at your peril if you care about SEO.
So loads of resources on our website. And there is a free phone number on there as well. I can’t remember it at the moment because it changed recently, but it should be front and center if you want to give it to your disabled family members, friends, colleagues, etc. who might want to have a chat with an actual person about how tech might be able to help them get the most out of their devices and their work and education, etc.
Scott (Host):
Well, links to everything, and including the telephone number, I’ll make sure there’s a telephone number in the show notes. So all of that will be in the show notes. For now, Robin, I know I could talk to you about so much. I’ve written down notes today about other things I’d like to talk about. So at some point in the future I would love to have you back on. But for now, this has been the Internet Marketing Podcast. Take care.
Robin Christopherson:
Thanks, Scott.
Last week, Google announced via email and a banner in Google Analytics that in March they’ll create a Google Analytics 4 (GA4) property for you or update the configuration of your existing GA4 property.
You may have already seen the following notification in your Universal Analytics (UA) view:
Although Google hasn’t revealed this, we believe it’s doing this because there are still many businesses who haven’t migrated to GA4 despite the 1st July 2023 deadline fast approaching.
The only way to prevent the automatic creation of a GA4 property/update to your existing one is to opt out via Google Analytics > Admin > ‘GA4 Setup Assistant’ under ‘Property’ by 28th February. That doesn’t leave you long if you want to do that.
In this post, we’ll take you through the pros and cons of letting Google do this for you, as well as providing our opinion on what we think is the best option.
Should You Let Google Create or Update a GA4 Property for You? On the face of it, it might seem desirable to have Google create or update your new property for you. As stated by Google though, there are a few big caveats:
- ‘For the best quality setup and the most historical data and insights, we recommend you migrate your Universal Analytics property to Google Analytics 4 now, before one is automatically configured for you’
- ‘Automatically created Google Analytics 4 properties contain only basic features’
- ‘If you have a Universal Analytics 360 property, you won’t have Google Analytics 4 automatically configured’
Additionally, if you’re in one of the following scenarios, it will not be wise to allow Google to create your property or update your existing one:
- You’ve used the need to migrate to GA4 as an opportunity to reassess what you measure, so you’ve only migrated some events and goals. Therefore, you don’t want undesirable events and goals to automatically populate in your new property. All your work would be undone! This would also apply to other settings you decided not to migrate as well
- Your UA property hasn’t been audited in a while or you don’t have someone actively looking after it, so you run the risk of having redundant or incorrect aspects being migrated. You also run the risk of this data being displayed in Google Ads if it’s connected to your UA property. You’ll be left with a new property that contains confusing data at best or inaccurate data at worst
- You’ve configured your GA4 property to be how you want. Google could overwrite that configuration if you don’t opt out, turning your ideal set-up into a very unideal one
For these reasons, we recommend that you don’t allow them to automatically create a GA4 property or update your existing one, especially if you want the best set-up that makes use of all features. For our clients, we’ll be opting them out of automatically-created properties.
What You Should Do if You Allow Google To Create a Property or Update Your Existing OneIf you must allow Google to create or update the property because you don’t have access to a tracking expert who can create your property, ensure you do the following before March:
- Sense check that all features of your UA property, including events and goals, are relevant to keep
- Ensure the main view you use for reporting is set as your default one
When your new property is automatically created, bear in mind the following limitations and potential challenges you’ll face:
- For apps, you’ll need to configure the app data stream and configure your app to send data
- Permissions for view-level users will not be carried over
- You may not be eligible to reuse your existing UA tagging for GA4. If you’re one of those businesses, you’ll need to manually add the GA4 tag to your site or implement it via a tag management system
- Goals will be copied over from your default view. If you have the wrong view set as the default, goals from an undesired view will be copied
- If you use goals in ads, from a view that isn’t your default one, those goals will be copied over as well
- If you use audiences in your ads, from a view that isn’t your default one, those audiences will also be copied over
- Your UA events could be migrated into more than 50 custom dimensions and metrics, which would exceed GA4’s limits. Therefore, some events (possibly very important ones) won’t be migrated
- Some businesses will find their set-up is so unique, e.g. data from your CRM is being sent to UA, that your use case will not be covered. So the migration will either not work or not be possible
Additional ResourcesIf you want to learn a bit more about the challenges of having Google create or update a property for you, check out the following resources:
- Google: About Automatically-created Google Analytics 4 Properties
- Andrew Miller: GA4 Automatically-created Properties: Should You Migrate Yourself?
Contact UsThere’s a lot to think about when it comes to GA4 and it can be confusing. Please get in touch if you’d like support with configuring or auditing GA4 properties, or you’d like your team to receive training on how to use GA4’s new reports and features.
You can find out more about our GA4 services here, or book a free consultancy call with our experts here. Alternatively, leave us a message via the form below, and we’ll be in touch. We’d love to help!
- Name* First Last
- Email*
- Message*
- EmailThis field is for validation purposes and should be left unchanged. Δ
In this episode, we welcome Jeff Sauer back to the Internet Marketing Podcast. Jeff joins us to discuss the intricacies of Google Analytics 4 migrations, including:
- Jeff’s approach to learning new analytics products, and specifically Google Analytics 4
- Why you should migrate to Google Analytics 4 as soon as possible
- Key GA4 dates you need to be aware of
- What should the scope of a GA4 migration include?
- What are the benefits of the new data-driven attribution model?
Referenced on this podcast:
- https://analyticscanvas.com/
- https://supermetrics.com/
- Google Analytics 4 FAQs from Data Driven U: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1eb9KN-tHMfW5qyBreRLog5sdxUeUe5CsqiwGwUoQAwU/edit?mode=html&ck_subscriber_id=1939675162
CONNECT WITH JEFF/DATA DRIVEN U:
- https://www.datadrivenu.com/
- https://www.youtube.com/@DataDrivenU
CONNECT WITH SCOTT:
- scott.colenutt@sitevisibility.com
- https://www.linkedin.com/in/scottcolenutt
CONNECT WITH SITEVISIBILITY:
- https://www.sitevisibility.co.uk/
- https://www.youtube.com/user/SiteVisibility
- https://twitter.com/sitevisibility
- https://www.facebook.com/SiteVisibility
- http://instagram.com/sitevisibility
If you have feedback, you’d like to be a guest, you’d like to recommend a guest or there are topics you’d like us to cover, please send this info to marketing@sitevisibility.com
Looking for Support with GA4?If you’re looking for support with GA4, whether that’s migrating from Universal Analytics, auditing your property set-up and tracking, setting up reporting or even training your team on everything they need to know when it comes to GA4, we’re here to help. You can find out more about our GA4 services here, or book in a free consultancy call with our experts here.
We’ve also written a post to help you create contact form events for GA4.
Alternatively, leave us a message via the form below, we’d love to help!
Contact Us * Name First Last * Email * Message* * CommentsThis field is for validation purposes and should be left unchanged. Δ
When it comes to GA4, one of the most common topics we get asked about is how to create contact form events. In this post, we’ll show you the different options for implementing them. So, what are you waiting for, let’s get stuck in!
Configuring your form tracking through events will allow you to send a lot of data about your form submissions to GA4. You can also configure parameters to send additional information about each form submission, e.g. form name and button label.
There are currently three ways you can create contact form events for GA4:
- Enabling the ‘form interactions’ enhanced measurement event in your web stream settings.
- Configuring events through Google Tag Manager (GTM) or any tag management system of your preference.
- Hardcoding events with developer assistance.
Out of these, we recommend configuring events through GTM or the tag management system of your choice in a similar way to how you would for Universal Analytics (UA), and we’ll tell you why shortly!
It’s important to note that at the time of writing, GA4 enhanced measurement events have a few limitations that prevent us from using them for form tracking.
Continue reading to find out why, as we explore each tracking option.
1. Enhanced MeasurementOn the 29th of September 2022, Google announced the ability to measure form interactions automatically through enhanced measurement events.
When this feature is enabled, the following events are collected:
- form_start: The first time a user interacts with a form in a session
- form_submit: When a user submits a form
This new feature isn’t enabled by default, but you can access it by navigating to:
Settings > Data Streams > select your data stream > configure Enhanced Measurement
When you access the full list of enhanced measurement options, you’ll be able to see many options for tracking, such as outbound clicks or site search. All you have to do is enable form interactions and GA4 will start collecting data on your forms.
However, there are two problems with this implementation.
The first is that GA4 might not be able to distinguish between a successful and an unsuccessful form submission. This could cause your form submission data to be inflated by false positives, making it unreliable.
The second problem happens when you have the Facebook pixel installed, which records the pageview event as a form submission in GA4. This means visitors coming from Facebook might get registered as form submissions, even before they interact with your form.
The lack of settings in enhanced measurement means there is currently no workaround for these problems. However, as always, we recommend you test the feature for yourself and make a decision based on how the data is being recorded for your site.
It is possible, and very likely, that Google will improve this feature in the coming months as UA will be deprecated on the 1st of July 2023. In its current state of development though, our recommendation is to configure your form tracking through your tag management system, which is next on our list.
2. Event Tracking Through Tag Management SystemThe way you implement your form tracking through your tag management system will be highly dependent on how your developers have configured your forms.
So the first thing you’ll need to do is use the preview mode in your tag management system and test your form. This will allow you to see what data you’re working with, so you can define your tag and trigger.
Next, make sure you install your GA4 configuration tag, so that Analytics is able to collect data about your website’s visitors. After that, it’s time to create an event tag where you will give your event a name. Have a look at Google’s list of recommended events to see if any of them match the action you’re trying to measure. Using these recommended events will enable GA4 to populate reports and future features will benefit from them as they become available.
In the example below, I’ve used a custom name for our event that best matches the user action we’re measuring, i.e. contact_form_submission.
How detailed you want to go with event parameters (parameters provide additional information about how users interact with your website) is entirely up to you.
GA4 gives us an opportunity to think about your marketing strategy in different ways, as you now have access to new data that you can use for decision-making.
Configuring the trigger for your tag will be the most challenging part because it will depend on how your website functionality has been developed. An incorrectly configured trigger will cause your data to be inaccurate and misleading, so be extra cautious during this step.
You can configure your trigger in various ways:
- Set up the tag management system default form submission trigger
- Ask your developer to fire a dataLayer.push() event
- Configure an AJAX auto-event listener
- Create an element visibility trigger
- Configure a custom auto-event listener
- Fire the event when the user reaches the ‘thank you’ page
The examples above are some of the most common trigger configurations we’ve found helpful for our clients. If you want to know more about which triggers would be best for tracking your forms, get in touch with us here. We’d love to help!
Lastly, always be sure you test your configuration multiple times using GA4’s DebugView. Test until you’re happy to publish your tracking. This will likely take some trial and error, so don’t feel discouraged if you don’t get it right the first time.
Tip: Take your form conversion tracking to the next level by implementing enhanced conversions for leads. This will allow you to measure offline sales by using hashed, first-party, user-provided data from your lead forms. Configure this if you’re running ads to your website pages and you want to measure how many leads are converted into sales.
Image source: Google
3. Hardcoded EventsHardcoding your events will achieve the same result as implementing them through your tag management system, with one main difference: If you need to configure changes or check tracking implementations you will be reliant on your developer. For that reason, we advise against this option.
Using a tag manager system will allow you to keep all your tracking in one place, manage tracking codes easily, and make changes without developer assistance.
However, if you’re comfortable with relying on your developers or it’s your only option, all you need to do is pass them this link to the developer guide. It will tell them how to configure the tracking through the Google Tag.
Final ThoughtsWith the rapid development of GA4 in the past year, it is possible that Google will address the problems with enhanced measurement, making it the simplest tool for form tracking. At the time of writing though, we recommend using a tag management system such as GTM.
If you’re feeling overwhelmed about configuring your form tracking or transitioning to GA4 in general, take a look at all the ways we can support you through this Google Analytics property transition. It’s a big change (even for us), so don’t feel alone in this journey.
Contact UsBook a free consultancy call with our GA4 experts here to discuss your options and understand how we can help you transition to GA4. Alternatively, leave us a message via the form below. We’d love to help!
- Name* First Last
- Email*
- Message*
- EmailThis field is for validation purposes and should be left unchanged. Δ
In this episode, we’re joined by JJ Reynolds, Head of Marketing & Analytics at Media Authentic. JJ joins us to share his advice on how to get more comfortable with data analysis.
In this episode we discuss:
- JJ’s journey from videography becoming a Head of Marketing & Analytics
- The role of curiosity in data analysis
- The importance of documenting your marketing hypotheses
- Do you need data science skills to be a data analyst?
- Getting over the fear of asking challenging business questions
- How to structure the perfect marketing insight
Referenced on this episode:
- Never Split The Difference by Chris Voss: (UK) https://amzn.to/3RJ1ePK (US): https://amzn.to/3I8Snnh
CONNECT WITH JJ/MEDIA AUTHENTIC:
- https://mediauthentic.com/
- https://betterthandata.com/
CONNECT WITH SCOTT:
- scott.colenutt@sitevisibility.com
- https://www.linkedin.com/in/scottcolenutt
If you have feedback, you’d like to be a guest, you’d like to recommend a guest or there are topics you’d like us to cover, please send this info to marketing@sitevisibility.com
Over the last few years, we’ve written about some of the top challenges facing some of the biggest industries.
We’ve covered:
- Food Delivery services
- Travel
- Electric Vehicles
- Health & Fitness Apps
- Digital News Publications
In this post, we’ll be looking at some of the top challenges facing retailers in 2023 and beyond.
These include:
- Energy prices & the cost of living
- Retaining employees
- A decrease in brand loyalty
So, let’s dive right in. What are the top challenges facing retailers in 2023?
Energy Prices & The Cost of Living: The Impact on RetailersThe rising energy costs and cost of living crisis in the UK have undoubtedly impacted the retail industry.
Back in August 2022, The Guardian reported that rising energy costs would cause thousands of shops to close for good, as well as reporting at the end of 2022 that retail spending fell during the year due to soaring inflation, energy costs and the cost of living crisis.
Not good news for retailers.
With energy in particular, many retailers have been hit hard as a lot of retailers have large stores that consume a lot of energy coming from lighting and heating.
But it’s not just in-store that energy prices are impacting retailers.
The energy crisis has also impacted retailers through higher fuel costs for transportation and delivery with the price of moving goods from warehouses to stores or even from suppliers to warehouses becoming almost unmanageable for some.
All of this has made it increasingly difficult for retailers to maintain their (often small) profit margins and, in some cases, has driven up the prices of their goods for consumers.
For many, it’s simply become unsustainable and a lot of smaller, independent businesses have either faced bankruptcy or have gone out of business.
Rising energy costs and the cost of living crisis have also had a knock-on effect on consumers too.
Spending more on energy has severely impacted the amount of disposable income that people have to spend on non-essential items.
So, how can retailers overcome the issues surrounding the cost of living and energy crisis?
Reducing Retail Energy Bills Lighting, heating, ventilation, and air conditioning are the most common uses of energy in stores.
As such, one way that retailers can try to reduce energy costs is by investing in energy-efficient technologies.
Retailers might want to consider switching to low-energy lighting, such as compact fluorescent lamps (CFLs) or light-emitting diodes (LEDs).
CFLs in particular typically use 70-80% less electricity than traditional bulbs and will last a lot longer too. LEDs are also a great option and in many cases have replaced CFLs as they turn on immediately and are even more efficient.
By replacing the lighting in stores to one of these options, retailers can save money whilst also knowing that they are doing better for the environment.
Retailers also might want to consider conducting regular energy audits, to help them identify areas of the business that are consuming too much energy.
Through energy audits, retailers can try to save money on energy by optimising their energy use by making things as simple as turning off lights and equipment when they aren’t needed compulsory!
It sounds simple, but it still astounds me to this day, just how many stores keep their lights on overnight. Stopping things like this can go a long way to reducing energy bills.
It’s also important to get employee buy-in, so it may also be worthwhile hosting a training session for staff explaining the needs and benefits of saving energy and how it can help your business during this particularly difficult period.
Unfortunately for retailers, it’s not just themselves and their energy bills that they need to consider when it comes to the cost of living.
They also need to think about how they can help their customers.
How Can Retailers Help Customers with the Cost of Living? With consumers typically shopping around, looking for cheaper options and spending less on luxury items, retailers need to do more to entice their customers.
Here are a number of ways in which retailers could support customers during the cost of living crisis:
- Introduce value ranges – many retailers are bringing in cheaper “value” ranges to offer cheaper alternatives on everyday products for their customers, and so this may be something that other retailers may want to consider.
- Price Freezes – common among supermarkets, many retailers are committing to price freezes on their products to ensure that their customers are able to afford the essentials.
- Loyalty schemes – as well as the benefits of brand loyalty and incentivising customers to return to their stores, loyalty schemes can also help customers to save money or earn points to spend in-store at a later date. Win-win!
- Offering rental services – some retailers like Decathlon have decided to help out customers with big ticket items by offering rental services on their products.
- Offering payment schemes – For example, letting customers use things like Klarna where payments are spread out over a number of months.
It’s clear that with the cost-of-living crisis and energy bills not going away, retailers will need to make changes in order to survive. By implementing some of the tips above, they can help both themselves and their customers during this difficult time.
Decrease in Brand Loyalty for Retailers It’s well known that brand loyalty has been on the decline for a number of years now and this has only been accelerated by the pandemic and the cost of living crisis.
But why are consumers less loyal to brands these days? Let’s take a look at some of the reasons behind it:
Increased CompetitionIncreased competition has made it much more challenging for businesses to establish and maintain brand loyalty.
With the rise of e-commerce and so many options available to consumers today, people are often less committed to a single brand and are much more likely to switch to competitors if they offer better products, prices, or experiences.
Today, retailers need to work harder to differentiate themselves.
They need to be able to create strong emotional connections with their customers and try to continually innovate and improve their offerings in order to stay relevant and competitive.
ConvenienceCovid and the subsequent lockdowns saw an increasing number of people change their shopping habits.
With travel restricted, some shops closed their doors and people were no longer able to go to their favourite stores. As such, lots of consumers were forced to change their shopping habits, either choosing places local to them, or ordering online instead.
The rise of Amazon and the speediness of delivery have also had a huge impact, with people often preferring to get a guaranteed next-day delivery from the comfort of their own home, rather than going out to a physical store or waiting longer for deliveries from elsewhere.
Making More Informed DecisionsWith social media and review sites so prominent today, consumers have access to a vast amount of information that allows them to make more informed purchasing decisions.
For example, when I’m looking at something in a store and thinking about buying it, I can very easily get out my phone, check the reviews for the product online, see what others have said about it, and even compare prices with other stores.
If I’m not getting the best deal there and then, I’ll typically leave the product and buy it elsewhere. With so much data available, consumers are now able to make real-time, data-driven choices.
This also ties in with a shift in consumer values.
More and more consumers are becoming socially conscious and again, consumers are able to have a better awareness of retailers’ environmental and social values.
As such, rather than staying loyal to specific brands, they’re more likely to show loyalty to the brands that represent their values as well.
What Can Retailers Do to Retain Customer Loyalty?Retaining customer loyalty is essential for the long-term success of any business, so what can retailers do about this? How can they try to retain their customers?
There are several strategies that retailers could test implementing to build and maintain customer loyalty. Here are our top tips:
- Provide excellent customer service
- Offer personalized promotions and discounts. Start loyalty schemes & or subscription-based models
- Use email & social media to communicate with customers and provide them with news, promotions, and other information that is relevant to them
- Regularly introduce new products/services
- Solicit and act on customer feedback
- Create a positive in-store experience
- Offer convenient payment and return options
- Gather customer feedback, and use it to improve their products, services, and customer experience.
- Implement loyalty programs and rewards to incentivise repeat business and increase customer satisfaction.
By implementing these strategies, retailers can build and maintain customer loyalty and ensure the long-term success of their business.
It’s all about testing which ones work for you!
Retaining EmployeesRetaining employees has always been an issue for retailers, but that has become significantly more difficult in recent years.
In fact, a survey from Korn Ferry showed that retailers saw higher year-over-year turnover for in-store, corporate and distribution centre employees in 2022, with more than a three-quarters (75.8%) turnover rate for all hourly in-store positions, up from 68% in 2021.
Statistics also show that retail employees often leave their roles at a rate that’s over four times higher than the average churn rate in other industries.
Losing staff is costly for any business, and with such high employee turnover, retail is no different.
Not only do retailers need to spend more on recruitment, onboarding and training new staff, but there is also lost productivity in the period when they’re hiring as well.
This all has an impact on the service they’re able to provide their customers.
Put simply, having a high staff turnover is not ideal!
But what’s causing this? Why are retailers struggling to keep hold of their staff?
Well, here are some of the common reasons that retailers struggle to retain employees:
- Low wages and high competition
- Lack of employee development and limited career growth
- Poor onboarding
- Lack of recognition
- Working in a high-stress environment
- Unpredictable schedules/working hours
All of these factors contribute to a challenging work environment for retail employees and make it difficult for retailers to retain them.
So, what can retailers do to try and improve their staff turnover?
Well, one key factor is simply paying them more! But, it’s not always that simple. With many retailers struggling financially, there isn’t always the budget to do so.
That’s why we believe that one of the key factors in addressing employee retention is by committing to developing and nurturing staff.
Commit to Developing and Nurturing Employees:There’s nothing worse than being stuck in a job and seeing no routes for progression and not feeling supported by your employer.
For employees, it leaves them feeling unengaged, and lacking motivation and ultimately, they’ll be unhappy and leave the company. It’s no good for either party!
But, by providing their staff with training, professional development opportunities, and clear career paths, retailers can help to improve job satisfaction, reduce turnover and create a much happier culture.
It’s something that many businesses in other industries do very well, and it’s time for retailers to catch up!
This doesn’t just mean pay rises or promotions though. Offering your staff training and development programs or providing them with courses to help them acquire new skills and stay up to date with current retail trends can really help staff to feel valued.
It’s so important to encourage professional development and, where possible, support employees who wish to pursue additional education or certifications within their role.
As well as offering development, it’s important to acknowledge your staff and value their opinions.
At work, people crave recognition, and it really isn’t hard to give. Be sure to regularly acknowledge and reward employees for their efforts and contributions to the company and try to ensure that you have an inclusive workplace culture that values employee well-being and satisfaction.
Retailers can show their employees that they care, by collecting, listening to and acting on employee feedback. In doing so, businesses can help to create a positive work environment where staff feel listened to, supported, recognised and rewarded.
In doing the above, retailers can show their employees that they are invested in their growth, development and well-being, which in turn, can help with staff showing more commitment to the business.
Offer Flexible Working Some of the common issues facing retail staff are that working hours are often rigid.
Schedules are often made on a weekly basis and staff are left wondering what shifts they’re going to get, which means that they aren’t able to make plans before they receive their schedules.
Things like doctor’s appointments, childcare and even just plans with friends and family are hard to arrange.
But, it doesn’t need to be that way.
Although many businesses (ours included) offered flexible working before the pandemic, it’s now nearly commonplace for businesses to offer flexible working.
Many roles offer working-from-home options and the ability to work flexible hours too.
For retail, this can be difficult and whilst it’s not always possible to allow staff to work from home, there are options for flexible working hours and better planning.
There are a number of ways in which retailers can allow more flexibility when it comes to working.
- Offering flexible scheduling – using technology/allowing staff to easily swap shifts
- Create schedules more than a week in advance to allow staff to plan ahead
- Offering fixed shift times for staff who need it
Of course, offering staff more money is another easy way in which you can help employee retention within retail, but as that option isn’t always possible, offering flexible working options and making sure that your staff are looked after will go a long way in helping retailers to retain their staff.
Conclusion So, there you have it, the top challenges facing retailers in 2023.
Let’s recap, these were:
- Cost of living/Energy Crisis
- A decrease in brand loyalty
- Employee retention
What do you think? Is there anything glaringly obvious that we’ve missed? Leave us a comment below and let us know your thoughts.
Contact UsIf you’re looking for support with your digital marketing, please don’t hesitate to get in touch. Book in a free consultancy call here, or leave us a message via the form below. We’d love to help!
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In this episode we’re joined by Michael McPherson, Co-Founder of The Purpose Led. Michael joins us to share his advice on how businesses can build greater trust and credibility on Amazon.
In this episode we discuss:
• What questions can you ask of prospects to best understand their purpose?
• What accreditations can help signify a businesses’ commitment to ecological issues?
• The moral challenge for brands of being value-driven and selling on Amazon
• How can you sell on Amazon responsibly?
• Can you build a purpose led brand from scratch on Amazon?
Referenced on this podcast:
• https://ecologi.com/
• https://www.bcorporation.net/
• https://www.bonrawfoods.com/
CONNECT WITH MICHAEL/THE PURPOSE LED:
• https://www.thepurposeled.com/
CONNECT WITH SCOTT:
• scott.colenutt@sitevisibility.com
• https://www.linkedin.com/in/scottcolenutt
If you have feedback, you’d like to be a guest, you’d like to recommend a guest or there are topics you’d like us to cover, please send this info to marketing@sitevisibility.com
In this episode we’re joined by Zino Rost van Tonningen, CEO at TyrAds. Zino joins us to discuss why he believes programmatic advertising will become even more effective in a future of cookieless marketing.In this episode we discuss:* Why will programmatic be more effective in a cookieless future? * What is the Google Privacy Sandbox? * How prioritising first-party data-capture will give you a competitive edge * Why is Google adopting cookieless marketing technolgy? * Why reward and loyalty apps might be about to experience a boom in popularity
Reference on this podcast:* https://privacysandbox.com/ * https://www.thetradedesk.com/
CONNECT WITH ZINO/TYRADS:* https://www.linkedin.com/in/rovato/ * https://tyrads.com/
CONNECT WITH SCOTT:* scott.colenutt@sitevisibility.com * https://www.linkedin.com/in/scottcolenutt
CONNECT WITH SITEVISIBILITY:* https://www.sitevisibility.co.uk/ * https://www.youtube.com/user/SiteVisibility * https://twitter.com/sitevisibility * https://www.facebook.com/SiteVisibility * http://instagram.com/sitevisibility
If you have feedback, you’d like to be a guest, you’d like to recommend a guest or there are topics you’d like us to cover, please send this info to marketing@sitevisibility.com
In this episode we’re joined by Brad Hoos, CEO of The Outloud Group.Brad joins us to discuss how to approach influencer marketing strategically, as we cover:* The pressure of influence experience by creators * The parallels between business culture and influencer storytelling * When is right time for a business to focus on influencer marketing? * Do you need a dedicated influencer marketing manager to be successful with influencer marketing? * Which markets are experiencing a saturation of influencer marketing? * BS influencer marketing metrics to avoid
Reference on this episode:* https://www.unmade.fm/ * https://www.mural.co/ * https://jamboard.google.com/
CONNECT WITH BRAD/THE OUTLOUD GROUP:* https://www.outloudgroup.com/ * brad@outloudgroup.com
CONNECT WITH SCOTT:* scott.colenutt@sitevisibility.com * https://www.linkedin.com/in/scottcolenutt
CONNECT WITH SITEVISIBILITY:* https://www.sitevisibility.co.uk/ * https://www.youtube.com/user/SiteVisibility * https://twitter.com/sitevisibility * https://www.facebook.com/SiteVisibility * http://instagram.com/sitevisibility
If you have feedback, you’d like to be a guest, you’d like to recommend a guest or there are topics you’d like us to cover, please send this to marketing@sitevisibility.com
In this episode Scott explores the topic of keyword rankings and why they remain a terrible measure of SEO success in 2023.
This episode is for all the marketers out there that just need a little third-party support in explaining why keyword rankings aren’t a good meausre of success and the right way to approach measuring organic search performance.
Do you still work in an environment where you’re measured on keyword ranking performance? Need any extra help in demonstrating the right way to measure organic search performance?
Let us know by Tweeting @SiteVisibility or emailing scott.colenutt@sitevisibility.com
In this episode we’re joined by ChatGPT to discuss topics including:
- What is ChatGPT?
- How is ChatGPT different from GPT-3?
- Why has ChatGPT rapidly gained popularity?
- How can marketers use ChatGPT?
- What does the future hold for ChatGPT?
… and yes, all responses in today’s episode were created entirely using ChatGPT.
Are you using ChatGPT? If so, what are you using it for?
Share your examples with us by Tweeting @SiteVisibility or emailing me: scott.colenutt@sitevisibility.com
Happy holidays all!
TranscriptScott: Nice to meet you and welcome to the podcast.
ChatGPT: Nice to meet you too! I’m here to help answer any questions you have or provide information on a wide variety of topics. Is there anything specific you’d like to know or discuss?
Scott: What is ChatGPT?
ChatGPT: ChatGPT is a variant of the GPT (Generative Pre-training Transformer) language model that has been fine-tuned for the task of generating natural language text in a conversational style. Like other GPT models, ChatGPT is a transformer-based language model that uses a combination of self-attention and multi-headed attention mechanisms to process and generate text. However, ChatGPT has been specifically trained on a large dataset of conversation transcripts in order to generate text that is more suitable for use in chatbot or conversational systems.
To use ChatGPT, you would provide it with a prompt, such as a question or statement, and it will generate a response based on its understanding of the language and the context provided by the prompt. You can then use this generated text to create a chatbot or conversational system that can respond to user input in a natural and engaging way.
One potential use case for ChatGPT might be to create a chatbot that can assist with customer service inquiries or provide information to users in a conversational manner. It could also be used to generate responses for use in messaging or chat applications, or to generate text for use in social media or other online platforms.
Scott: How is ChatGPT different from GPT-3?
ChatGPT: GPT-3 is a very large and powerful language model developed by OpenAI, while ChatGPT is a variant of the GPT language model that has been fine-tuned specifically for the task of generating natural language text in a conversational style.
One key difference between GPT-3 and ChatGPT is the size and complexity of the models. GPT-3 is a very large language model, with billions of parameters, while ChatGPT is a smaller, more specialized model with fewer parameters. This means that GPT-3 is generally more powerful and capable of generating a wider range of text, but ChatGPT may be better suited for tasks that require more specialized language generation capabilities, such as generating responses for chatbots or conversational systems.
Another difference between the two models is the type of training data they were trained on. GPT-3 was trained on a diverse range of data, including web pages, books, and other text sources, while ChatGPT was specifically trained on a dataset of conversation transcripts. This means that ChatGPT is better suited for generating text in a conversational style and may be more effective at generating responses that are appropriate for use in chatbot or conversational systems.
Overall, while both GPT-3 and ChatGPT are transformer-based language models that can generate natural language text, they are designed for different purposes and may be better suited for different types of tasks. GPT-3 is a very large and general-purpose language model, while ChatGPT is a smaller and more specialized model that is particularly well-suited for generating text in a conversational style.
Scott: How long did ChatGPT take to develop?
ChatGPT: It is not clear how long it took to develop ChatGPT specifically, as there is limited information available about the model. However, it is likely that the development of ChatGPT involved fine-tuning a pre-existing GPT language model on a dataset of conversation transcripts in order to improve its performance on the task of generating natural language text in a conversational style.
Fine-tuning a language model typically involves training the model on a new dataset for a specific task, using techniques such as supervised or unsupervised learning. This process can take a varying amount of time depending on the size and complexity of the model, the quality of the training data, and the resources available for training.
In general, the development of large language models such as GPT-3 and ChatGPT involves significant time and resources, as they require the collection and annotation of large datasets, the design and implementation of complex machine learning models, and the training and optimization of those models on powerful hardware.
Scott: Why has ChatGPT gathered so much interest?
ChatGPT: It is likely that ChatGPT has gained significant interest due to its ability to generate natural language text in a conversational style, which can be useful for a variety of applications. Chatbots and conversational systems are becoming increasingly prevalent in various industries, including customer service, e-commerce, and online education, and ChatGPT’s ability to generate text that is appropriate for use in these systems may have contributed to its popularity.
In addition, the use of ChatGPT and other language models for text generation has the potential to enable the creation of more engaging and effective chatbots and conversational systems, which could improve user experience and increase the efficiency of various processes.
Finally, the development and use of ChatGPT and other language models is an active area of research in the field of natural language processing (NLP), and the advancements made in this area can have wide-ranging impacts on a variety of applications and industries. As a result, ChatGPT and similar models may have garnered significant interest from researchers and practitioners in the NLP and machine learning communities.
Scott: How many people are using ChatGPT?
ChatGPT: It is not clear how many people have used ChatGPT specifically, as the model has not been widely released or made publicly available. It is also possible that ChatGPT is being used by researchers or companies in private settings, which would not be publicly disclosed.
In general, the use of language models such as ChatGPT is becoming increasingly common in various applications, particularly in the development of chatbots and conversational systems. However, it is difficult to determine the exact number of people who have used or are using ChatGPT, as this information is not publicly available.
Scott: What are people using ChatGPT for?
ChatGPT: It is likely that ChatGPT is being used for the development of chatbots and conversational systems, as it has been specifically trained for the task of generating natural language text in a conversational style. Chatbots and conversational systems are becoming increasingly prevalent in a variety of industries, including customer service, e-commerce, and online education, and the use of ChatGPT and other language models can help to improve the effectiveness and efficiency of these systems.
In addition, ChatGPT and other language models may be used for a variety of other tasks related to natural language processing (NLP), such as language translation, summarization, and text generation. However, it is not clear to what extent ChatGPT is being used for these tasks, as this information is not publicly available.
Finally, the development and use of ChatGPT and other language models is an active area of research in the field of NLP, and researchers may be using ChatGPT and similar models to advance the state of the art in language processing and generation.
Scott: How is ChatGPT being used in e-commerce?
ChatGPT: It is possible that ChatGPT and other language models are being used in the development of chatbots and conversational systems for use in the e-commerce industry. Chatbots and conversational systems can be used to assist customers with various tasks related to online shopping, such as answering questions about products, providing recommendations, and processing orders.
By using ChatGPT or other language models to generate appropriate responses to customer inquiries and requests, e-commerce companies can improve the efficiency and effectiveness of their customer service operations, and provide a more engaging and personalized experience for their customers.
For example, a chatbot powered by ChatGPT or a similar language model could be used to assist customers with finding and purchasing products on an online marketplace or retail website. The chatbot could provide product recommendations based on the customer’s interests or previous purchases, and answer questions about product availability, pricing, and shipping.
In addition to assisting with customer service, ChatGPT and other language models may also be used to generate product descriptions, customer reviews, or other types of content for use on e-commerce websites. These models could be used to generate high-quality, relevant content that is tailored to the specific needs and interests of e-commerce customers, which could help to increase sales and customer satisfaction.
Scott: How can marketers use ChatGPT?
ChatGPT: Marketers can use ChatGPT and other language models in a variety of ways to improve the effectiveness of their marketing efforts. Some potential applications for ChatGPT and similar models in marketing include:
Chatbot development: Marketers can use ChatGPT or other language models to develop chatbots or conversational systems that can assist with customer service, lead generation, or other marketing tasks. For example, a chatbot powered by ChatGPT could be used to provide product recommendations or answer questions about a company’s products or services.
Content creation: ChatGPT and other language models can be used to generate high-quality, relevant content for use in marketing campaigns. This could include product descriptions, blog posts, social media posts, or other types of content that are tailored to the specific needs and interests of a target audience.
Personalization: ChatGPT and other language models can be used to generate personalized content or responses for individual customers or segments of a target audience. This could include personalized emails, social media messages, or other types of content that are tailored to the specific interests or characteristics of a particular customer or group of customers.
Customer service: ChatGPT and other language models can be used to improve the efficiency and effectiveness of customer service operations by generating appropriate responses to customer inquiries or requests. This could help to reduce the workload of customer service teams and improve the customer experience.
Overall, ChatGPT and other language models can be valuable tools for marketers looking to improve the effectiveness of their marketing efforts and provide a more personalized and engaging experience for their customers.
Scott: What are the biggest limitations of ChatGPT?
ChatGPT: Like any machine learning model, ChatGPT has certain limitations that may impact its performance and usefulness in certain situations. Some potential limitations of ChatGPT include:
Quality of the generated text: While ChatGPT and other language models are capable of generating high-quality text that is difficult to distinguish from text written by humans, they may still produce text that is inaccurate or inappropriate in certain contexts.
Dependence on training data: The quality and effectiveness of ChatGPT and other language models is largely dependent on the quality and diversity of the training data they are trained on. If the training data is limited or biased, the model may produce inaccurate or inappropriate text.
Lack of context or understanding: ChatGPT and other language models do not have a deep understanding of the world and are limited by the information and context provided to them. This can lead to the generation of text that is not appropriate or relevant in certain contexts.
Sensitivity to input: ChatGPT and other language models may be sensitive to the specific wording or formatting of the input provided to them, and may produce unexpected or inappropriate responses if the input is not formatted correctly.
Overall, ChatGPT and other language models are powerful tools for generating natural language text, but they do have certain limitations that should be taken into account when using them.
Scott: What’s next for ChatGPT?
ChatGPT: It is not clear what the future holds for ChatGPT specifically, as it is a proprietary model and there is limited information available about its development or use. However, it is likely that the field of natural language processing (NLP) and language generation will continue to advance, and ChatGPT and other language models may evolve and improve over time.
One potential direction for the development of ChatGPT and other language models is the incorporation of more advanced techniques, such as transfer learning or multimodal learning, which could improve the model’s performance and flexibility. There may also be efforts to incorporate additional data sources or improve the quality and diversity of the training data used to fine-tune language models like ChatGPT.
In addition, it is possible that ChatGPT and other language models will be used in a wider range of applications in the future, as the use of chatbots and conversational systems continues to grow and expand. Language models like ChatGPT may be used to create more effective and engaging chatbots and conversational systems for use in a variety of industries, including customer service, e-commerce, and online education.
Finally, the development and use of ChatGPT and other language models is an active area of research in the field of NLP, and it is likely that there will be ongoing efforts to improve and advance the state of the art in language processing and generation.
Scott: If people want to learn more about ChatGPT, where should they go?
ChatGPT: If you are interested in learning more about ChatGPT and other language models, there are a number of resources that you can consult. Some options for learning more about ChatGPT and related topics include:
Online tutorials and courses: There are many online tutorials and courses that cover the basics of language models like ChatGPT and the applications of these models in natural language processing (NLP) and other fields. These courses can provide a good introduction to the concepts and techniques involved in language modeling and can be a useful resource for learning more about ChatGPT and similar models.
Research papers and articles: There are many research papers and articles available that describe the development and use of language models like ChatGPT. These papers can provide detailed technical information about the models and their capabilities, and can be a valuable resource for learning more about ChatGPT and similar models.
Conferences and workshops: There are many conferences and workshops that focus on NLP and language modeling, and these events can be a good opportunity to learn more about ChatGPT and other language models. Attending these events or watching recordings of the presentations can provide valuable insights into the latest developments in the field and can help you stay up to date with the latest research.
Online communities: There are many online communities and forums where you can discuss ChatGPT and other language models with other researchers and practitioners. These communities can be a good resource for asking questions and getting advice from experts in the field, and can help you learn more about ChatGPT and similar models.
Scott: Thanks, did you enjoy the conversation?
ChatGPT: As an artificial intelligence, I do not have feelings or emotions in the same way that humans do. However, I am designed to assist users and answer questions to the best of my ability, and I am happy to have been able to help you. If you have any other questions, please feel free to ask.
If you’ve been on the internet or social media over the last couple of weeks, chances are you’ll have come across ChatGPT, a chatbot created by OpenAI.
Since its release in November 2022, it’s gone viral and according to some reports, had over 1 million people sign-up in the first 5 days since its release.
Users around the world have been testing its capabilities and getting some pretty impressive results. In fact, if you’ve been on Twitter over the last few weeks, it’s been trending a lot, and you’ve probably seen many examples of what users have been able to get it to do.
It is quite simply mind-blowing.
For marketers, it presents huge opportunities and is undoubtedly going to influence marketing going into 2023 and beyond.
In fact, some people have been questioning if people will continue to rely on Google for answers, or if they’ll just jump straight into ChatGPT.
That got us thinking, would ChatGPT be able to help us when it came to SEO? Could it undertake some SEO tasks for us?
In this post, we’ll be exploring what ChatGPT is, what you can do with it and whether you could use it for SEO.
We’ll be looking at how ChatGPT can help with:
- Keyword Research & generating long-tail keyword suggestions
- Writing and suggesting Meta Descriptions & Titles
- Generating Heading suggestions for your pages/posts
- Writing compelling Ad Copy
So, what are we waiting for, let’s dig in…
So, What is ChatGPT?First things first, what exactly is ChatGPT?
I saw on Twitter that ChatGPT was described as a Chatbot on steroids, and to me, that’s a pretty accurate statement!
It’s so much more than your usual chatbot and looking on the OpenAI site itself, their statement says that:
“We’ve trained a model called ChatGPT which interacts in a conversational way. The dialogue format makes it possible for ChatGPT to answer follow-up questions, admit its mistakes, challenge incorrect premises, and reject inappropriate requests. ChatGPT is a sibling model to InstructGPT, which is trained to follow an instruction in a prompt and provide a detailed response”
On Wikipedia it’s described as:
“a prototype artificial intelligence chatbot developed by OpenAI which specializes in dialogue. The chatbot is a large language model fine-tuned with both supervised and reinforcement learning techniques”
But who better to ask than ChatGPT itself…We posed the question, and here was its answer:
“GPT, or Generative Pretrained Transformer, is a type of language model developed by OpenAI. It is a large, deep-learning based model that has been trained on a massive amount of data in order to generate human-like text. GPT is often used for natural language processing tasks, such as language translation, summarization, and text generation. It can be used in a chat context to generate responses to user input in a way that sounds natural and human-like.”
Based on other Chatbots, the main difference seems to be that it specialises in dialogue and is able to talk to you just like a human would do.
With other chatbots, it can become frustrating to use them quite quickly with the answer options limited.
With ChatGPT it’s more of a conversation and there are far more ways to use it, which begs the next question…
What Exactly Can You Do With ChatGPT?Unlike the majority of other chatbots out there, there are lots of things that you can get ChatGPT to do.
You can find a list of what it can do here but these include:
- Writing code
- Fixing broken code (and explaining WHY it was wrong!)
- Answering questions that you ask it
- Writing poems
- Writing short stories
- Providing explanations of things
- Translating language
- Correcting grammar
- Simplifying text
- Extracting keywords from a block of text
- Summarising text
- Creating a recipe from a list of ingredients
- Generating ideas for you
As you can see, the opportunities are endless and there’s huge potential for the tasks that you could undertake using it.
But for marketers and SEO’s, perhaps one of the most interesting aspects of ChatGPT is its ability to write human-like content. So let’s dive a little deeper into that and take a look at what ChatGPT can write for you.
What Can ChatGPT Write for You?In short, just about anything. It can be used to write sentences, paragraphs, and even entire articles or documents.
It all depends on the quality of the information that you put into it.
The more detail you put in, the better the result.
For example, if you provide ChatGPT with a prompt or topic, it may be able to generate text related to that prompt or topic. Alternatively, if you provide ChatGPT with a specific set of inputs and outputs, it may be able to learn to generate text in a particular style or format.
So far I’ve seen examples of ChatGPT writing blog posts, essays, poems, short stories, news articles, summaries and even opinion pieces.
Sky News got it to write an article about itself and The Guardian got it to write an opinion piece for them.
So, if ChatGPT is able to write long-form content it begs the question, could ChatGPT be used for SEO? Could it write copy for landing pages, blog posts or even white papers for you?
Can ChatGPT Be Used for SEO & Creating Content?In theory, the answer is yes.
With 2023 fast approaching and many other sites and bloggers etc. providing their SEO predictions for 2023, I decided to see if ChatGPT could create something similar. I asked it to write a blog post for me about SEO predictions for 2023 and here’s what it came up with:
The post covers voice search, structured data, AI and machine learning, Mobile-first indexing, the importance of local SEO and the role of content.
All very feasible things to be included in such posts. Not bad!
It’s a little short though at only 381 words. As such, I asked it if it could make the post longer, and it did, expanding on each point and creating a post that was nearly 600 words.
With the addition of an introduction and a conclusion, the post would be good to go. And guess, what? I asked it to provide that as well, and it wrote both out for me:
So there you have it, an 800-word blog post that could be created and published on our blog within half an hour. Crazy!
You might be thinking (like I was) that with the quality of content that ChatGPT can produce, this could solve some of your content marketing prayers!
But, there are a couple of catches.
Firstly, it’s not right all the time!
For example, after hearing through the grapevine that it’d get it wrong, we asked it who won the 1998 World Cup, and it told us that it was Brazil.
Now, I may have only been 10 years old at the time, but I’m pretty certain it was France!
So, before you start going ahead and getting ChatGPT to write your content for you, you’ll need to think about whether the content is actually going to be accurate and whether it’s something you’d want to put your business’s name behind.
Secondly (and perhaps more importantly), there are issues around AI-generated content, with Google actively working on technology that can detect when content has been AI-generated.
Google’s John Mueller said back in April 2022, that content that is automatically generated via AI writing tools would be considered spam and could lead to a manual penalty.
He stopped short of saying that Google could automatically detect when content had been automatically generated by AI, but did say that if Google’s webspam team came across such content, then they’d be authorised to take action.
So, before you start using ChatGPT to create all of your content, you may want to think twice!
How Could You Use ChatGPT for SEO & Content? Despite Google frowning upon users creating automatically generated content using AI, there are in fact, several ways that you could use ChatGPT to help you with your SEO & Content Marketing.
For example, you may not want to write an entire blog post using it, but it could help you to generate ideas for your blog post.
Let’s look at an example of how this might work.
I told it that I wanted to write a blog post about keyword research tools and asked it which ones I should mention.
This is what it came up with:
Now I have a list of tools that I could write about for my blog post.
But, as it only provided 5 tools, I then asked if there were any others that I should include, and it gave me 5 more:
Pretty impressive.
Not only can it come up with suggestions for what you could include in your articles or blog posts, but you could follow the same process as above and ask it for suggested headings to use within the post itself as well.
Then, you could easily have a great starting point for your article, with 10 suggested tools to write about for undertaking Keyword Research with suggestions for the headings of each section.
Talking of keyword research, this leads me to the next way that ChatGPT could be used for SEO.
Can ChatGPT Be Used for Keyword Research? In short, ChatGPT can be used to help with your keyword research efforts.
Now, I’m not suggesting that you could use ChatGPT specifically for undertaking your entire keyword research, as you wouldn’t have other metrics like Search Volumes, Keyword Difficulty etc. but one way that you could use it for keyword research is right at the beginning of the process when trying to generate keyword ideas.
For example, I asked it to find potential keywords to use on a page about SEO Services, and it came up with the following list of keywords:
Within seconds, you have a useful list of keywords that you could then put into a keyword research tool and start digging around with.
Better yet, you can also take some of these and ask ChatGPT to come up with long-tail variations of these keywords.
This is particularly useful as you may find that some of the keywords it comes up with are ones that you’d have never thought about.
Pretty useful huh!
Can ChatGPT Write Meta Descriptions and Titles?Another way in which you can use ChatGPT to help with your SEO and Content marketing is to get it to help you with writing meta descriptions and titles.
I asked it to come up with some suggestions for page titles that included the term SEO Services, and this is what it came up with:
Now, whilst all of these might not be relevant for your business, you can still get ideas of the types of phrases or words that you could include in your page title.
The same can be said for meta descriptions.
Here are 5 meta descriptions that it came up with for an SEO services page:
Again, whilst you might not want to copy these exactly, you can use them to generate ideas for the types of terms or phrases that you may want to include, as well as the types of Call to Actions to use.
How to Use ChatGPT for Ad Copy Coming up with compelling and engaging copy for your ads can be tedious.
Luckily, ChatGPT can help you here too.
I asked it to write some Google Ad headlines based on the keyword SEO services and then once it had given me some examples, I asked it to make them more compelling. Here are the results:
It even explains what it has done and why, telling me why the ads are more compelling than the first ones that it came up with.
Once again, you might not want to copy these directly, but they can provide you with inspiration for the kinds of words to use in your ads to drive more conversions. The same can also be applied to descriptions.
ConclusionSo, whilst you may not want to use ChatGPT to write all of your content for you, with the risk of being penalised by Google, you can use it as an assistant for other SEO activity and the opportunities are only as limited as to what you can think of!
Let’s recap.
Here are the ways you can use ChatGPT for SEO:
- Generating keyword suggestions
- Generating long-tail keyword suggestions
- Writing and suggesting Meta Descriptions & Titles
- Generating Heading suggestions for your pages/posts
- Write compelling Ad Copy
What do you think? Are there any other ways that you could use ChatGPT for SEO? We’d love to hear your thoughts. Leave us your thoughts in the comments below or feel free to email me: sean.nichols@sitevisibility.com. We’d be happy to include any other ideas in this post!
Contact UsIf you’re looking for support with your SEO or Content Marketing, please don’t hesitate to get in touch. Our experts would love to help you increase your visibility online, boost traffic and generate more sales. Give us a call on 01273 733433 or leave us a message via the form below:
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On this week’s episode of the Internet Marketing Podcast, Scott is joined by Rick Elmore, former American football player and Founder and CEO of Simply Noted to discuss the power of handwritten notes for building meaningful relationships.
On the show you’ll learn:
- How you can scale handwritten notes
- How to use handwritten notes when following up with cold traffic
- What a Pen Plotter is and how the technology has advanced
- How Simply Notes started as a side-hustle
- The benefits of handwritten notes over emails or letters etc.
- The industries that are more responsive to handwritten notes
CONNECT WITH RICK /SIMPLY NOTED
- https://simplynoted.com/
- https://www.linkedin.com/in/rick-elmore/
CONNECT WITH SCOTT:
- scott.colenutt@sitevisibility.com
- https://www.linkedin.com/in/scottcolenutt
If you have feedback, you’d like to be a guest, you’d like to recommend a guest or there are topics you’d us to cover, please send this to marketing@sitevisibility.com
In this episode, we’re joined by Sean Connell, Content Director at The Sponsor and Founder of Sponsor Analytics.
In the episode we discuss:
- How sponsorship is different from partnership or influencer marketing
- What the long term considerations of sponsoring a team or event are?
- When is a business ready to be a sponsor?
- How to find a sponsor that aligns with your business
- When is sponsorship not a good idea?
CONNECT WITH SEAN/THE SPONSOR:
- https://www.thesponsor.com/
- https://www.sponsoranalytics.co.uk/
- https://www.linkedin.com/in/sean-connell-6840024a/
CONNECT WITH SCOTT:
- scott.colenutt@sitevisibility.com
- https://www.linkedin.com/in/scottcolenutt
CONNECT WITH SITEVISIBILITY:
- https://www.sitevisibility.co.uk/
- https://www.youtube.com/user/SiteVisibility
- https://twitter.com/sitevisibility
- https://www.facebook.com/SiteVisibility
- http://instagram.com/sitevisibility
If you have feedback, you’d like to be a guest, you’d like to recommend a guest or there are topics you’d us to cover, please send this to marketing@sitevisibility.com
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In today’s episode we’re joined by Jordi Romero, CEO & Founder of Factorial HR. Jordi joins us to discuss the diversity of ways in which HR can help you to grow your business and how Factorial’s software helps businesses make their HR processes more efficient and enjoyable.
In this episode we discuss:
- How Jordi’s early experiences as an employee in non-data led cultures drove the vision for what Factorial would later become
- The steps Jordi and his co-founders took to create the first Factorial MVP
- How Factorial approached their international marketing strategy
- Factorial’s features and functionality that support employee satisfaction, well-being and retention
- How Factorial’s employees help to shape the development of its software
- Factorial’s plans for enhancing its software through the use of AI
- Are we experiencing the early signs of a fundamental shift in the way HR is viewed?
SPECIAL OFFER:
- To get 1 month of Factorial FREE and an exclusive free HR consultation, visit this link: https://factorialhr.co.uk/sitevisibility
CONNECT WITH JORDI / FACTORIAL
- https://factorialhr.co.uk/
- https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCvdggYbsyb1aMidiGpuZ-Jg
- https://www.linkedin.com/company/factorialhr
- https://www.instagram.com/factorial_hr/
- https://twitter.com/factorialhr
- https://es.linkedin.com/in/jordiromero
CONNECT WITH SCOTT:
- scott.colenutt@sitevisibility.com
- https://www.linkedin.com/in/scottcolenutt
In today’s episode we’re joined by communications specialist Jenni Field. Jenni has extensive experience in business communications and recently authored the book ‘Influential Internal Communication: Streamline Your Corporate Communication to Drive Efficiency and Engagement’.
Jenni shares with us the common symptoms of businesses that are suffering from deep-rooted communication issues and how we should go about trying to solve them.
In this episode we discuss:
- What led to Jenni dedicating her focus to internal communications and founding Redefining Communications
- What triggered Jenni to document her experience in the form of her book, ‘Influential Internal Communication’
- How to identify resolvable surface-level issues vs. deep rooted cultural communication problems
- Quick communication fixes that make us all cringe!
- What are the similarities and differences in communication issues faced by SMEs and large corporations?
- The right and wrong ways to surface information from employees (avoid survey fatigue!)
- What causes employees to distrust your communication
- Should social affairs and politics be discussed at work?
Referenced on this episode:
- Jenni’s book, ‘Influential Internal Communication: Streamline Your Corporate Communication to Drive Efficiency and Engagement’: https://amzn.to/3x4AT30 or via Kogan Page: https://www.koganpage.com/product/influential-internal-communication-9781789666137
CONNECT WITH JENNI / REDEFINING COMMUNICATIONS
- https://redefiningcomms.com/
- https://twitter.com/mrsjennifield
- https://www.instagram.com/jennifield/
- https://www.linkedin.com/in/jennifield/
CONNECT WITH SCOTT:
- scott.colenutt@sitevisibility.com
- https://www.linkedin.com/in/scottcolenutt
For all show ideas, guest recommendations and feedback email marketing@sitevisibility.com
In today’s episode we’re joined by Robert Nickell, Founder of Rocket Station. Robert joins us to explain how businesses can scale their offerings using entirely virtual teams.
In this episode we discuss:
- Robert’s early learnings from virtual staffing in the real estate sector
- How access to remote workers and virtual assistants has evolved over the last decade
- Examples of businesses that Rocket Station has helped to grow using VAs
- Industries that lend themselves more naturally to the use of VAs for scalability
- How Rocket Station built their network of VAs from the Philippines
- Why do Rocket Station offer service contracts and how does this differ from finding a VA yourself?
- Can you create a unique company culture, virtually?
- Robert’s recommended workflow and communication tools
Referenced on this episode:
- https://www.gliffy.com/
- https://www.lucidchart.com/
- https://app.diagrams.net/
- https://www.smartdraw.com/
- https://www.ringcentral.co.uk/
- https://www.8×8.com/
CONNECT WITH ROBERT / ROCKET STATION
- https://rocketstation.com/
- brooks@rocketstation.com
CONNECT WITH SCOTT
- scott.colenutt@sitevisibility.com
- https://www.linkedin.com/in/scottcolenutt
For all show ideas, guest recommendations and feedback email marketing@sitevisibility.com
In today’s episode we’re joined by Dr Christine Bailey, Founder of Sophia Marketing and Author of ‘Customer Insight Strategies: How To Understand Your Audience and Create Remarkable Marketing’.
In this episode we discuss:
- Have the principles for gleaning customer insight changed over the last 20 years?
- What makes an insight insightful?
- The 5 sources of data you need for meaningful marketing analysis
- What’s the #1 obstacle that prevents customer insight from being gleaned?
- Why monthly or quarterly marketing targets might actually prevent remarkable marketing
- Why getting outside of your comfort zone is a critical component in gleaning meaningful customer insights
Referenced on this episode:
- Christine’s book, Customer Insight Strategies: https://www.koganpage.com/product/customer-insight-strategies-9781789662504 & https://amzn.to/3umOoJt
- Marketing Technology Landscape Supergraphic: https://chiefmartec.com/2020/04/marketing-technology-landscape-2020-martech-5000/
- [Book] Thinking Fast and Slow by Daniel Kahneman https://amzn.to/3yG4H7L
- [Book] Play Bigger by Al Ramadan, Dave Peterson,Christopher Lochead and Kevin Maney: https://amzn.to/3wABlpn
- Jolt by Richard Tyler: https://amzn.to/3voHyoo
CONNECT WITH CHRISTINE / SOPHIA MARKETING
- https://uk.linkedin.com/in/drchristinebailey
- https://twitter.com/christinebailey
- https://www.sophiamarketing.co.uk/
CONNECT WITH SCOTT:
- scott.colenutt@sitevisibility.com
- https://www.linkedin.com/in/scottcolenutt
For all show ideas, guest recommendations and feedback email marketing@sitevisibility.com
Struggling to make the most of your data? If you’d like to get in touch with us to find out how we could help you make meaningful marketing decisions and ensure your data is accurate, please give us a call on 01273 733 433 or leave us a message via the form below:
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This episode is a little different from the topics we usually cover on the Internet Marketing Podcast as we’re joined by Tokunbo Ajasa-Oluwa, Chief Executive Officer at Career Ready.
SiteVisibility partnered with Career Ready back in 2018 to support them with the management of their Google Ads grant. We’ve witnessed first-hand the principles that Tokunbo has instilled in Career Ready since joining as CEO in early 2020 and in this episode he shares with us Career Ready’s ambitions to give more young people opportunities, particularly in creative industries.
In this episode we discuss:
- How Career Ready helps young people in the UK access employment
- Tokunbo’s first year goals as Career Ready’s CEO
- How Career Ready harnessed the advocacy of alumni to showcase the importance of their work
- How the pandemic accelerated Career Ready’s use of technology to engage young people
- What is social mobility?
- A breakdown of Career Ready’s services for employers and young people and how to access them
Referenced on this episode:
- https://www.impetus.org.uk/youth-employment-group
- https://careerready.org.uk/career-ready-at-18/
- https://www.sitevisibility.co.uk/career-ready-case-study/
CONNECT WITH TOKUNBO / CAREER READY
- https://careerready.org.uk/
- https://twitter.com/toksytweets
CONNECT WITH SCOTT:
- scott.colenutt@sitevisibility.com
- https://www.linkedin.com/in/scottcolenutt
For all show ideas, guest recommendations and feedback email marketing@sitevisibility.com
In this episode we’re joined by Mike Rhodes, CEO of WeSavvy and AgencySavvy.
Mike is the co-author of ‘The Ultimate Guide to Google Ads’ and joins us to discuss some key trends that made it into the recent 6th edition of the book, in particular, Google’s adoption of AI driven smart features.
Learn About Google Ads’ New AI-Driven Features In this episode we discuss:
- Is there a gap in marketing sophistication in Australia vs the rest of the world?
- How Mikes’s approach to identifying trends and topics has changed during the pandemic
- How Mike prioritises the topics to cover when revising editions of his co-authored book ‘The Ultimate Guide To Google Ads’
- Red flags to look out for when considering a new client-agency partnership
- Are customers losing access to their data because of Google’s increased adoption of AI?
- How Mike uses the mantra of ‘trust, but verify’ when approaching new Google Ads ‘smart’ features
Referenced on this episode: * [Book] The Ultimate Guide to Google Ads: https://amzn.to/3yae8fu * https://www.descript.com/ * https://otter.ai/ * https://copysmith.ai/ * https://www.copy.ai/ * https://www.trypencil.com/ * https://writesonic.com/ * https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GPT-2
CONNECT WITH MIKE / WEBSAVVY / AGENCYSAVVY * https://www.websavvy.com.au/ * https://agencysavvy.com/ * https://gafcourse.com
CONNECT WITH SCOTT: * scott.colenutt@sitevisibility.com * https://www.linkedin.com/in/scottcolenutt
For all show ideas, guest recommendations and feedback email marketing@sitevisibility.com
SiteVisibility are delighted to announce that we’re joining forces with Cats Protection, the UK’s largest feline welfare charity, to help improve their visibility, and in turn ensure that more unwanted, stray or homeless cats are re-homed and that more people are educated on cats and their welfare.
Cats Protection are creating a world where every cat is treated with kindness. We’re working with them to inform this mission with an expert content strategy that sifts through an internet of misinformation and offers cat owners content they can rely on, and we couldn’t be happier to help them on their journey.
“Team SV are understandably excited to be unleashing a digital strategy for Cats Protection. It means we get to support the improvement of content on the internet, a difficult feat in itself, but more importantly, we get to support cat welfare through our work with the lovely team at Cats Protection. Knowing what we do as marketing professionals will have a positive impact on the world is what really motivates us”
Rachel Pearson, Head of Creative, SiteVisibility
Our Senior SEO Analyst, Marcos Martin had previously provided training for Rebecca at Cats Protection, and they came to us with a brief for reaching new audiences of cat owners and carers with valuable, trustworthy and vet-led content as well as making sure the main Cats Protection website was the primary resource of all things cat welfare.
We love that Marcos’ amazing SEO training brings about great opportunities like this and who can resist that smooth, dulcet Spanish voice of his?!
At SiteVisibility we’re crazy about pets (you may have seen Tango on our team page…) In fact, we wouldn’t be a decent agency if we didn’t go bonkers for animals, and when the opportunity arose, we collectively jumped at the chance to support a business that helps cats.
*Note – Never trust an agency that doesn’t have a pet or two as part of their honorary team
To show just how much we wanted to work together, our Head of Creative put together a pitch video to show them our enthusiasm and vision. We really wanted to save those feline friends!
To enhance our offering to Cats Protection, we also brought in Allegra Chapman to support our team as she has extensive charity sector experience. She joins us as the Account Manager and will be working closely with all of us to deliver on the promises and plans we’ve been pawing away at this month. Allegra’s a close friend of the SV team, working closely with Rachel, our Head of Creative, for many years.
We think it’s a dream team made in heaven
“I have built my career as a freelance content and digital consultant around working with brands, businesses and organisations that impact the world positively, or are looking to do so and need to learn how. It’s so exiting for me to be working with Cats Protection and Rachel and the rest of the talented bunch at SiteVisibility. Rachel and I go way back having built Brighton Digital Women and Watch This Sp_ce together and have a great dynamic when it comes to getting stuff done and done right! I’m super pleased to be on board with SiteVisibility’s focus on social good.”
Allegra Chapman
The partnership with Cats Protection follows a number of new client wins for SiteVisibility in 2021, including Flexebee, a leading provider of e-learning training within health and social care and ties in nicely with our teams’ desire to work for brands and businesses that fuel social-good in the world. We all want to wield our digital, data and creative expertise and passions for making positive change.
I’m sure a lot of people have reassessed what their priorities and motivations are in the last 14 months and Team SV are no different. If you’re looking to change the world for good, for people, animals and our environment, then a team of driven marketers await your call!
We’ve recently held discussions as a team about what we want to be as a business and what impact we want to have as a team of marketers. We decided that our objectives and priorities for the year, maybe forever, would be:
- To lead with data
- To inspire through creativity
- To provide marketing only to businesses that we define as fuelling social good
We want to achieve our goal of being the #1 agency that people turn to when they are trying to achieve ‘social-good’. In essence, this means that we want to utilise our marketing skills to promote companies that are positively impacting people and the planet. Our team is experienced and socially-conscious, and so we want to make use of this collective ambition and only work with companies that are meaningful to us.
Cats Protection provide us with the perfect opportunity to utilise our data-led approach along with our creative arm to help them spread the word and ensure more cats find homes and that every cats life is beautiful.
After a year of lockdowns and uncertainty surrounding the business, a strong start to the year has led to SiteVisibility being in a position to hire for a number of new roles! If you’re interested in joining a fun, creative and fast-growing team, and you want to help change the world by working with businesses fuelling social good, check out the full job descriptions here.
In today’s episode (a landmark 600th show!) we’re joined by Joseph Wilkins, Founder of FunnySalesVideos.com to discuss… well, funny sales videos! Joseph had a long career in creating traditional infomercials before doubling-down on the creation of funny videos. He shares with us this story and the techniques he uses to produce funny sales videos that are seen by millions of users each year.
In this episode we discuss:
- How Joseph applied his direct response marketing experience to pivot into creating funny sales videos
- How the Harmon Brothers inspired Joseph and his team to ‘find their funny’
- How to create funny sales videos even if you don’t consider yourself a funny person
- The similiarties and differences between creating infomercials and funny sales videos
- What you need in the first 5 seconds of a video to capture someone’s attention
- What causes users to get bored, lose attention and stop watching your online videos
- Managing the balance of being disruptive without being distasteful
- Techniques for repurposing sales videos into snippets for paid social ads
- How Hollywood movies are becoming increasingly influenced by the editing techniques used in online videos
Referenced on this episode:
- https://www.pro-creative.com/
- https://harmonbrothers.com/
- https://www.drybarcomedy.com/
CONNECT WITH JOSEPH / FUNNYSALESVIDEOS.COM
- https://funnysalesvideos.com/
- https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/how-to-make-a-video-go-viral/id1494603767
- https://www.linkedin.com/in/wilkinsjoseph
CONNECT WITH SCOTT:
- scott.colenutt@sitevisibility.com
- https://www.linkedin.com/in/scottcolenutt
For all show ideas, guest recommendations and feedback email marketing@sitevisibility.com
In this episode we’re joined by an Internet Marketing Podcast veteran and our very own Senior SEO Analyst, Marcos Álvarez Martín, to discuss Google’s upcoming Core Web Vitals update.
*UPDATE*
Shortly after this recording, Google provided an update to note that the Core Web Vitals update will now start rolling out from mid-June 2021: https://developers.google.com/search/blog/2021/04/more-details-page-experience.
In this episode we discuss:
- What is the Core Web Vitals update and how does it differ from previous Google search algorithm updates?
- How might the Core Web Vitals impact roles of SEO professionals?
- A description of what the 3 key Core Web Vitals are
- What are ‘page experience signals’?
- Why business owners and webmasters may need increased development budgets in 2021/22
- How to benchmark your current performance and tools to help analyse performance against Core Web Vitals
- How will you know if your site is impacted by the Core Web Vitals update?
Referenced on this episode:
- https://search.google.com/search-console/about
- https://developers.google.com/speed/pagespeed/insights/
- https://web.dev/vitals-tools/
- https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/web-vitals/ahfhijdlegdabablpippeagghigmibma?hl=en
- https://developers.google.com/search/blog/2020/05/evaluating-page-experience
- https://developers.google.com/search/blog/2020/11/timing-for-page-experience
CONNECT WITH MARCOS:
- marcos.martin@sitevisibility.com
- https://twitter.com/markookami
- https://www.linkedin.com/in/marcos-alvarez-martin
CONNECT WITH SCOTT:
- scott.colenutt@sitevisibility.com
- https://www.linkedin.com/in/scottcolenutt
CONNECT WITH SITEVISIBILITY:
- https://www.sitevisibility.co.uk/
- https://www.youtube.com/user/SiteVisibility
- https://twitter.com/sitevisibility
- https://www.facebook.com/SiteVisibility
- http://instagram.com/sitevisibility
For all show ideas, guest recommendations and feedback email marketing@sitevisibility.com
Oribi is an alternative to Google Analytics. It provides actionable data, insights for funnel optimization, and strong audience segmentation. All of the above without using code.
Oribi helps thousands of companies to:
- Know exactly how each marketing activity and channel contributes to sales
- Optimize their funnel
- View all their key metrics, trends, and marketing budgets in one dashboard
- Analyze and optimize paid campaigns
- Credit every single marketing activity, from paid campaigns to newsletters and content
For 20% off your first 3-months of Oribi, use the code ‘sitevisibility’ during sign-up.
In this episode we discuss:
- Oribi’s origin story
- How Oribi helps business owners and marketers collect useful marketing data without the need for developers
- What Oribi does differently to Google Analytics
- A breakdown of Oribi’s key features and functionality
- How Oribi uses AI to surface marketing insights
- Who is Oribi best for?
- The considerations behind Oribi’s key marketing messages (Google Analytics is old!)
CONNECT WITH IRIS / ORIBI
- https://oribi.io/
- https://www.facebook.com/getoribi/
- https://twitter.com/getoribi
- https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCZJTakkFkIYvjaTlXpEDo3g
- https://www.linkedin.com/company/oribi
- https://il.linkedin.com/in/irisshoor
CONNECT WITH SCOTT:
- scott.colenutt@sitevisibility.com
- https://www.linkedin.com/in/scottcolenutt
CONNECT WITH SITEVISIBILITY:
- https://www.sitevisibility.co.uk/
- https://www.youtube.com/user/SiteVisibility
- https://twitter.com/sitevisibility
- https://www.facebook.com/SiteVisibility
- http://instagram.com/sitevisibility
For all show ideas, guest recommendations and feedback email marketing@sitevisibility.com
In 2021, the electric revolution is not just on the horizon, it’s very much in the here and now.
The effects of climate change and our need to reduce our reliance on fossil fuels is unquestionable, and governments all around the world are introducing legislation that aims to limit or even completely eradicate the sale of new petrol or diesel cars in the near future.
The growth of the electric motoring is clear for everyone to see but despite this, there remain significant marketing challenges for the industry to overcome. But where can we look for inspiration on how to do this?
The answer is on two wheels and are called e-bikes.
Even in a pre-covid world, electric bicycles were a regular sight on city streets and were surging in popularity. Post-Covid, where commuter patterns and working arrangements may never return to what they were, this could only increase, and fundamentally change our relationship with cars in the process.
In this blog post, we look at the top challenges facing the electric car industry, and what they can learn from the successful marketing of e-bikes.
What are the top marketing challenges facing Electric Vehicle manufacturers? There are plenty of challenges that need to be overcome before the mass acceptance and adoption of electric vehicles (EVs) around the world, and some are easier to overcome than others.
These include:
- Resistance to change
- Poor track record
- Range anxiety, charging times and infrastructure
- The cost of building and maintaining Electric Cars
- Limited choice
Resistance to change and a poor track record Every new technology has problems with gaining acceptance to the market and EVs are no different. Not only do they have to overcome an aversion to change from an end user perspective, in some instances, especially in the US, they have become emblematic of political and social divides too.
Whether it’s from climate change sceptics, fossil fuel vested interests or those within the motoring industry, the concept of electric motoring is one that’s only recently started to gain anything close to widespread acceptance, and overcome those prejudices.
What’s more, most of the early attempts at electric cars were so awful that many have forever written them off. In 2019, Dyson famously had to scrap it’s electrical car project due to the cars not being commercially viable and in 2013, Fisker Automotive went bankrupt despite producing the Fisker Karma, one of the best luxury hybrid electric vehicles.
There have been many more failures along the way such as the GM EV1, the Toyota RAV-4 EV, and even the old Sinclair C5.
It’s only in the last 10-15 years since battery technology has made them viable choices for the everyday motorist that we are seeing that change.
A lot of people think they will need to make significant changes to their motoring habits if they buy an EV, but in reality, these are quite insignificant. One of the major examples of this is to do with range and charging.
Range anxiety, charging time and charging infrastructure It’s undeniable that a vast and reliable infrastructure has grown that makes the car second to none when it comes to convenient transport.
Filling your tank with petrol takes 5 minutes and you can drive another several hundred miles. Right now, electric cars simply can’t compete with that.
In the past, shockingly poor charging times and low capacity batteries made electric cars completely unsuitable for any owner that did anything more than short trips around town.
Even now, unless you’re using a Tesla SuperCharger or similar, EVs can take from anywhere between 4-24 hours to fully charge. The thought of running out of charge mid-journey and being stuck somewhere for potentially hours is what’s become known as Range Anxiety.
Modern EVs tend to have a range of between 180 and 350 miles depending on the model but what if you wanted to drive from London to Glasgow, a distance of over 400 miles?
Charging times and having more charging points are clearly two of the biggest challenges that the electric car industry will need to overcome.
Access to high speed charging on UK motorways is improving, but those within the industry will need to make sure that this continues and that charging points are easily accessible.
Charging times also need to be improved and although this is already underway for some vehicles, the Tesla Supercharger for example takes around 20 minutes to recharge the battery pack to 50%, and roughly 45 minutes to charge to 80%, this needs to be rolled out at a much larger scale.
More and more people are now installing EV chargers in homes, workplaces and business premises, but when it comes to appearances and accepted truths, range anxiety is proving very hard to overcome although the reality is, when it comes to longer journeys, taking a 45-minute break for a coffee and a rest while your car charges is probably not such a bad thing.
A larger issue though, is that for a lot of prospective electric car buyers, they’re seen as a dive into the unknown that simply isn’t worth it yet because…
Electric cars are expensive to buy and maintain, and the choice is limited The elephant in the room with the current crop of electric vehicles on the market is that they’re still very expensive and there’s no real used EV market to speak of yet.
New technology is always expensive, but until the last 5-10 years or so, the cost of electric cars was so prohibitive that only those who normally bought brand-new BMWs and Mercedes’ could afford it.
Even now, the cheapest electric cars tend to cost between £20,000 and £30,000 and this is a sizable outlay for most people. There’s also an issue that maintenance is often reliant on main dealers.
But none of these problems are insurmountable, and in fact the electric bike industry faced similar when it first started to bloom…
What are the similarities to e-bikes? Forbes reports that “E-bikes are predicted to grow from 3.7 million bikes sold in 2019 to 17 million in 2030. The e-bike market in 2020 is already up by 23% year on year, and on the current trajectory, there will be 10 million e-bikes sold per year as early as 2024.”
COVID-19 has undoubtedly played a part in that growth as more and more people look for ways to get outside, exercise, or to avoid commuting via public transport, but the wheels were in motion (not sorry!) well before that.
Halfords note that sales of e-bikes have been increasing for several years, and there now exists a wide range of bikes at various price points to cater for everyone.
However, despite their success, e-bikes didn’t have an easy ride to success and still encounter challenges, many of them similar to those facing the EV industry.
Although opinion of them has certainly changed, they were originally seen as ‘not real bikes’ and perhaps carried an unfair label of being meant for the elderly. They were also seen as complex, heavy and expensive with slow charge times, limited range and costly maintenance.
Many of these things still affect e-bikes to this day… despite costs coming down, prices still tend to start at over £1000, and that’s almost 3x the amount of a semi-decent regular bike. Although sales are clearly booming, many people simply can’t or won’t spend that much on a bike. They’re still much heavier than a normal bike, repairs to the drivetrain are potentially expensive, and charge times and range haven’t significantly improved.
How did e-bikes become so successful? Being a keen cyclist myself, I think e-bikes were able to overcome their disadvantages by effectively marketing of their benefits.
Now this is nothing new, in fact, it’s what almost every company aims to do, but I think the reason why e-bike industry was so successful is that they got their messaging spot on.
Fundamentally, they were able to promote all the benefits of e-bikes while at the same time showing that they could fit seamlessly into your life.
Owning an e-bike doesn’t necessitate any changes to your lifestyle or the way you use it, but they do open up cycling to whole new group of people who may have been hesitant to traditional bikes.
These include:
- Those who are older, or less physically able, and may struggle to pedal a traditional bike
- Those who live in particularly hilly areas
- Those who commute and don’t want to have to shower or take a change of clothes
- Those who are new to it and just want to enjoy leisure cycling
Lance Branquinho from Cycling News hits the nail on the head in his feature about “How the e-bike saved the cycling industry”:
“Perhaps the greatest gift of e-bikes, is the freedom of imagination and richness of experience, that they allow more riders to experience a cycling journey.”
By advertising all the benefits with none of the drawbacks, people have bought in. Literally as well as figuratively, regardless of the price. This latest video from Trek Bikes sums it up perfectly:
What can the electric car industry learn? We’ve seen that the ebike industry and the electric car industry certainly have some similarities in the challenges they face.
Electric cars are well on their journey to gaining mainstream acceptance and it is absolutely inevitable that eventually they will be the norm, but what can EV manufacturers do both collectively and individually to create change?
Education, Education, Education According to Quartz, “More than half (57%) of British people would consider buying an electric car if it was “available at the right price for them,” according to a recent YouGov survey commissioned by insurance company Aviva.
The interest only increases with the younger generation, with 73% of respondents aged 18-24 reporting they would consider an EV.”.
There is clearly an enthusiasm among the public to embrace electric motoring. However, 81% of respondents in the same survey cited battery range and a lack of charging infrastructure as a primary factor in why they wouldn’t choose an electric car.
A survey of 13.9m UK drivers by Kwik Fit had similar findings. 37% of those not considering an electric vehicle for their next car cited a lack of fast charging points in areas where they commonly drive as the reason. 35% cited how far they could travel on a single charge, and 33% cited the increased cost compared to a petrol, diesel or hybrid car.
This is where education comes in, and fundamentally it seems that electric vehicles have an image problem.
We know that over the course of the car’s lifetime, electric vehicles are vastly cheaper to run, easier to insure and don’t rely on a fuel source that will eventually run out. We also know that that in 2019, the average car journey in the UK was 8.4 miles, comfortably within the maximum range of any electric car on sale today.
If you regularly drive across the country then the range argument stacks up, but for most of us it simply doesn’t.
Anecdotally, when i’ve spoken to electric vehicle owners, they all say that there is little to no change in their motoring habits, but this either isn’t being communicated to potential owners, or isn’t being received.
Put simply, the entire industry needs to do a better job of ensuring their marketing and messaging cuts through.
When we looked at e-bikes we saw marketing that normalised e-bikes and showed them as every bit as good as a traditional bike, without the perceived drawbacks, and sales soared.
Clearly, a car is much more considered purchase, but for me, when we see marketing for electric cars, it all seems a bit stuffy and dull and there’s a real chance to change that.
Innovative marketing tactics for innovative tech In order for their message to get through, EV manufacturers need to get creative. The current generation of young car buyers, and certainly those coming up behind them, consume media completely differently.
Motoring advertising in general is very old fashioned and traditional, but embracing new tactics could engage and convince the customers they need.
Whether it’s in the motoring industry, fashion industry, tech, or frankly anything else, highlighting the benefits and convenience of electric vehicles in a genuine and honest way will help lead to normalisation of electric motoring.
PR and influencer campaigns working with family bloggers and influencers, that are backed up with more traditional advertising techniques, will help to attract the current generation of new car buyers, and nurture those of the future.
For example, could a manufacturer send a family on a camping road trip in Scotland to demonstrate how when it comes to using it, their EV is just like a normal family car and that it can cope with long trips, lots of luggage and a bit of rough and tumble?
Likewise, could a manufacturer work with business influencers to demonstrate that there’s no reason an EV can’t be used as a fleet car? In the process, highlighting why range anxiety is not always justified. Or, a manufacturer could highlight the amount of time people spend at petrol pumps over the course of a car’s lifetime, and juxtapose that with the amount of time saved to do other things by charging your car at home.
Seizing on changing habits Many people have tried to predict what a post-covid world will look like and most of us don’t have a clue, so I’m not going to. But… I do think it’s likely that the rise of remote working, virtual meetings and changing attitudes to flexible working, there may be a change in the way we use our cars.
If we’re just doing the school run, heading to the shops and using it for leisure time, an electric vehicle suddenly makes a lot more sense financially and some of the main perceived drawbacks have gone.
Any electric car manufacturer who is able to effectively communicate this and position themselves as a vehicle that makes sense in a modern context may be the one who can capitalise on the inevitable change in public opinion.
Changing public opinion is also down to the manufacturers themselves. If they know that people are hesitant about the charging network, then they should explore ways to allay peoples fears. This could be through highlighting their investment in their own network, a tactic that has worked very well for Tesla in the the USA, or by working with various public or private charging networks to guarantee access to their cars.
Going a step further, Ford has partnered with Centrica in the UK to offer a dedicated home charger installation service with their cars, and British Gas customers get preferential rates on their home charging. Expanding this by offering the buyer access to a national network of chargers as well allows the manufacturer to offer a completely seamless experience to the customers, meaning they’ll never be far from a charger, and never have to worry about range anxiety again.
Conclusions There are some things that no amount of good marketing can change and it’s evidently clear that EV manufacturers are in a catch-22 situation. Currently, they’re too expensive and the charging network doesn’t exist to convert enough people into buying them, but prices won’t come down and the investment in the network won’t improve until there is mass market appeal.
This mass market appeal has to be created and driven by the manufacturers. The simple fact is that they have to do a better job of highlighting the benefits of EV motoring, addressing people’s concerns, and offering practical and tangible solutions. The switch to electric motoring is inevitable for all of us, and although there are still questions around the environmental impact of manufacturing batteries, for the sake of the planet, the sooner we all switch, the better.
If you’d like to speak to a member of our team about how we could help you to get your message out there and grow your business, please don’t hesitate to get in touch. You can call us on 01273 733433 or leave us a message via the form below. We’d love to help!
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In this episode we’re joined by Smartphone Video Marketer, Daryl Cygler. Daryl is a Marketing Director at fuel equipment specialists, FES Tanks but a passion and curiosity for video led Daryl to the creation of the Smartphone Video Marketing Group where he helps SMEs get to grips will all aspects of smartphone video production.
Learn Important Smartphone Video Marketing Tips In this episode we discuss:
- How mobile journalism inspired Daryl to become a smartphone video marketing advocate
- The key lessons Daryl has taken from mobile journalists and applied to marketing
- How Daryl created his first marketing video from his smartphone
- The importance of learning to take imperfect action
- Common obstacles in creating smartphone videos and how to overcome them
- Can SMEs use smartphones for live streaming?
- Ideas for how SMEs can start small in their video marketing experimentation
Referenced on this episode:
- https://uk.cfm.net/
- https://www.powertutors.co.uk/
- https://lovicklifecoach.co.uk/
- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Steven_Soderbergh
- Lady Gaga ‘Stupid Love’: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5L6xyaeiV58
- https://www.kinemaster.com/
- https://luma-touch.com/lumafusion-for-ios-2/
- https://gopro.com/en/us/shop/quik-app-video-photo-editor
CONNECT WITH DARYL:
- https://smartphonevideo.marketing/
- F.E.S. TANKS
CONNECT WITH SCOTT:
- scott.colenutt@sitevisibility.com
- https://www.linkedin.com/in/scottcolenutt
For all show ideas, guest recommendations and feedback email marketing@sitevisibility.com
When welcoming in the New Year (and, let’s be honest, frantically waving goodbye to 2020), were you one of those people who made a vow to yourself to start looking after yourself – both mentally and physically?
Y’ know, that whole ‘New Year, New Me’ jazz?
I’ll hold my hands up, I make (and break) the same pledge every single year!
But this past year, in particular, has sobered up even the most reluctant fitness fans to the importance of good health. We’ve spent heaps more time at home and a lot less of it commuting, opening up our schedule to really knuckle down on our health and fitness goals.
With that in mind, it’s unsurprising that downloads of health & fitness apps rocketed by 65% in the UK during the first lockdown in March 2020.
But can health & fitness apps continue riding this wave of success forever? Or will it be short-lived? Join us as we investigate the 3 top challenges health & fitness apps can expect to face in the coming year, and some of the tactics we recommend they employ to overcome this.
What are we waiting for? Let’s dive in!
The Re-Opening Of Gyms Post Covid The health and fitness industry has experienced polar extremes throughout the Pandemic.
On the one hand, gyms have been struggling due to forced closure and have had to innovate with online classes, while home workout equipment and health & fitness apps have surged in popularity.
However, we’re finally starting to see the light at the end of the tunnel! With the government releasing their spring lockdown road map, restrictions are expected to start easing up in mid-April – but what will this mean for health & fitness apps?
Will users abandon their apps and flock back to physical, brick and mortar locations for their workouts – or has the public psyche about enclosed spaces and crowds changed irreversibly? For now, that’s something that remains to be seen.
Allow us to play devil’s advocate for a minute, though!
Should it transpire that health & fitness apps start to majorly plummet in popularity with the re-opening of gyms, what tactics could they utilise to tackle this? Well, we reckon the way to go is to overemphasise the social features of health & fitness apps. After all, people who frequently visit the gym, and are desperate to get back, tend to do so because they enjoy the social element of it.
But apps can still be social too AND they’re convenient at the same time, allowing you to work out wherever and whenever you want!
Headspace, a guided meditation and mindfulness app, is a prime example of a health & fitness app that uses various ‘social’ elements impressively. For instance, it’s possible to see your friend’s meditation stats and ‘nudge’ them to meditate more, not too dissimilar to an old school Facebook poke (remember when that was once a thing?).
You can also join meditation ‘groups’. A bit like when people recommend you take up exercise with a friend, as you’re more likely to stick it out, this feature works in the same way.
Finally, their ‘buddies’ feature enables the user to include friends in their meditation journey, allowing you to connect with them and share your progress.
If health and fitness apps were to use these same ‘gamification’ tactics, not only would it encourage shareability of the app but it may also appeal to those who aren’t quite ready to go back to a gym but crave and miss the social element.
For any health & fitness apps who see a decline in users post-lockdown, and as the gyms reopen, gamification is one route to try and win back those who already have the app, as well as encourage new sign-ups too.
A Saturated Apps Market & Diminishing Human Attention Span Something that always seems to seep back into the news agenda at one point or another is a concern about the attention span of the human race.
We live in a fast-paced world of mobile phones, Facebook feeds, Twitter and TikTok, where people want their online content quick, fast and easily digestible.
Indeed, we are in the age of what’s known as ‘attention economy’ – where attention is one of the most valuable resources of the digital age. A study conducted by Microsoft Corp suggests that people are now generally starting to lose concentration after just 8 seconds while on social platforms.
Wowza, that’s an all-time low!
While that stat applies specifically to social media, no doubt it has implications for the app market too. With so many health & fitness apps now available, and new ones cropping up every day, our time and ability to process all of these different apps haven’t changed – in fact, it remains the same! So not only do health & fitness apps need to differentiate themselves from competitors by ensuring they have strong USPs, but they also need to employ creative tactics which encourage users to sign up and remain engaged.
If you’re still with us and haven’t been distracted by something shiny and new, here’s just a few tactics you might consider:
- Allow users to ‘try before they buy’. Letting users explore your health & fitness app as much as possible, without needing to sign up or login, demonstrates the value of your app before a user has to commit to it.
- Make the speed and reliability of your app a primary concern. As we discussed previously, society is more demanding than ever and attention span is declining globally. Don’t give your app users any ammunition to feel frustrated otherwise they’ll easily abandon you or defect to a competitor.
- Utilise push notifications. Push notifications will often draw users back to an app they haven’t engaged with recently. For example, if you’re a fitness app, why not send out a push notification ranking the top 10 most popular workouts on your app this week? This involves pulling on their FOMO heartstrings and invoking curiosity about what others are doing to help lure them back in!
Data Privacy & Trust Now, data privacy and trust is hardly a new concern for 2021, neither is it exclusive to health & fitness apps. Nonetheless, it is an ongoing issue that remains relevant.
A study by the Manifest, for example, discovered that some people fear apps that track and collect location data. For health & fitness apps, which commonly use this feature, this could prove a major barrier to enticing new users. Indeed, among those in the study who were not comfortable with location-tracking apps, 15% cited lack of privacy as their top concern whilst not feeling safe was cited as a reason by 52%.
And understandably so. Breach of location data has incredibly serious consequences. If a hacker can access maps of a user’s fitness regime, they could know precisely when and where a person is – potentially opening them up to becoming a victim of crime.
In 2018, the fitness app Strava experienced issues relating to data privacy when it released an interactive heat map of user’s activity. It brought together one billion activities and 13 trillion GPS data points, enabling anyone and everyone to explore exercise routes across the globe.
On the face of it, this was an incredibly impressive feature. Hundreds of thousands of Strava users could use it to plan where they ride, run and swim. However, crisis soon struck when an Australian university student noticed the map showed locations and routines of military personnel at bases in the Middle East and other conflict zones. They were forced to quickly wipe sensitive data from the publicly available heat map.
To overcome this obstacle, health & fitness apps need to demonstrate they are truly trustworthy from the get-go. Here are just a few tactics we recommend:
- When it comes to your in-app permissions, transparency is key. If, like apps such as Strava, Fitbit or Zwift, you prompt your users to turn on their location services, most users will want reassurance on the 5 w’s – who, what, where’s, when, why (and how). So, tell them! In a straightforward, honest and uncomplicated manner, explain every inch of your data collection process. By being upfront immediately, the user has more reason to trust your app.
- Give users complete control with regards to social sharing. Many health & fitness apps are designed so that when a user accomplishes a goal or performs any kind of in-app action – this is then posted to social media. As much as the brand awareness benefits of this activity can be great, you must strike a careful balance between this and respecting your user’s privacy. Not being transparent about this feature could lead to bad reviews, ratings and ultimately uninstallation of your app!
Conclusion Ultimately, there are various challenges facing health & fitness apps and we’ve covered just a few of them in this post but to recap, here are the top three challenges facing health and fitness apps in 2021:
- The Re-Opening Of Gyms Post Covid
- A Saturated Apps Market & Diminishing Human Attention Span
- Data Privacy & Trust
To overcome these challenges, we recommend health & fitness apps consider utilising some of the following tactics:
- Emphasise the ‘social’ features of your health & fitness app to make it an equally enjoyable and social experience as going to a physical gym.
- Have strong, clearly defined USPs which separate you from competitors.
- Offer free trials and design your app so they require minimal commitment (i.e. no login).
- Make the speed of your app a high priority. In a busy market, users need few reasons to stop using your app and opt for a competitor.
- Use push notifications and FOMO to encourage users back to your app after periods of stagnation.
- Avoid mistrust about privacy and data by being utterly transparent and honest about which in-app permissions you require and why.
- Respect user’s privacy by allowing them to control their social sharing settings.
So, there you have it! What do you think?
We’d love to hear from you if you have any thoughts on the key challenges ahead for health & fitness apps and even some of your solutions. Please leave us a comment below or contact us with your thoughts and we’ll get them added to the post!
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In this episode we’re joined by Asher Ismail, Co-Founder of Uncapped.
Uncapped offer an alternative take on capital, helping to provide growing businesses with fast and flexible funding for marketing, inventory or hiring.
In this episode we discuss:
- Asher’s experiences in startups as an entrepreneur and how that led to the idea of Uncapped
- Uncapped’s mission to provide an alternative fundraising option for growing businesses
- The pros and cons of fundraising options for growing businesses and how Uncapped compares to these options
- The VC community and media response to Uncapped
- How case studies have been critical to establishing trust for Uncapped
Referenced on this episode:
- https://wise.com/
- https://get.weareuncapped.com/sitevisibility/
CONNECT WITH ASHER / UNCAPPED:
- https://www.weareuncapped.com/
- https://twitter.com/weareuncapped
- https://www.linkedin.com/company/weareuncapped/
CONNECT WITH SCOTT:
- scott.colenutt@sitevisibility.com
- https://www.linkedin.com/in/scottcolenutt
CONNECT WITH SITEVISIBILITY:
- https://www.sitevisibility.co.uk/
- https://www.youtube.com/user/SiteVisibility
- https://twitter.com/sitevisibility
- https://www.facebook.com/SiteVisibility
- http://instagram.com/sitevisibility
For all show ideas, guest recommendations and feedback email marketing@sitevisibility.com
Paul Cowan is CMO at the cloud-accounting platform, FreshBooks. Paul has spent his career building, growing and promoting products and has the distinct experience of working in product, marketing and product marketing roles.
In this episode we discuss:
- What happens in the intersection of product and marketing at FreshBooks
- Examples of marketing that’s built-in to products
- What SaaS product marketers can learn from the gaming sector
- What can marketing teams learn from product teams and vice versa
- When to target broad audiences vs. when to go feature-specific
Referenced on this episode:
- https://looker.com/
- https://trello.com/
CONNECT WITH PAUL / FRESHBOOKS
- https://www.linkedin.com/in/paulcowan/
- https://twitter.com/cowanpkc
- https://www.freshbooks.com/
CONNECT WITH SCOTT:
- scott.colenutt@sitevisibility.com
- https://www.linkedin.com/in/scottcolenutt
For all show ideas, guest recommendations and feedback email marketing@sitevisibility.com