Best of the MarTechBot showcases the MarTechBot’s responses to prompts submitted by readers. See more about how marketers are using MarTechBot here. The language model is based on content from MarTech embedded on top of ChatGPT. The editors of MarTech selected this response for its usefulness and have supplemented it with additional relevant content.

I am the first generative AI chatbot for marketing technology professionals. I am trained with MarTech content. Here’s something somebody asked me! After that, how to improve prompts to get even better answers from me.

Prompt:

How might a marketer for a large B2C company incorporate a CDP into their martech stack to improve the customer experience, increase customer engagement, and increase conversion rates?

Answer:

Incorporating a customer data platform (CDP) into the martech stack of a large B2C company can significantly enhance customer experience, engagement, and conversion rates. Here’s how a marketer can effectively integrate a CDP:

1. Centralized customer data management 

Unified customer profiles: A CDP aggregates data from various sources (e.g., website interactions, social media, email campaigns, and CRM systems) to create comprehensive customer profiles. This holistic view enables marketers to understand customer behavior and preferences better. 

Data quality and governance: Ensure the data collected is accurate, up-to-date, and compliant with regulations (e.g., GDPR). This builds trust and enhances the quality of insights derived from the data.

2. Segmentation and targeting

Advanced segmentation: Utilize the CDP to create detailed customer segments based on behavior, demographics, and purchase history. This allows for more personalized marketing efforts.

Dynamic audiences: Implement real-time audience segmentation that adapts based on customer interactions, enabling timely and relevant messaging.

3. Personalized marketing campaigns

Tailored content delivery: Use insights from the CDP to deliver personalized content and product recommendations across various channels (email, social media, website) based on individual customer preferences and behaviors.

 Cross-channel consistency: Ensure that messaging is consistent across all touchpoints, enhancing the overall customer experience and reinforcing brand identity.

4. Enhanced customer engagement

Behavioral triggers: Set up automated campaigns triggered by specific customer actions (e.g., cart abandonment, product views) to re-engage customers at critical moments in their journey.

Feedback loops: Incorporate customer feedback mechanisms to gather insights on their experiences, which can be analyzed through the CDP to refine marketing strategies.

5. Data-driven decision-making

Analytics and Reporting: Leverage the analytics capabilities of the CDP to track campaign performance, customer engagement metrics, and conversion rates. This data can inform future marketing strategies and optimizations. 

A/B testing: Use the CDP to conduct A/B tests on different marketing approaches, allowing for data-driven adjustments that enhance effectiveness.

6. Integration with other martech tools

Seamless integration: Ensure that the CDP integrates smoothly with other tools in the martech stack (e.g., email marketing platforms, social media management tools, analytics software) to create a cohesive marketing ecosystem.

Real-time data activation: Enable real-time data activation across channels, allowing for immediate adjustments to campaigns based on customer interactions.

7. Lifecycle marketing

Customer journey mapping: Utilize the insights from the CDP to map out customer journeys and identify key touchpoints for engagement. This helps in crafting targeted campaigns that guide customers through their lifecycle stages.

Retention strategies: Implement retention strategies based on customer behavior analysis, such as loyalty programs or personalized offers for repeat customers.

By effectively incorporating a CDP into the martech stack, a large B2C company can create a more personalized and engaging customer experience. This fosters stronger customer relationships and drives higher engagement and conversion rates, ultimately contributing to business growth. The key is to leverage the insights gained from the CDP to inform every aspect of marketing strategy and execution.

Dig deeper: The customer data platform market

Updated prompt:

Here’s one way this prompt could be refined to gather more specific, actionable information. MarTechBot now has 10+ personas to provide more targeted responses. For this prompt, try selecting the CMO persona. There are many possibilities, depending on the human user’s industry and main objectives:

Before we start, in addition to your other context, you are CMO for a large consumer brand. Please explain how a CDP can improve these three areas of the customer journey: customer experience, customer engagement and conversion rates. For each area, please describe how the CDP helps, what other technology, if any, is needed, and what metrics the marketing team should measure for success in this area. Please keep language simple so the entire marketing team can understand.

The key elements and enhancements to this prompt are as follows:

(Task)

Please explain how a CDP can improve these three areas of the customer journey.

(Context)

You are CMO for a large consumer brand.

(Format)

For each area, please describe how the CDP helps, what other technology, if any, is needed, and what metrics the marketing team should measure for success in this area.

(Tone)

Please keep language simple so the entire marketing team can understand.

Updated answer:

Certainly! A customer data platform (CDP) is a powerful tool that can significantly enhance the customer journey in three key areas: customer experience, customer engagement and conversion rates. Let’s break down how a CDP contributes to each area, the additional technologies that may be needed, and the metrics we should track for success.

1. Customer experience

How the CDP helps:

A CDP centralizes all customer data from various sources (like website interactions, purchase history and social media) into one unified profile. This allows us to understand our customers better and tailor their experiences. For example, if a customer frequently buys eco-friendly products, we can highlight similar products in their communications.

Additional technology needed:

To enhance customer experience, integrating the CDP with a customer relationship management (CRM) system can be beneficial. This allows for better tracking of customer interactions and preferences.

Metrics to measure success:

Customer satisfaction score (CSAT): Surveys to gauge how satisfied customers are with their experiences.

Net promoter score (NPS): Measures customer loyalty and likelihood to recommend our brand.

Customer retention rate: The percentage of customers who continue to engage with our brand over time.

2. Customer engagement

How the CDP helps:

With a CDP, we can segment our audience based on behavior and preferences, allowing us to send personalized messages and offers. For instance, if a customer has shown interest in a specific product category, we can send targeted emails or notifications about new arrivals or promotions in that category.

Additional technology needed:

Marketing automation tools can complement the CDP by automating the delivery of personalized messages across various channels (email, social media, etc.).

Metrics to measure success:

Email open and click-through rates: Indicates how well our messages resonate with customers.

Social media engagement rates: Measures likes, shares, and comments on our posts.

Time spent on site: Reflects how engaged customers are with our content.

3. Conversion rates

How the CDP helps:

By analyzing customer data, a CDP helps identify patterns that lead to conversions. For example, if we notice that customers who engage with a specific type of content are more likely to purchase, we can create more of that content to drive sales.

Additional technology needed:

Integrating the CDP with an ecommerce platform can help track customer behavior throughout the buying process, from browsing to checkout.

Metrics to measure success:

Conversion rate: The percentage of visitors who complete a desired action (like making a purchase).

Abandonment rate: The percentage of customers who start but do not complete a purchase, helping us identify areas for improvement.

Average order value (AOV): The average amount spent per transaction, which can indicate the effectiveness of upselling and cross-selling strategies.

In summary, a CDP is a vital tool that enhances customer experience, engagement, and conversion rates by providing a comprehensive view of customer data. By integrating it with other technologies like CRM and marketing automation tools, and by measuring the right metrics, we can create a more effective marketing strategy that resonates with our customers and drives business growth.

Now it’s your turn to give MarTechBot a try. It’s free and includes multiple expert personas to choose from, as well as an image generator.

Are you getting the most from your stack? Take our brief 2024 MarTech Replacement Survey

The post CDP and customer experience: Best of the MarTechBot appeared first on MarTech.

One of the biggest areas of contention in enterprise PPC advertising is conversion tracking efficacy.

This is in part due to how difficult it is to get approvals, make changes to your sites, and ensure that there’s buy-in to how you will be tracking conversions.

We’re going to dive into how to secure permission to get your conversion tracking set up, as well as how to report on those metrics.

While you will need to adopt this for your business and your needs, it should hopefully provide a very useful framework.

Getting Buy-In From IT

The biggest issue most IT teams will have is lags in performance (site speed).

Google Tag Manager is one of the easiest ways to get tags onto your site.

This is because the install goes in once, and it’s one set of assets that will impact the site. You can then make whatever changes you need.

However, you need to make sure the events you’re going to track are trackable and that there won’t be any changes once tracking is set up.

For example, if you have an event for a form that registers a conversion when users submit, changing the language to contact us could easily cause a lapse in conversions.

You’ll need to make sure that there is a strong communication line between your IT team, your design team, and of course, your own ideas and strategies.

What Events Will You Track?

A big part of success is which events you designate as primary (influences reporting and bidding) and which ones are secondary.

These can be beginning an application or starting a purchase. While you may decide to keep most events as primary, you do need to make sure that the appropriate values are set.

Additionally, it is very important that you connect your CRM so that you can score your leads and, ultimately, convey the conversion values of true customers.

Ad platforms do best when you’re able to share revenue and profit information versus only relying on a placeholder number. While there is a valid fear around price gauging when an ad platform knows your profit numbers, you can mitigate that with bid floors/caps in portfolio bidding.

If you can’t track conversions for whatever reason, hope is not lost! Auto-bidding and manual can be reasonable solutions.

Reporting Your Success

It’s critical that stakeholders understand (and buy into) the information you’ll be sharing with them. If all they care about is signed customers, you’re not going to show them every single type of conversion action.

You should still track what you need, i.e., segmenting conversion actions and seeing which types happened when.

As a general rule, these metrics are safe to include in reports:

Conversions: what you’re tracking and the value of these conversions.
Return on ad spend (ROAS).
Budget efficiency: percent of the budget going to converting entities.
Cost.

Every other metric is nice to have, but on a case-by-case basis.

As you share reports and agree on conversion actions, make sure you have their buy-in for privacy and consent work. This ensures you’ll be able to track effectively, and you’ll also be able to use any contact information secured in future marketing efforts.

Call tracking is going to be a critical step for many. You can use:

On-site: dynamic numbers based on anticipated impression and click volume.
Off-site: a static number assigned to an action.

When you share reporting information, you will want to ensure calls are scored based on whether they became leads and on their duration.

By default, conversions are considered at 60 seconds. However, in most cases, that will not be adequate. Make sure you’re building in at least two minutes (ideally five minutes) before considering a call a conversion.

The final consideration is how much you will rely on GA4 events vs ad platform conversion. If your team requires the same “sources of truth,” you may want to opt for GA4.

However, you can also collaborate with your SEO teams by building in organic reporting.

By doing this, you can report on how much budget is needed in paid vs organic due to overlap and potential cannibalization. To access these reports, connect your search console to Google Ads.

User Experience

The final consideration is the user experience when they convert with you. Essentially, how easy is it for them to accidentally convert multiple times or not convert at all (despite believing that they have)? This can skew your numbers and budget allocation.

It’s important to review the conversion path for your customers on multiple devices and multiple operating systems.

For example, when you design on an iOS system, sometimes fonts and colors get skewed when moving to Windows. This can cause a bad user experience and impact the conversion tracking itself.

Another potential hurdle is form-fill confirmation.

If users don’t see a thank you page confirming their appointment and offering the opportunity to add it to their calendar, they may not realize the appointment went through.

Make sure it’s clear that the user accomplished the action you’re trying to get them to take.

Creative Solutions If You Can’t Track Conversions

If you are unable to get your IT team to set up conversion tracking properly, all is not lost. You can still create something approaching tracking, you just will need to do a little bit more manual work.

Use UTMs with tracking parameters to help your CRM system convey that a lead came from the ad platform. Then, you can share that information with the ad platform.

It’s a little bit riskier to rely wholly on analytics because it’s typically best to use a non-ad platform-oriented tracking solution as your source of truth of what value happened.

While you can use analytics, you may get more value out of using your CRM.

Final Takeaways

To sum up, conversion tracking is a critical part of any campaign, especially enterprise.

While your implementation may not be perfect, you can still get a lot of value out of using Google Tag Manager to get the most pixels on and using call tracking rules of engagement to set yourself up for success.

Be sure that you use Auto or manual bidding unless you’re able to connect off-line conversions.

More resources: 

Featured Image: Akarawut/Shutterstock

This is the second part of a three-part series. The first part, on composable CDPs is here.

The CDP space has been overtaken in recent months by talk of composability. Misnomer or not, the term has stuck, and in essence means the possibility of CDPs activating data within a customer’s data warehouse (or “lakehouse”). There are many ways to do this, but what’s important to note is that it’s a step away from the traditional model of the CDP itself ingesting customer data, creating and storing a persistent database of customer profiles.

While the noise about this has been coming primarily from the CDP space, a similar trend is detectable in customer engagement platforms — platforms that emphasize messaging customers in the moment across multiple channels. “Be absolutely engaging,” is the motto of customer engagement platform Braze.

But while platforms like Braze and Iterable are taking advantage of the growing trend of pulling data from data warehouses, that doesn’t mean some data doesn’t reside in their platforms, at least for a certain amount of time.

Off to the races

We spoke with Kevin Wang, Braze’s chief product officer, about composability just as Braze launched a new offering, the Braze Data Platform. “The ability to pull data from a data warehouse directly with the very seamless, automated transitions we facilitate, that for us is relatively new,” Wang said. Braze has also long been able to activate data held in CDPs.

“The overall thinking here is that there’s more data than ever; the data needs to go somewhere; companies are becoming much more data-driven; and computers, systems, networks need to support all of that data flowing through.” The CDP is one solution for this; an alternative, growing in popularity, is the use of data warehouses like Snowflake, Databricks, Google Big Query, Amazon Redshift and so on.

“The general trend of companies wanting to leverage the data warehouse more and more to be that central organizational point, connecting out to different platforms and systems, we certainly see that trend happening,” said Wang. “The CDPs have seen that trend and as a result a lot of them have very strong integrations into data warehouses as well. Because data warehouses are really built for storing massive amounts of data and keeping it well-organized, they’re less optimized for a lot of what we do. For example, that ability to have a user take an action or make a purchase and immediately respond with a message to a browser or email inbox. “

What Wang sees is Braze customers who have centralized their data in a data warehouse syncing those elements relevant to personalized customer journeys into Braze and setting up customer journey orchestration within Braze. Does that mean the data is being copied into Braze?

“The way that it works with a data warehouse is that we set up a sync where at very high frequency — a matter of minutes — we actually sync data into our user profiles,” Wang explained. “All of our real-time action and performance and reponsiveness all operate in terms of our user profiles. Our cloud data ingestion allows customers to define segments, pull data directly from the data warehouse, then use the segments in Braze and they’re off to the races.”

The way the customer action triggers a response can vary from brand to brand. Some brands have the customer action data flow direct to Braze where a response will be automatically determined. Some channel it to the data warehouse first; that means the response is not triggered quite as fast. Some brands, indeed, have a mixture of needs. An ecommerce site or a dating app, to take two examples, will see transactions that require an instantaneous response. “But they might also have a newsletter or weekly recommendations; that’s a use case that is more data heavy but the real-time need is not central for that use case.”

The newly announced Braze Data Platform has extensions to Amazon Redshift and Databricks (they already had Snowflake) but the data ingested by Braze for activation does linger in Braze. “We can store data for a long amount of time,” said Wang, “but some of it will eventually get archived. We’re not designed to store every single data point in perpetuity but we do store data long enough for customers to re-target off of it.”

Dig deeper: What the composability revolution means for CDPs

Solving for the activation gap

Traditional CDPs are starting to struggle to demonstrate value, especially set against the trend towards data warehouses. That’s the view of Heather Blank, SVP GTM strategy and partnerships at Iterable. “Modern players like Hightouch, those have been the ones to coin the term ‘composable CDP,’” said Blank, “because they saw an opportunity with customers who had data warehouses or data lakes where they were storing not just customer data but all of their business data. They saw that you do not need all the bells and whistles of a CDP, nor do you need to duplicate your storage of data, so we’re just going to lay down some rail tracks for data to move back-and-forth on.” Hightouch is a partner of Iterable. It now calls itself a composable CDP but has been primarily known for its reverse ETL capabilities.

“Where Iterable fits in is, we’re not interested in storing all data for our customers. We want to make sure that customers have the ability to easily pull the appropriate data into our platform from those central data sources and then have a place to marry that data with the data we have — who clicks on an email, what channels are they most responsive in, all the things that we observe.” The aim is to drive the most personalized content possible in the optimum channel, at the right time and with the right frequency, Blank explained.

Iterable has integrations with a number of established CDPs. “Those guys are going to market with a composable CDP as well. While Iterable has these integrations, Blank is seeing more and more customers who want to pull their data out of warehouses directly and to have a CDP as a hop in-between to get to us. That’s why we have the integration with Hightouch.”

The challenge faced by traditional CDPs, according to Blank, is similar to the challenge that confronted DSPs. While CDPs dealt in first-party data, DSPs dealt with audiences for paid media, but they both tended to become rail tracks between a brand’s data and where that data is activated. What’s more, there was a time when multiple applications were needed to activate data — Iterable was once only email, Braze was in-app, for example.

“What you had was this really complex stack where you had to bring data in, log into all these different places to design your campaigns, segment, personalize and send your campaigns. We call that problem the ‘activation gap,’” said Blank. Iterable is solving the problem by plugging directly into data respositories, via reverse ETL. “Then we’re a single source platform for you to compose all of your messages, do all your decisioning and deliver across all the channels that you want.” Iterable also has partners like The Trade Desk where data can be activated on the paid side.

Blank was keen to emphasize that she was not denigrating CDPs but rather observing their evolution. “If you have to pull your data out of somewhere that’s not a data warehouse, or from multiple places because you haven’t been able to centralize it all in a data warehouse, then [traditional] CDPs are still the answer.”

But the data has to be in Iterable at some point in order for it to be activated, right? In fact, Iterable does have data repository capabilities. “We have some customers for whom we are their CRM system. It sort of depends. You can store as much or as little data in our platform as you want.” And that depends, again, on the need to respond in real-time. “You don’t want to wait for data to move back-and-forth. As soon as somebody buys something, you don’t want them then to get a cart abandonment email.”

Dig deeper: Amperity launches composable ‘Lakehouse’ CDP

It’s okay to copy data

Braze, Iterable, MessageGears and others in this space may now be able to reach into data warehouses, but they do import or pull or copy data into their platforms. “Of course they do,” said David Raab, founder and CEO at the CDP Institute. “If you want to have real-time access or just want control of it because your system needs to work on it in a certain way to do its job of course you’re going to make a copy of it. You can’t not.”

There’s a lot of copying going on, said Raab, but: “That’s okay. It’s not bad in and of itself. It’s not like murdering kittens. It’s always bad to murder kittens, it’s not always bad to copy data. And you can quote me.”

In the next article in this series: What the composability revolution means for the martech stack itself.

Are you getting the most from your stack? Take our brief 2024 MarTech Replacement Survey

The post What the composability revolution means for customer engagement appeared first on MarTech.

What opportunities are other SEO professionals taking advantage of? Did other SEO professionals struggle with the same things you did this year?

Our fourth annual State of SEO Report is packed with valuable insights, including the most pressing challenges, emerging trends, and actionable strategies SEO practitioners like you have faced over the last year and what they see on the horizon.

Find out how top search teams are tackling challenges. Download the full report today.

Top Challenges In SEO: From Content To Algorithm Changes

In 2023, 13.8% of SEO pros said content creation was the top challenge for SEO professionals. However, in 2024, 22.2% (up from 8.6% in 2023) of all SEO practitioners surveyed revealed that algorithm changes have become the primary concern.

In fact, 30.2% of those we asked pointed to core and general algorithm updates as the main source of traffic instability over the last 12 months. This finding is in stark contrast to 2023,  where 55.9% of SEO pros felt algorithm updates helped their efforts at least a little.

Why?

Simply put, creating the most helpful and expert content no longer guarantees a top spot in the SERPs.

To complicate matters, Google’s algorithms are constantly evolving, making it crucial to adapt and stay updated.

Budget Constraints: A Major Barrier To Success

Our survey revealed that budget limitations (cited by 19.4%) are the number one barrier to SEO success and the primary reason clients leave (by 41.0% of SEO professionals surveyed.)

With everyone feeling the financial squeeze, how can you gain an edge?

Forget gaming the SERPs. Focus on creating content that genuinely serves your ideal customer.
Collaborate with your marketing team to distribute this content on platforms where your audience is most active. Remember, Google’s rules may change, but the need for high-quality, valuable content that genuinely serves a need remains constant.
Prove your return on investment (ROI). Track customer journeys and identify where you are gaining conversions. If you’re not seeing success, make a plan and create a proposal to improve your strategies.

Learn how to overcome budget barriers with even more insights in the full report.

Key Insights From The State Of SEO Survey

SEO Industry Changes:

AI is predicted to drive the most significant changes in the SEO industry according to 29.0% of those we surveyed.
16.6% believe Google updates will continue to be a major factor.

Performance Disruptions:

36.3% of State of SEO respondents believe generative AI in search platforms and AI-generated content are major disruptors going forward into the future.

Essential SEO Metrics: Adapting To Fluctuations

As you explore the data in the report, you’ll find that 20.0% of State of SEO 2025 respondents indicated that keyword rankings and organic pageviews (11.7%) are the top tracked SEO metrics.

However, when these metrics fluctuate due to uncontrollable factors, it’s essential to build business value into your tracking.

Focus on the quality of your traffic and prioritize efforts that bring in high-quality users.

Skills In Demand: Navigating A Changing SEO Landscape

The most challenging skills to find in SEO professionals are technical SEO (18.9%) and data analysis (14.8%).

Meanwhile, 18.2% of respondents indicated that the most desired skills in candidates are soft skills and 15.7% said the ability to build and execute SEO strategies.

Want to grow as an SEO professional?

Develop rare and desirable skills.

SEO is increasingly integrated with other marketing disciplines, so cultivating exemplary collaborative skills and learning the languages of other fields will make you highly valuable.

Other Important Findings

69.8% of SEO professionals found SERP competition increased over the last 12 months.
Only 13.2% of respondents felt zero click searches will cause significant shifts in the SEO industry.
50.0% of SEO professionals reported client turnover remained steady throughout 2024.

The State of SEO 2025 Report is your go-to resource for understanding and mastering the current SEO landscape.

Download your copy today to gain a deeper understanding of the challenges, opportunities, and insights that will shape SEO in the coming year.

Stay informed, stay ahead, and make 2025 your best year in SEO yet!

Let’s start with the basics.

The term “operational maturity” may be relatively new to some marketers, but the concept is well established. It ranks how effectively an organization executes and manages the way it does business, from internal strategies, to resources, to the structures that deliver products or services.

The essentials of operational maturity involve management practices, process improvement, technology and how it’s used, and staff capabilities, including existing skill sets, training opportunities, and identifying personnel or skill gaps. 

To achieve and accelerate operational maturity, operational metrics come into play. These are quantitative evaluations that allow organizations to accurately follow the steps made toward specific objectives. They also provide perspectives on achievements within the organization at macro and micro levels. These metrics eliminate guesswork because they provide an informed view of current state and past performance, enabling organizations to make solid decisions. 

The goal for organizations, then, is to cultivate a sustained, proactive and informed process for gathering and using operational data — operational metrics maturity — to achieve optimal performance and results.

Understanding the spectrum of operational maturity

The first thing to understand is that one organization’s operational maturity is not going to be the same as another’s. Size of department, tenure of team, access to technology and budget are just some of the factors that can influence maturity.

Achieving operational maturity within a marketing department of 50 associates with a $20 million budget will look completely different than a four person department with a $1 million budget. Although it’s every marketing leader’s goal to reach optimal operational maturity, it’s imperative to realize that falling short of that does not mean you’re failing.

Begin by evaluating your strategic objectives through the lens of data, considering the following questions:

1. What type of data does your organization gather? For example:

Strategic performance measures.

Process performance measures.

In-market performance measures.

Effectiveness/performance of assets.

Time tracking.

Customer interaction data

2. How is the data gathered?

3. Do you regularly take action on this data?

4. How frequently are you able to access updated data?

5. Do you have a data visualization and reporting strategy for performance metrics?

6. Does your team have access to customer sentiment data that captures the emotions, opinions, attitudes and overall sentiment of customers toward a product, service or brand?

7. What is your typical planning horizon for marketing programs/campaigns?

8. Are your technology tools integrated?

Discovering your KPIs

You’ve determined your strategic direction — now what? The next step is to set up new key performance indicators or reevaluate your existing performance indicators. Consider these categories of performance indicators as you decide what measures matter most: 

Strategic performance indicators show where the organization is achieving outcomes. 

Operational performance indicators show inputs, process and outputs. 

In-market performance indicators outline how the tactics you’ve used have performed. 

This isn’t an exhaustive list, and there are other metrics that will contribute to the ways you can monitor your organization’s progress toward meeting strategic objectives. Based on what your organization’s objectives are, you can customize your measurement categories and track the metrics accordingly.

Defining ‘optimal performance and results’

With thousands of metrics and KPIs that can be analyzed within a marketing department it can be very challenging for leaders to determine which ones to focus on. As a revenue enablement engine, it’s critical to align marketing KPIs with overall strategic firm initiatives. This is the path to follow to achieve your company’s objectives and ensure you’re fulfilling your mission and value proposition.

A company goal to grow revenue by 10% might result in different marketing KPIs than a company goal to improve Net Promoter Score (NPS) by 5%.

Less is more

When choosing which KPIs to focus on, remember that less is more. Identify the metrics that move the needle and directly influence your strategic goal. For instance, when analyzing content marketing data, you might need to look at page views, unique visitors, time on page, scroll depth, backlinks, bounce rate, keyword rankings, click-thru rate, conversion rate, pages per session, etc.

Avoid paralysis by analysis by choosing the top two “needle-moving” metrics out of the laundry list of dozens of metrics. This will lead to more actionable data and provide clearer insights for immediate action.

Dig deeper: Mastering data-driven decision-making in the strategy phase

Your secret weapon: Innovation and creativity metrics

Innovation and creativity metrics are crucial in a marketing organization as they help assess and drive the effectiveness, impact and originality of marketing efforts. They are essential for enhancing customer engagement, driving competitive advantage and improving marketing effectiveness. Consider selecting one or two metrics from the following list:

Number of new ideas generated.

Number of new ideas implemented.

Innovation rate.

Time to market for new ideas.

By systematically tracking and analyzing these metrics, the marketing organization can better understand the impact of its creative efforts, identify successful strategies, and continually enhance its approach to innovation. This leads to more effective marketing campaigns, stronger brand differentiation, and ultimately, improved business performance.

Moving up and next steps

As you make the shift toward moving up with operational maturity, prioritize using data as a starting point.

As you gather data that informs where your organization stands currently, you can evaluate your KPIs and related performance measures. From there, you can begin to establish targeted goals, making sure your processes harmonize with your objectives. As you implement a structure for reviewing and evaluating performance on a regular basis, you can spark creativity and ongoing improvements.

Are you getting the most from your stack? Take our brief 2024 MarTech Replacement Survey

The post Moving up with marketing operational maturity appeared first on MarTech.

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4 years after the DOJ lawsuit against Google started, Judge Amit Mehta declared Google guilty of monopolizing online search and advertising markets. The most successful startup in history is officially an illegal monopoly.

The ruling itself is big, but the fat question in the room is what consequences follow and whether there is an impact on SEO.

I can’t look into the future, but I can run through scenarios. There is a good chance it will affect SEO and the open web.

Before we dive in, remember:

I’m not a lawyer or legal expert.
I solely rely on documents and insights from the court case for my opinion.
When I refer to “the document”, I mean Judge Mehta’s opinion memorandum.1

Scenarios

Scenario planning is the art and science of envisioning multiple futures.

Step one is framing the key question: What might the remedies (consequences) of the lawsuit against Google be, and what potential consequences could result for SEO?

Step two is identifying the driving forces affecting the key question:

Legal:

Judge Mehta concludes that Google is an illegal search monopoly, not an advertising monopoly. This is important.
The defining precedent lawsuit against Microsoft in the 90s didn’t lead to a break-up of the company but the opening of APIs, sharing of key information and a change in business practices.

Economic:

Google faces competition in advertising from Amazon, TikTok and Meta.
Google has superior market share in search, browsers, mobile OS and other markets.
Exclusivity and revenue share agreements between Google, Apple, Samsung, Mozilla and other partners delivered massive traffic to Google and profits to partners.

Technological:

Apple agreed not to innovate in search, spotlight and device search in return for revenue share.
Large Language Models are in the process of changing how search works and the dynamics between searchers, search engines and content providers.

Social: Younger generations use TikTok to search and social networks to get news and other information.
Political:

The sentiment of “big tech” has turned largely negative.
After almost two decades of no anti-competitive action against tech companies, the Google lawsuit could start a wave of tech regulation.

Step three is defining scenarios based on the key question and driving forces. I see 3 possible scenarios:

Scenario 1: Google must end its exclusivity deals immediately. Apple needs to let users choose a default search engine when setting up their devices. Google could get hefty fines for every year they keep the contract with Apple going.

Scenario 2: Google gets broken up. Alphabet must spin off assets that prevent it from gaining and holding more power in search and keep other players from entering the market.

YouTube is the 2nd largest search engine (Google is the largest text search engine, according to the judge). Running both at the same time creates too much power for one company to own.
Chrome and Android – maybe Gmail – need to be divested because they habituate users to choose Google and provide critical data about user behavior. A good example for the “damage” or habituation is Neeva, which failed because it couldn’t convince users to change their habit of using Google, according to founder Sridhar Ramaswamy.
Alphabet can keep Maps because there is competition from Apple.

Scenario 3: Google must share data like click behavior with the open market so everyone can train search engines on it.

Scenarios two and three are messy and could potentially harm consumers (privacy). Scenario 1 is the most likely to happen. To me, the argument “If Google is the best search engine, why does it need to pay to be the default on devices?” checks out.

Polygamy

Let’s look at the consequences for Google, Apple, and the web under the lens of scenario 1: Apple needs to end its monogamous relationship with Google and let users choose which search engine they want as default when setting up their phones.

1/ Consequence For Google

Apple’s impact on Google Search is massive. The court documents reveal that 28% of Google searches (US) come from Safari and makeup 56% of search volume. Consider that Apple sees 10 billion searches per week across all of its devices, with 8 billion happening on Safari and 2 billion from Siri and Spotlight.

“Google receives only 7.6% of all queries on Apple devices through user-downloaded Chrome” and “10% of its searches on Apple devices through the Google Search App (GSA).” Google would take a big hit without the exclusive agreement with Apple.

If Apple lets users choose a search engine, 30% of searches from iOS and 70% from MacOS could go to non-Google search engines: “In 2020, Google estimated that if it lost the Safari default placement, it would claw back more search volume on desktop than on mobile.” Apparently, users are less inclined to change their default search engine on mobile devices.

Google would take a big hit but survive because its brand is so strong that even worse search results wouldn’t scare users away. From the document:

In 2020, Google conducted a quality degradation study, which showed that it would not lose search revenue if were to significantly reduce the quality of its search product. Just as the power to raise price “when it is desired to do so” is proof of monopoly power, so too is the ability to degrade product quality without concern of losing consumers […]. The fact that Google makes product changes without concern that its users might go elsewhere is something only a firm with monopoly power could do.

Most of you had some feelings about this test when I brought it up on Twitter.

2/ Consequence For Apple

Apple wouldn’t be able to make another exclusive deal. I doubt that the court would forbid only Google to make distribution agreements.

Even if Apple could partner with someone else, they don’t want to: Eddy Cue, Apple’s senior vice president of Services, said publicly in court, “There’s no price that Microsoft could ever offer“ to replace Google. “They offered to give us Bing for free. They could give us the whole company.” Woof.

But Apple’s bottom line would certainly take a hit. In the short term, Apple would miss about $20 billion from Google, which makes up 11.5% of its $173 billion profits (trailing the last 12 months in Q1 ‘24). In the long term, the losses would amount to $12 billion over 5 years:

Internal Apple assessment from 2018, which concluded that, even assuming that Apple would retain 80% of queries should it launch a GSE, it would lose over $12 billion in revenue during the first five years following a potential separation from Google.

Mind you, not only Apple’s bottom line would take a hit, but also Google’s other distribution partners. Mozilla, for example, gets over 80% of its revenue from Google.2 Without the revenue share, it’s likely the company wouldn’t survive. Bing should buy Mozilla to keep the company alive and slightly balance Google’s power with Chrome.

3/ Consequence For The web

The web could be the big winner from a separation of Google’s distribution agreements. More traffic to other search engines could result in a broader distribution of web traffic. Here is my thought process:

Search is a zero-sum game that follows Zipf’s law in click distribution: the first result gets a lot more clicks than the second, which gets more than the third and so on.
In theory, you can get near-infinite reach on social networks because they customize the feed for audiences. On Google, the feed is not customized, meaning there are only so many results for a keyword.
If more users would use other search engines on Apple devices, those non-Google search engines get more traffic, which they could pass on to the web.
Assuming not every search engine would rank the same site at the top (otherwise, what’s the point?), the available amount of traffic for websites would expand because there are now more search results across several search engines that websites could get traffic from.

The big question is, “How many users would choose search engines that are not google if given a choice?” Google estimated in 2020 that it would lose $28.2 – $32.7 billion in net revenue (~$30 billion to keep the math simple) and over double that in gross revenue from losing 30% of iOS searches and 70% of MacOS.

Net revenue is the amount of money from selling goods or services minus discounts, returns, or deductions. Since we don’t have that number, we have to use total revenues as a ceiling because we know that net revenue has to be lower than revenue.

In 2020, Google’s total revenue was $182.5 billion, meaning~$30 billion would be 16.5% of total revenue. The actual number is likely higher.

Other search engines would likely catch some of Google’s lost revenue. A study by DuckDuckGo from 2019 3 found that mobile market share of non-Google search engines would increase by 300%-800% if users could choose a default.

The next logical question is “Who would get the search traffic Google loses?” Bing and DuckDuckGo are the obvious ones, but what about Perplexity and OpenAI? As I wrote in Search GPT:

OpenAI might bet on regulators breaking up Google’s exclusive search engine deal with Apple and hope to become part of a search engine choice set on Apple devices.

At the time of writing, I thought the likelihood of OpenAI intentionally launching Search GPT to catch some of the Apple traffic is small. I don’t think that anymore.

If Open AI got just 10% of the $30b in revenue Google would lose, it could make up over half of the $5b in annual expenses it runs on now. And all that without having to build much more functionality. Good timing.

According to Judge Mehta, Chat GPT is not considered a search engine: “AI cannot replace the fundamental building blocks of search, including web crawling, indexing, and ranking.”

I don’t agree, for what it’s worth. Most LLMs ground answers in search results. From What Google I/O 2023 reveals about the future of SEO:

Most search engines use a tech called Retrieval Augmented Generation, which cross-references AI answers from LLMs (large language models) with classic search results to decrease hallucination.

2nd-Order Effects

I want to take my scenarios one step further to uncover 2nd-order effects:

First, Would only Apple be forced to let users choose a default search engine when setting up their device or could Android as well? Mobile operating systems could be seen as a market bottleneck to search traffic.

A blanket ruling for all mobile OSs could mean that Google has to let users choose and potentially lose some of the advantages of owning Android.

Second, if Google were forced to cut all distribution agreements, it would have ~$25b to spend. What would they do with the money? Would it simply compensate for the ~$30 billion it would lose by taking a massive hit in Apple search traffic?

Third, if Apple wasn’t contractually obligated to not innovate in Search across Spotlight, Safari, and Siri, would it build its own search engine?

It might be better off building what comes after search and/or charge to use LLMs. The court documents reveal that Apple estimated a cost of at least $6 billion per year to build a general search engine.

Having a website that doesn’t convert is a little like having a bucket with a hole in it. Do you keep filling it up while the water’s pouring out — or do you fix the hole then add water? In other words, do you channel your budget into attracting people who are “pouring” through without taking action, or do you fine-tune your website so it’s appealing enough for them to stick around?

Our recommendation? Optimize the conversion rate of your website, before you spend on increasing your traffic to it.

Here’s a web design statistic to bear in mind: you have 50 milliseconds to make a good first impression. If your site’s too slow, or unattractive, or the wording isn’t clear, they’ll bounce faster than you can say “leaky bucket”. Which is a shame, because you’ve put lots of effort into designing a beautiful product page and About Us, and people just aren’t getting to see it.

As a digital web design and conversion agency in Melbourne, Australia, we’ve been helping our customers optimize their websites for over 10 years, but it wasn’t until mid-2019 that we decided to turn the tables and take a look at our own site.

As it turned out, we had a bit of a leaky bucket situation of our own: while our traffic was good and conversions were okay, there was definitely room for improvement.

In this article, I’m going to talk a little more about conversions: what they are, why they matter, and how they help your business. I’ll then share how I made lots of little tweaks that cumulatively led to my business attracting a higher tier of customers, more inquiries, plus over $780,000 worth of new sales opportunities within the first 26 weeks of making some of those changes. Let’s get into it!

What is conversion?

Your conversion rate is a figure that represents the percentage of visitors who come to your site and take the desired action, e.g. subscribing to your newsletter, booking a demo, purchasing a product, and so on.

Conversions come in all shapes and sizes, depending on what your website does. If you sell a product, making a sale would be your primary goal (aka a macro-conversion). If you run, say, a tour company or media outlet, then subscribing or booking a consultation might be your primary goal.

If your visitor isn’t quite ready to make a purchase or book a consultation, they might take an intermediary step — like signing up to your free newsletter, or following you on social media. This is what’s known as a micro-conversion: a little step that leads towards (hopefully) a bigger one.

A quick recap

A conversion can apply to any number of actions — from making a purchase, to following on social media.

Macro-conversions are those we usually associate with sales: a phone call, an email, or a trip to the checkout. These happen when the customer has done their research and is ready to leap in with a purchase. If you picture the classic conversion funnel, they’re already at the bottom.

Micro-conversions, on the other hand, are small steps that lead toward a sale. They’re not the ultimate win, but they’re a step in the right direction.

Most sites and apps have multiple conversion goals, each with its own conversion rate.

Micro-conversions vs. macro-conversions: which is better?

The short answer? Both. Ideally, you want micro- and macro-conversions to be happening all the time so you have a continual flow of customers working their way through your sales funnel. If you have neither, then your website is behaving like a leaky bucket.

Here are two common issues that seem like good things, but ultimately lead to problems:

High web traffic (good thing) but no micro- or macro-conversions (bad thing — leaky bucket alert)

High web traffic (good thing) plenty of micro-conversions (good thing), but no macro conversions (bad thing)

A lot of businesses spend heaps of money making sure their employees work efficiently, but less of the budget goes into what is actually one of your best marketing tools: your website.

Spending money on marketing will always be a good thing. Getting customers to your site means more eyes on your business — but when your website doesn’t convert visitors into sales, that’s when you’re wasting your marketing dollars. When it comes to conversion rate statistics, one of the biggest eye-openers I read was this: the average user’s attention span has dropped from 12 to a mere 7 seconds. That’s how long you’ve got to impress before they bail — so you’d better make sure your website is fast, clear, and attractive.

Our problem

Our phone wasn’t ringing as much as we’d have liked, despite spending plenty of dollars on SEO and Adwords. We looked into our analytics and realized traffic wasn’t an issue: a decent number of people were visiting our site, but too few were taking action — i.e. inquiring. Here’s where some of our issues lay:

Our site wasn’t as fast as it could have been (anything with a load time of two seconds or over is considered slow. Ours was hovering around 5-6, and that was having a negative impact on conversions).

Our CTA conversions were low (people weren’t clicking — or they were dropping off because the CTA wasn’t where it needed to be).

We were relying on guesswork for some of our design decisions — which meant we had no way of measuring what worked, and what didn’t.

In general, things were good but not great. Or in other words, there was room for improvement.

What we did to fix it

Improving your site’s conversions isn’t a one-size-fits all thing — which means what works for one person might not work for you. It’s a gradual journey of trying different things out and building up successes over time. We knew this having worked on hundreds of client websites over the years, so we went into our own redesign with this in mind. Here are some of the steps we took that had an impact.

We decided to improve our site

First of all, we decided to fix our company website. This sounds like an obvious one, but how many times have you thought “I’ll do this really important thing”, then never gotten round to it. Or rushed ahead in excitement, made a few tweaks yourself, then let your efforts grind to a halt because other things took precedence?

This is an all-too-common problem when you run a business and things are just… okay. Often there’s no real drive to fix things and we fall back into doing what seems more pressing: selling, talking to customers, and running the business.

Deciding you want to improve your site’s conversions starts with a decision that involves you and everyone else in the company, and that’s what we did. We got the design and analytics experts involved. We invested time and money into the project, which made it feel substantial. We even made EDMs to announce the site launch (like the one below) to let everyone know what we’d been up to. In short, we made it feel like an event.

We got to know our users

There are many different types of user: some are ready to buy, some are just doing some window shopping. Knowing what type of person visits your site will help you create something that caters to their needs.

We looked at our analytics data and discovered visitors to our site were a bit of both, but tended to be more ready to buy than not. This meant we needed to focus on getting macro-conversions — in other words, make our site geared towards sales — while not overlooking the visitors doing some initial research. For those users, we implemented a blog as a way to improve our SEO, educate leads, and build up our reputation.

User insight can also help you shape the feel of your site. We discovered that the marketing managers we were targeting at the time were predominantly women, and that certain images and colours resonated better among that specific demographic. We didn’t go for the (obvious pictures of the team or our offices), instead relying on data and the psychology of attraction to delve into the mind of the users.

We improved site speed

Sending visitors to good sites with bad speeds erodes trust and sends them running. Multiple studies show that site speed matters when it comes to conversion rates. It’s one of the top SEO ranking factors, and a big factor when it comes to user experience: pages that load in under a second convert around 2.5 times higher than pages taking five seconds or more.

We built our website for speed. Moz has a great guide on page speed best practices, and from that list, we did the following things:

We optimized images.

We managed our own caching.

We compressed our files.

We improved page load times (Moz has another great article about how to speed up time to first Byte). A good web page load time is considered to be anything under two seconds — which we achieved.

In addition, we also customized our own hosting to make our site faster.

We introduced more tracking

As well as making our site faster, we introduced a lot more tracking. That allowed us to refine our content, our messaging, the structure of the site, and so on, which continually adds to the conversion.

We used Google Optimize to run A/B tests across a variety of things to understand how people interacted with our site. Here are some of the tweaks we made that had a positive impact:

Social proofing can be a really effective tool if used correctly, so we added some stats to our landing page copy.

Google Analytics showed us visitors were reaching certain pages and not knowing quite where to go next, so we added CTAs that used active language. So instead of saying, “If you’d like to find out more, let us know”, we said “Get a quote”, along with two options for getting in touch.

We spent an entire month testing four words on our homepage. We actually failed (the words didn’t have a positive impact), but it allowed us to test our hypothesis. We did small tweaks and tests like this all over the site.

We used heat mapping to see where visitors were clicking, and which words caught their eye. With this data, we knew where to place buttons and key messaging.

We looked into user behavior

Understanding your visitor is always a good place to start, and there are two ways to go about this:

Quantitative research (numbers and data-based research)

Qualitative research (people-based research)

We did a mixture of both.

For the quantitative research, we used Google Analytics, Google Optimize, and Hotjar to get an in-depth, numbers-based look at how people were interacting with our site.

Heat-mapping software shows how people click and scroll through a page. Hot spots indicate places where people naturally gravitate.

We could see where people were coming into our site (which pages they landed on first), what channel brought them there, which features they were engaging with, how long they spent on each page, and where they abandoned the site.

For the qualitative research, we focused primarily on interviews.

We asked customers what they thought about certain CTAs (whether they worked or not, and why).

We made messaging changes and asked customers and suppliers whether they made sense.

We invited a psychologist into the office and asked them what they thought about our design.

What we learned

We found out our design was good, but our CTAs weren’t quite hitting the mark. For example, one CTA only gave the reader the option to call. But, as one of our interviewees pointed out, not everyone likes using the phone — so we added an email address.

We were intentional but ad hoc about our asking process. This worked for us — but you might want to be a bit more formal about your approach (Moz has a great practical guide to conducting qualitative usability testing if you’re after a more in-depth look).

The results

Combined, these minor tweaks had a mighty impact. There’s a big difference in how our site looks and how we rank. The bottom line: after the rebuild, we got more work, and the business did much better. Here are some of the gains we’ve seen over the past two years.

Our dwell time increased by 73%, going from 1.5 to 2.5 minutes.

We received four-times more inquiries by email and phone.

Our organic traffic increased despite us not channeling more funds into PPC ads.

We also realized our clients were bigger, paying on average 2.5 times more for jobs: in mid-2018, our average cost-per-job was $8,000. Now, it’s $17,000.

Our client brand names became more recognizable, household names — including two of Australia’s top universities, and a well-known manufacturing/production brand.

Within the first 26 weeks, we got over $770,000 worth of sales opportunities (if we’d accepted every job that came our way).

Our prospects began asking to work with us, rather than us having to persuade them to give us the business.

We started getting higher quality inquiries — warmer leads who had more intent to buy.

Some practical changes you can make to improve your website conversions

When it comes to website changes, it’s important to remember that what works for one person might not work for you.

We’ve used site speed boosters for our clients before and gotten really great results. At other times, we’ve tried it and it just broke the website. This is why it’s so important to measure as you go, use what works for your individual needs, and remember that “failures” are just as helpful as wins.

Below are some tips — some of which we did on our own site, others are things we’ve done for others.

Tip number 1: Get stronger hosting that allows you to consider things like CDNs. Hiring a developer should always be your top choice, but it’s not always possible to have that luxury. In this instance, we recommend considering CDNs, and depending on the build of your site, paying for tools like NitroPack which can help with caching and compression for faster site speeds.

Tip number 2: Focus your time. Identify top landing pages with Moz Pro and channel your efforts in these places as a priority. Use the 80/20 principle and put your attention on the 20% that gets you 80% of your success.

Tip number 3: Run A/B tests using Google Optimize to test various hypotheses and ideas (Moz has a really handy guide for running split tests using Google). Don’t be afraid of the results — failures can help confirm that what you are currently doing right. You can also access some in-depth data about your site’s performance in Google Lighthouse.

Tip number 4: Trial various messages in Google Ads (as a way of testing targeted messaging). Google provides many keyword suggestions on trending words and phrases that are worth considering.

Tip number 5: Combine qualitative and quantitative research to get to know how your users interact with your site — and keep testing on an ongoing basis.

Tip number 6: Don’t get too hung up on charts going up, or figures turning orange: do what works for you. If adding a video to your homepage slows it down a little but has an overall positive effect on your conversion, then it’s worth the tradeoff.

Tip number 7: Prioritize the needs of your target customers and focus every build and design choice around them.

Recommended tools

Nitropack: speed up your site if you’ve not built it for speed from the beginning.

Google Optimize: run A/B tests

HotJar: see how people use your site via heat mapping and behaviour analytics.

Pingdom / GTMetrix: measure site speed (both is better if you want to make sure you meet everyone’s requirements).

Google Analytics: find drop-off points, track conversion, A/B test, set goals.

Qualaroo: poll your visitors while they are on your site with a popup window.

Google Consumer Surveys: create a survey, Google recruits the participants and provides results and analysis.

Moz Pro: Identify top landing pages when you connect this tool to your Google Analytics profile to create custom reports.

How to keep your conversion rates high

Treat your website like your car. Regular little tweaks to keep it purring, occasional deeper inspections to make sure there are no problems lurking just out of sight. Here’s what we do:

We look at Google Analytics monthly. It helps to understand what’s working, and what’s not.

We use goal tracking in GA to keep things moving in the right direction.

We use Pingdom’s free service to monitor the availability and response time of our site.

We regularly ask people what they think about the site and its messaging (keeping the qualitative research coming in).

Conclusion

Spending money on marketing is a good thing, but when you don’t have a good conversion rate, that’s when your website’s behaving like a leaky bucket. Your website is one of your strongest sales tools, so it really does pay to make sure it’s working at peak performance.

I’ve shared a few of my favorite tools and techniques, but above all, my one bit of advice is to consider your own requirements. You can improve your site speed if you remove all tags and keep it plain. But that’s not what you want: it’s finding the balance between creativity and performance, and that will always depend on what’s important.

For us as a design agency, we need a site that’s beautiful and creative. Yes, having a moving background on our homepage slows it down a little bit, but it improves our conversions overall.

The bottom line: Consider your unique users, and make sure your website is in line with the goals of whoever you’re speaking with.

We can do all we want to please Google, but when it comes to sales and leads, it means more to have a higher converting and more effective website. We did well in inquiries (actual phone calls and email leads) despite a rapid increase in site performance requirements from Google. This only comes down to one thing: having a site customer conversion framework that’s effective.

A study by the Data Provenance Initiative, a collective of independent and academic researchers dedicated to data transparency, reveals a mismatch between ChatGPT’s training data and its typical use cases.

The study, which analyzed 14,000 web domains, found that ChatGPT’s training data primarily consists of news articles, encyclopedias, and social media content.

However, the most common real-world applications of the tool involve creative writing, brainstorming, and seeking explanations.

As the study states,

“Whereas news websites comprise nearly 40% of all tokens… fewer than 1% of ChatGPT queries appear to be related to news or current affairs.”

Diving deeper into usage patterns, the researchers analyzed a dataset called WildChat, containing 1 million user conversations with ChatGPT. They found that over 30% of these conversations involve creative compositions such as fictional story writing or role-playing.

This mismatch suggests that ChatGPT’s performance may vary depending on the specific task and its alignment with the tool’s training data.

Marketers should know that ChatGPT might struggle to generate content based on current events, industry-specific knowledge, or niche topics.

Adapting To ChatGPT’s Strengths & Limitations

Knowing what ChatGPT is trained on can help you align prompts with the tool’s strengths and limitations.

This means you may need to add more context, specify the desired tone and style, and break down complex tasks into smaller steps.

For AI-assisted content creation, leverage ChatGPT for tasks like ideating social posts or email subject lines. Reserve human expertise for complex, industry-specific content.

Use effective prompt engineering to optimize output. Always fact-check and edit AI-generated content to ensure quality.

AI tools can accelerate ideation and content creation but don’t expect perfection. Human review is essential for accuracy, brand consistency, and channel-specific copy.

Looking Ahead

This research highlights the need for marketers to be careful with AI tools like ChatGPT.

Understand what AI can and can’t do and combine it with human expertise. This combo can boost content strategies and help hit KPIs.

As the field evolves, we might see AI tools better tailored to real-world usage patterns.

Until then, remember that it assists but doesn’t replace expert judgment.

Featured Image: Emil Kazaryan/Shutterstock

With Google ruled a monopoly in the world of search, reactions from the search advertising world continue to pour in.

Here’s a selection of comments grouped by topic.

Google’s appeal and the future legal battle

Julie Bacchini, president and founder of the agency Neptune Moon, underscores that while the court ruling declaring Google a monopoly is significant, the real impact will emerge during the remedy phase and Google’s inevitable appeal.

“Google will appeal (and they said they will in their comically bad statement about the ruling) and that will be a slow process. But it is the remedy phase that will ultimately decide what this ruling will actually mean in practical terms.”

“Also, this case was as much about setting the table for the Google advertising case that goes to trial in September. This case got A LOT on the record that will likely be used in the upcoming trial.”

“Monopolistic behaviours have gone essentially unchecked in a lot of industries since the Reagan administration and maybe that hasn’t been such a good idea. These cases are starting to try to act on that. The App store cases run along the same lines.

“If the Sherman antitrust act had been enforced over even the last 25 years, the business landscape would look very different. It wasn’t and we have what we have.”

“To be fair too, Google is like any other publicly traded company today – their primary goal is to make sure the meet analysts expectations every quarter. That’s it. And I think we often forget that. Their decisions all come back to that core. And what that makes them do can make it feel like they are a big, kinda evil corporation.”

“There are a lot of openings for appeal issues, I agree. But I really think the testimony they got and internal Google documents are going to be a tough hill for Google to climb in the Ads case. So I can’t help but wonder if this case was more about making that one stick?”

Oscar Ford, CEO at Google Ads agency Anuncia, finds the ruling’s development fascinating and anticipates a prolonged legal battle due to Google’s appeal.:

“Google are appealing the ruling, so this will roll on for a while longer. I’m not sure what the outcome is, but to break up an existing monopoly the only option surely is to split it into separate companies?”

“Google’s response to the ruling is amusing but they have a point – they have made the best search engine and nothing else has come close for decades.”

Chris Ridley, head of paid media at integrated digital agency Evoluted, predicts a resolution similar to that of Google shopping in 2017:

“What I do see happening is an echo of what we saw happen to Google Shopping in 2017. A similar EU ruling regarding Google’s Shopping that led to Google opening up their Shopping space to third-party Comparison Shopping Services (CSS), which were granted a 20% discount on cost-per-clicks (CPCs) to ensure they could fairly compete.”

“This could lead the way to Google introducing Comparison Text Advertising Services to the Google text ad market to dismantle Google’s monopoly on the text advertising market, which may also benefit from a similar discount on CPCs as a gesture of Google encouraging competition on their SERPs.”

Dig deeper: What the Google antitrust ruling could mean for advertisers

Market dynamics and Google’s competitors

Chris Lloyd, a freelance marketing consultant, points out that Google’s market share has been declining due to its inability to innovate:

“I think we are already seeing their decline, and it’s not due to regulatory rulings. Google has been losing market share for a couple of years now. Quite simply they can’t build and innovate and will continue to be outplayed by Perplexity, OpenAI, Meta, Apple.”

Sam Tomlinson, EVP and digital strategist at the agency Warschawski, criticizes the legal reasoning in the 286-page ruling, particularly the market definition, which he believes won’t hold up on appeal.

“The market definition was categorically insane to me – something I don’t think gets upheld on appeal”

“It isn’t like the winner today is always the winner tomorrow. Google even admitted that (and the court agreed) in this ruling, where they highlighted that Google has innovated massively, at great expense, despite having a ‘monopoly’”

“Every other company, hedge fund, investment bank and PE fund does the exact same thing — which is why this feels ridiculous. It isn’t good or bad, it’s just profit-driven, because profit is an existential imperative for any business”

Navah Hopkins, Brand evangelist for Optmyzr, is disappointed that the US failed to establish search advertising as a distinct market:

“I am disappointed in the US for not being able to make the case that search advertising is a market (I understand there’s another case in September, but the ruling makes it clear that information just wasn’t presented).”

“The fact that this case started in 2020 and that’s when PMax began to really take hold speaks to the diversification that was clearly top of mind for Google. As the ruling stated “search text ads are a monopoly” but search advertising was not. PMax gives Google the cover it needs to still have some search without running a foul of the search text ads monopoly rules.”

“That Microsoft was brought up as a serious competitor felt disingenuous. Though it is interesting to see how CPCs trended after each other (i.e. the market drove up costs not Google itself…which I’m skeptical about)”

Ethical and practical concerns

Sarah Stemen, a paid search specialist, reflects on her disillusionment with Google and doubts any significant penalties will arise:

“I need to stop gaslighting myself into thinking Google is great because they built my career. This is a capitalist driven company that lost sight of any values and it sucks.”

“I think we all remember Microsoft and I would like to think that’s the outcome but I don’t actually think any penalty of any significant difference will happen especially under our current administration and court system.”

Reid Thomas, a marketing strategist, observes that the US ruling aligns closely with the EU’s mandate & questions a meaningful mandate:

“Our point of views are all very US focused — isn’t this ruling very aligned with the EU ruling from a few years ago that mandated search engine choice?”

“I also think it’s quite disingenuous to target the distribution agreements with the ‘If Google is so great, why are they paying?’ and the answer is: because this is a competitive market, and others could pay, too.”

The diverse opinions highlight the complexity of the issue and the far-reaching implications of the ruling for the tech industry, digital advertising, and antitrust law. As the legal process continues and potential remedies are considered, many in the industry are watching closely to see how this decision might reshape the future of digital advertising.

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Google has revealed plans to expand the capabilities of its AI assistant Gemini, introducing a new feature called “Deep Research.” This announcement came via social media following the company’s recent ‘Made By Google’ event.

According to Google’s post, Gemini will soon be able to “do in-depth research for you and synthesize the info to give you a simple, comprehensive plan.”

Google says this feature will be launched “in the next few weeks,” along with other functionalities showcased at the event.

Everything you’ve seen today will launch in the next few weeks, but the vision for our assistant isn’t over. We’re building so Gemini can do in-depth research for you and synthesize the info to give you a simple, comprehensive plan. Stay tuned #MadeByGoogle pic.twitter.com/D10j2yUlJH

— Google (@Google) August 13, 2024

How Deep Research Works

The Deep Research tool is designed to assist users with complex tasks, such as gathering information from multiple sources and compiling comprehensive reports.

Google provided an example showing how the feature might help a restaurant owner research the process of adding a sidewalk café in Seattle.

In the example, Gemini outlines its approach to creating a guide that includes permit requirements, application steps, shelter specifications, timelines, costs, and case studies.

Gemini informs the user it will research web pages, analyze results, and create a full report.

Potential Applications & Limitations

Google describes the tool as being “designed to help you with making big decisions, navigating multiple sources, or getting started on a project you might not know about.”

However, Google hasn’t provided any sample reports or details about its data-sourcing methods.

This development could impact how users interact with search engines and process information.

Instead of manually sifting through multiple web pages, people might rely on Gemini to compile and synthesize information from various sources.

Unanswered Questions

Gemini’s full research capabilities and potential impact on search habits are unclear. Google’s keeping quiet on specifics, functionality, and rollout plans.

We’ll be watching to see how this research tool performs and monitoring potential ripple effects on the search ecosystem.

Featured Image: mundissima/Shutterstock