gringom

The martech industry seems to be constantly on the hunt for the next big thing, and understandably so. In an industry where we said goodbye to a handful of platforms and brands in 2018 (R.I.P. LittleThings, Go90s, Rocketfuel), the next big thing may be what keeps us all not only chugging along, but successful. For my big bet, I think the smart money is on an evolution of 2018’s darling, the customer data platform (CDP).

A 2018 survey by The Relevancy Group found more than 80 percent of firms had already engaged a CDP vendor or planned to. The Interactive Advertising Bureau (IAB) and Winterberry Group estimated U.S. marketers spent close to $5 billion on data management and integration products in 2018, further evidence of the market’s continued emergence.

However, leading analysts noted that 2018’s customer-data fever was limited in scope. CDPs, like data management platforms (DMPs) and demand side platforms (DSPs) before them, have a narrow focus on a specific subgroup. For CDPs, it’s brands’ existing customers. For DMPs and DSPs, it’s prospective customers, based on online intent data gathered from cookies. All of these platforms almost exclusively cater to consumer brands. I believe that in the maturing era of Big Data, there’s evidence of a new world order.

New class of data buyers and sellers

In martech’s latest epoch, consumer brands are not the only companies that curate, store, leverage and sell data. As such, they’re also not the sole purchasers of marketing technology. Publishers are just one recent example of a newer breed of data buyers and sellers coming to the table.

This new class of data buyers and sellers, already engrained in data commerce, include publishers, platforms and agency holding companies. They bring unique data challenges that CDPs, DMPs and DSPs weren’t built to solve. This new class curates data both online and offline. It also requires the ability to leverage and sell data that covers existing customers, active prospects and potential prospects yet unknown.

All of these needs require tools that offer visibility and insights into this data in ways we haven’t seen before. Data owners need technology to organize, visualize and package data sets at incredible speed and scale to activate within the martech ecosystem.

AI activation for large data sets

CDPs were bankrolled, in part, because of their ability to unify customer data and make it accessible to other systems, specifically helping brands target customers across channels and devices. Platforms, publishers and other data owners require different means of organizing and understanding the data they collect. Rather than collecting data in order to reach those users again, data owners have data that they can monetize or activate for clients, which requires an additional layer of analytics, beyond centralization and organization, in order to activate it.

The technology that we’ve already developed for the targeting use case can also serve the monetization archetype. Though it’s traditionally been used for targeting, artificial intelligence is a general activation tool for deriving insights and driving activation from large data sets, and therefore can serve both needs.

Holistic view of data management

The demand and technology exist. The timing couldn’t be better. The amount of data we create and money we spend to manage it continue to grow. But in order for our new class to embrace yet another tech stack component, three principles, scale, speed and control, must be present in the form this new platform takes.

Scale is an indelible component of marketing solutions in order to justify cost, and even more so in the automated programmatic age. Speed is integral because the longer technology takes to build, implement and start driving results, the lower the ROI. Finally, as data owners leverage new technology and data to monetize data sets, they’ll require increased visibility into data accuracy, coverage, security and more. This level of transparency shepherds an in-depth understanding of data governance practices, a requisite of an age where calls for transparency continue to crescendo in the aftermath of data-related scandals, GDPR and new stateside regulation.

The eras of Big Data, digital and single customer view have long been culminating in this new generation of holistic data management. We’ve been waiting for the technology with the capacity and range to activate this data. Now that it’s here, why should brands have all the fun? There is a new class of data owners, including publishers, platforms and agency holding companies, that can leverage this technology to bring new, unique data sets into the marketplace, which can drive incremental value across the entire ecosystem.

Opinions expressed in this article are those of the guest author and not necessarily Marketing Land. Staff authors are listed here.

About The Author

David Dowhan is founder and CEO of TruSignal, a predictive analytics and big data company. TruSignal is expert at using offline data and predictive score marketing to fuel digital campaigns, partnering with data providers, media companies, DSPs and digital audience hubs to help power their custom, people-based lookalikes, consumer insight dashboards, and bid-price optimization strategies.

Nothing forces you to keep a close eye on Google updates quite like having a wide variety of SEO projects and clients.

With clients in almost every industry, I’m forced to check early and often when changes appear in search to see how they’re playing out differently based on the industry (and even the search intent within each industry).

Moreover, I have to think ahead.

In 2018, most of the big changes came from Google’s search ranking algorithm updates, its growing emphasis on structured data, and tweaks in the Google search console.

But there’s also a shift in focus from what sites owners wanted to what users need.

The rollout of mobile-first indexing demonstrates Google’s response to the impact of technology on human behavior.

As people spend more time with their mobile devices, it’s only natural to pay more attention to content that’s optimized to be dynamic and mobile-friendly.

Google’s speakable markup typifies both the company’s plans for search and the AI-is-the-future mantra. The growing popularity of voice assistants and their newfound place in smart homes have certainly guided advances in how search engines operate.

However, as somebody who drives rankings for a wide variety of clients and personal projects, I’m still holding my breath as to whether voice search can drive any meaningful business metrics.

In 2019, content optimization will continue to matter. From structured data to on-page optimization, competition for ranking advantage may come down to which sites can meet Google updates standards.

For the SEO community, 2019 requires a better understanding of how people engage online in order to create meaningful content that positively impacts user experience and a site’s search engine visibility.

SEOs will need to double-down in understanding four key areas:

• Mobile
• Structured data
• Relevance
• Accessibility

Mobile matters

According to Pew Research Center, one in five American adults access the internet through their smartphone.

In the latest report by We Are Social, mobile phones account for 50% of the web traffic share by device globally.

The growth of the mobile industry has not been overlooked by Google, who rolled out the mobile-first indexing in the first quarter of 2018, after over a year and a half of experimentation.

This move shows that Google is increasingly using the mobile version of your page for its crawling, indexing, and ranking systems. While this update does not provide any ranking advantages per se, SEO in 2019 will certainly put greater emphasis on optimizing pages for mobile crawlers.

Sites that offer two versions of their content will continue to see a negative impact on their SERP (search engine results pages) performance if mobile renderings are amiss. For digital marketers, this means both mobile and desktop content should be equivalent.

As mobile web pages become Google’s primary search engine index, webmasters, SEO specialists, and digital marketers must ensure websites are well-coded and mobile-responsive. Checking out how your page’s content renders across various mobile devices is critical to identifying issues like speed and performance which could potentially affect your bounce rates.

Content optimization through structured data

The search engine results page, especially in terms of informational searches, is dominated by structured data and schema: snippets of information that help Google understand the content of your page rather than guess the data.

Structured data provides Google contextual information that helps in classifying your page and which, when done right, enhances the appearance of your site in search.

In 2019, the SEO community will continue to explore how to further optimize this feature, which is valuable for e-commerce pages and business web pages especially as schema options grow. According to Rebecca Gill of emagine, using expert profiles and structured data can convey to Google who you are, what you’re doing, and why your website should be on page one real estate.

Here are some types of information that can be added through structured data:

• Business name
• Contact details
• Aggregate rating
• Products and services
• Place or address

While structured data enables your site to be featured in Google’s knowledge graph, it’s not a guarantee. Google is stringent and rightfully so on how structured data is implemented.

Done right, it can do wonders to your SERP performance. But if the information provided is inaccurate, too broad, or badly formed, Google will identify your structured data as ineligible, which would negatively affect your rankings.

Research and relevance

RankBrain, Google’s machine-learning AI system introduced in 2015 reflects the evolution of how people look for content online.

Despite very little information from Google about how it works, we know that the technology is an important ranking signal, and it’s unique in its capacity to understand if users are satisfied with their search query results. This means that SEO in 2019 will continue to have a stronger emphasis on watching search intent.

What do users want? Information, resources, or products? Mapping keywords based on a buyer’s journey will be crucial this year.

In addition, RankBrain’s ability to process both single and long-tail keywords demands even more comprehensive keyword research and expanded awareness about your consumers.

Businesses will have to look for all the topics relevant to their industry, understand the search intent around the various topics, and make sure that they match a site’s content closely. Still, Google will continue to favor larger and more authoritative sites, so unless you’re running a page comparable in breadth and depth as Wikipedia or Forbes, the focus should be on niche relevant keywords.

In the meantime, consider updating site content. Since 2011’s Google Freshness update, dated content continues to significantly impact rankings in the SERP. Updating old posts, including its publishing data, will tell Google that sites are providing fresh content, especially those that are linked to higher authority sites.

It’s not about writing daily, weekly, or even monthly. It’s about making sure that your best content is always relevant based on the most recent information.

Last year saw links losing value and the trend will continue in 2019.

Relevance is the new “authority” when it comes to links.

A competitor analysis audit will be essential to determining just how many links, and what links, will work for your industry or niche.

Content and accessibility

If Google’s priority is user experience, then on-page optimization efforts are non-negotiable.

We’ve seen how keyword density is no longer as impactful as before, especially with structured data playing a bigger role in search. Content and writing style will also be influenced by semantic search with Google’s efforts to identify the contextual meaning of the query.

In 2019, expect content with more images, videos, and even music embed. Google looks at user satisfaction and rich media is one way to improve online engagement.

But even if your content is well-written, accessibility to your site can impact how you rank in SERP.

“As of the 2010 census, one in five Americans have a disability, and one in ten people have a disability that directly impacts their computer use. That’s 56.7 million people! This is a huge portion of our potential users, and we have an ethical duty to help all people who will use the technology we create.” – Fen Slattery, Accessibility Lead at Clique Studios.

Accessibility is about inclusion and when your website performs terribly for a group of people, it’s unlikely that it will hold any sort of rankings for a significant period of time.

Ongoing changes

Change is the only thing certain in the SEO industry. Google’s interest in AI technology is firmly anchored on how people look for information online, and the way they do so has changed over the years.

2019 is likely to see even lower organic CTR than in 2018 as Google continues to offer more and more options to keep users in search.

For the SEO industry, this means understanding how people think, and how people act. Digital marketers, website owners, and businesses need to be flexible, curious, and creative. They need to look for ways to gain trust and authority, two values that have not only remained important in an ever-changing SEO landscape but are now considered non-negotiable to getting on page one.

Related reading

Featured snippets are one of the main engines of economic growth today, with countless businesses and aspiring entrepreneurs relying upon them to get their message out to prospective clients.

If your SEO strategy is working well, you can expect to see results in about three months. Here are ten reasons why that might not be the case.

Writing good content isn’t enough. Here are 4 key factors to consider when creating effectively structured SEO content, and tools to use to meet each need.

Link reclamation is a simple but efficient tactic to turn unlinked brand mentions into links. Here’s when to reach out, who to contact, and what to say.

While marketers of all kinds are laboring over dozens of personas that make up their target audiences, the team at highly successful newsletter brand Morning Brew think they have found a better way.

Target one persona … just one.

“We picked a real human being, detailed out what this human does,” said Alex Lieberman, co-founder CEO of Morning Brew, “literally codified a persona and their behavior that we can reference in any point in time.”

That persona is a lot like Lieberman and co-founder and COO Austin Rief, who together started Morning Brew when they were both in college. It’s a young, high-earning professional, living in a coastal city who is highly aspirational, is tech-forward, is really passionate about business and likes watching Ted talks, said Lieberman.

“The core characteristic of the person is someone who is curious,” he said.

But can a single persona really encapsulate a daily newsletter audience that Morning Brew now counts above 1 million subscribers? Of course not, but Lieberman and Rief believe their creation is relatable enough to the entire universe of Morning Brew readers that its entire content strategy is tied to speaking that person’s language.

One voice to rule them

This week, Morning Brew launched the first in what it says will be a slate of specific industry-focused newsletters. On Tuesday, it rolled out a new daily email on emerging technology, which the founders say will focus on the business of AR and VR, blockchain, drones, robotics and other hot-tech topics. More topical newsletters are on the way, but Morning Brew wouldn’t say what those will be.

The new verticals will carry the same advertising model as Morning Brew’s original newsletter. No banner ads, just “Sponsored by” branding at the top and native advertising throughout that the founders recently told Forbes is bringing in about $200,000 in revenue a week. But even those ads are written in-house in the same voice as the rest of their newsletter.

Rief said the company has built out a detailed voice guide, and though its writing team is like any other, a diverse makeup of people with different styles and opinions on Oxford commas, all of them hew to the same voice.

When email works, it really works

Morning Brew sees a roughly 45 percent open rate, an enviable metric for any brand that has its own newsletters. Its voice and its focus on engaging the target persona play a big role.

Brands tend to overcomplicate email, said Rief. “If people think about it in a more simple fashion, you are creating an email because you believe that you can serve content to an audience that will be worth their time in reading,” he said.

Morning Brew’s goal is simple: Give them your undivided attention for five minutes before the start of the workday and they’ll give you great content.

“The content you create needs to be informed by who your audience is and 100 times better than anything else they are getting,” said Reif.

It’s that focus on shipping great content to inboxes that’s given the humble email newsletter a big boost.

“The cornerstone of an email relationship is trust,” wrote MarketingProfs founder Ann Handley just last week. “Subscribers opt in because they trust that you’ll deliver something of value. If you break that promise, they’ll unsubscribe. You cannot darken their doorstep ever again.”

Handley also touted the 1:1 connection brands get with email, something you don’t get on social media, for example.

“Everything about it (voice, visuals, vibe) is all you. And only you. Those who read your post on LinkedIn are on there interacting with LinkedIn. But when they read your words in your newsletter, they are interacting with you,” she wrote.

For what it’s worth, Morning Brew does include Facebook and Twitter share icons under individual sections in its newsletter, but Rief and Lieberman say those are for reader convenience and those interactions are not a metric they pay much attention to.

More tips from Morning Brew

Knowing the audience is key for Morning Brew, so one rule of thumb they hold is “respond to every inbound email.” Period.

Next, invest in good editorial talent. You can’t write a good newsletter without that.

Email deliverability is an issue for everyone, and Morning Brew has tools in its martech stack to help keep an eye on it. Their advice: Take a good look at the platforms that are out there.

Lastly, Morning Brew runs a referral program that gives readers gifts like stickers, mugs and t-shirts for forwarding their emails to friends. It’s highly successful, and the founders say word of mouth accounts for 40 percent of the company’s audience growth. But Lieberman cautions that referral programs only work when you’ve already built an engaged audience.

“It doesn’t matter if we gave the best rewards,” he said, “it all starts with content.”

About The Author

Henry Powderly is vice president of content for Third Door Media, publishers of Search Engine Land, Marketing Land and MarTech Today. With more than a decade in editorial leadership positions, he is responsible for content strategy and event programming for the organization.

Facebook constantly expands its advertising offerings by introducing new features to accommodate advertisers in their effort to make the most out of their platform.

Whether it is creating ads that tell the brand’s story with carousel ads, immersing users in their brand’s world with Canvas or Stories ads, or cutting down the time to create creatives while at the same time tailoring the ad to the ad viewer with dynamic ads, Facebook wants to ensure that it gives advertisers the tools to drive results across its platforms.

In a world where personalization is vital to make experiences more engaging, Facebook Ads are no different. Advertisers need to customize their offering, ad copy and ad creative to ensure the best experience possible. A great experience tailored to the user’s needs hopefully equals higher engagement — or, in terms of Facebook advertising, conversions.

Tailoring your ads to your user, the manual and tedious way

One way you could promote your products to potential customers before dynamic ads were available was to create a single image or carousel image ad and guide people to specific product pages on your website.

But if you were a business with a large inventory to promote, you needed to create as many ads (creative and links to product pages) as your products. And if you wanted to tailor your ads based on where they are on the marketing funnel or the actions they performed (e.g. they viewed or added to the cart a particular product), then things could become really complicated really fast.

Dynamic ads (or dynamic product ads as they are formerly known) allow advertisers to not only automate this tedious process but also create highly personalized ads that promote products with up to date information.

Dynamic ads: The definition and requirements

Facebook dynamic ads help advertisers display the right product to the right people at the right time. Here is how this happens:

A potential customer visits your site and browses through your products. Facebook, through the Pixel, will pair products and users and ‘take notes’ on how they interacted with them. When you create a dynamic ad you can include everyone that exhibited the same behavior, bring them back to your website by displaying the very same products each user engaged with using accurate and updated information available in the product feed. This how dynamic ads can help your visitors to complete the transaction.

To be able to run dynamic ads you need to have the following in place:

1. A business manager: This serves as a big folder where all of your assets (Facebook page, Ad account, Pixel, and Dynamic ads-related assets mentioned below) will be organized.
2. Product feed(s): This is the file where all your products and product information will be stored.
3. Product catalog(s): This is where your product feed is hosted.

How to get started with dynamic ads

Dynamic ads are a powerful offering that can be used across a variety of verticals. Currently, dynamic Facebook ads are available to businesses that sell products (ecommerce), hotel, flight, destination, and home listings.

Your business type will dictate the events (standard or custom) you need to implement. Here are the typical standard events needed for ecommerce businesses.

Source: Facebook

You can add as many events you need to align them to your funnel. Once you have the events implemented, you need to create the feed.

1. Creating a product feed

Facebook requires Facebook advertisers to list all of their products in a file following a specific format. This file is the product feed that will feed the products to your catalog. Depending on your ecommerce platform, you may need to create a data feed using a .csv, .tsv, or .xml file or a third-party feed provider to facilitate this process.

Download the data feed template and fill in the information. Here is what your feed needs to include:

Source: Facebook 

Be sure to test your feed with Feed Debugger to ensure that your feed is set up correctly and fix any issues that may arise.

2. Creating a product catalog

Now, we can create a product catalog. Visit Catalog Manager in your business manager and choose the type that best describes your needs.

Name your product catalog and click on the ‘Add Products’ button to upload your product feed.

Next, choose how you will upload the data (schedule or a one-time upload) and insert the URL of your product feed.

When done, go to the ‘Diagnostics’ tab to check for any issues, if you have done so with Feed Debugger. Now, that your product catalog and product feed are all set up, we can move to the exciting part; creating the dynamic ads campaign.

3. Setting up a dynamic ads campaign

To create a dynamic ads campaign, head over to Ads Manager and choose ‘Catalog sales’ as the campaign’s objective. 

At the ad set level, create a product set. The product set is a subset of your product catalog, and it contains the products that will be displayed through this campaign.

Next, in the audience section, choose ‘Define a broad audience and let Facebook optimize who sees your products’ so you can reach new people (prospecting campaign). To remarket to existing visitors, use the option “Use info from your Pixel or app to create a retargeting audience “.

Scroll down below the connections menu and click ‘Show Advanced Options’. Here are some options that let you refine your audience and exclude people who are less likely to take action, such as someone who has already visited your website or bought from you.

Next, you want to optimize for the right event type. Choose the event that you want to optimize for (View Content, Add To Cart, or Purchase) and set the conversion window to one that suits your needs.

Be sure to fill in any other information (i.e. targeting, budget, etc.) the way you usually do. Now, we will create the ad.

When choosing the ad format (single or carousel), take into account the type of images used in your product feed.  Typically, landscape images will look great with the single image ad format while vertical images will look better with the carousel ad format.

Now for your ad copy, you don’t need to manually insert the product name, description, or any other product information. You can use the ‘+’ button inside each box to pull a catalog field from your product feed.

For instance, click the ‘+’ button in the text field, and select ‘Price’ from the drop-down list.

There you have it. You’ve successfully created your first dynamic ad.

Using dynamic ads creatively

As mentioned previously, dynamic ads are currently available if you promote products, vehicle, flights, destination, or home listings. If you don’t see your business type here, don’t get discouraged as dynamic ads can be used for all verticals. Here are some examples of using dynamic ads creatively.

1. Using dynamic ads to promote your blog posts

When using dynamic ads to promote your articles, the articles serve as products, and all product info will be the article’s information. For example, the product id will be the article’s id; the product description will be the article’s description and so on. Have in mind that you don’t need to rename the product feed’s, only the contents of it.

Promoting your articles this way, allows you to save time and automate a tedious process. Plus, you can easily choose whom you will target; new or existing audience.

2. Using dynamic ads for a betting company

To use dynamic ads top promote betting services, we substitute the products for matches/games and take of advanced product feed offerings by changing product availability based on time. Since matches are time-sensitive, we need to ensure that no match would get advertised after the betting period has ended.

Although these are just two cases, dynamic ads can be used for the majority of the verticals out there.

Making the most out of your dynamic ads

Dynamic ads are a powerful tool in Facebook advertiser’s arsenal. Since its launch, new possibilities are constantly being added. Here are some possibilities that you will find interesting:

1. Customizing the appearance of your Dynamic Ads

In an endless newsfeed where a majority of the ads look the same, you should create and apply custom templates to your dynamic ads to help stand out and grab your ad viewer’s attention. Depending on the period you are advertising in you can create Christmas, Valentine’s day, Black Friday inspired templates. You can also create “evergreen” templates that include your logo and your brand’s colors.

2. Multi-language and multi-country dynamic ads

Recently, Facebook released two new features that help you target your ideal audience within a country where many languages are spoken. Creating multi-language dynamic ads is very straight forward. Set up the dynamic ads campaign the way you normally would, and use the ‘Create in Different Languages’ option.

Have in mind that this will only change the ad’s copy, not the information that comes from your product feed.

If you are promoting your products across countries that have different currencies and you need to tailor product information to the language of your audience, then you need to create additional feeds that will include currency information (one feed) and country/language information (second feed).

Both secondary feeds can be set up in your Catalog Manager. If you are targeting an international audience consider tailoring your ads to match their language. The chances are that your ads will convert better.

A secondary feed that holds information on different languages will look something like the above screenshot. You need the product id which uniquely identifies your product, then state the overrides for each country-language combination and provide the all necessary product info for each language.

For currencies, you will work similarly. Provide the product id, the country and the price in the country’s currency.

3. Using animations in dynamic ads

The slideshow dynamic ads format helps display your products to users from different angles, including close-ups, without users having to click on the ad. This way, you bring the web experience straight in the users’ NewsFeed. To create Slideshow Dynamic Ads you only need to include multiple images of the same product in the feed as opposed to only one and check the box ‘show when available’ under ‘Catalog Assets’.

Final words

Facebook Dynamic ads are a great advertising solution and should be part of your online advertising strategy. They allow you to automate ad creative creation, tailor your offering to your ad viewer and optimize for success. When done correctly, Facebook dynamic ads can help achieve your KPIs and make more bang for your buck.

Related reading

2018 was an eventful year for Google Ads, and 2019 looks to bring even more changes. Here are the key things to expect this year.

$7.2 billion was lost to click fraud between 2016 and 2018. Here are common types of click fraud on Google Ads and what you can do to prevent and report it.

Over 600 million users visit FB business pages every day. 52% of consumers have discovered a brand there. Why and how to optimize for Facebook local search.

As demand for ad impressions on social media increases, marketers need to take extra steps to optimize campaigns and maximize their ROI for paid social.

Facebook has lost an estimated 15 million users in the U.S. during the last two years, according to a report from Edison Research. The firm’s “The Infinite Dial 2019,” surveyed 1,500 U.S. citizens age 12-years and older and found that Facebook usage overall has dropped from 67 percent to 61 percent in two year’s time, with the 12 to 34-years age segment down from 82 million in 2017 to 65 million this year.

Twitter usage is also on a downward slope, going from 23 percent to 19 percent between 2017 and 2019. The report found, overall, social media use has stagnated since 2016, with the number of respondents claiming to be on social remaining around 77 to 80 percent for the past three years. But social media marketing experts said they’re not seeing any impact from declining social media use.

People aren’t leaving social, just shifting platforms. While the report showed Facebook users numbers were dropping, Facebook-owned Instagram is experiencing a steady rise. Instagram’s audience reach is still much smaller than Facebook’s, but Edison’s survey found Instagram usage has climbed from 34 percent in 2017 to 39 percent.

Steve Weiss, CEO of digital marketing agency MuteSix, said he doesn’t believe Facebook users are leaving, but instead the current user base is simply aging.

“While the younger demographics may be shifting to Instagram and Snapchat, Facebook is also seeing increased gains from the 55+ segment. In other words, users aren’t exactly leaving, they are simply shifting,” said Weiss. According to Edison’s report, the 55+ age segment of respondents were the only group whose Facebook usage had increase since 2017.

Yuval Ben-Itzhak, CEO of social media marketing platform Socialbakers, said his company doesn’t have any data indicating a drop in Facebook user numbers.

“In Q4, Facebook reported an increase,” said Ben-Itzhak, “As for Twitter, they have stopped reporting on users which could mean users did not grow.”

Ben Heiser, a content strategist for the Drum Agency, agrees with Weiss in terms of Facebook versus Instagram user numbers.

“Everyone likes to take shots at Facebook usage being down as the end of social media as we know it, but social media is more of a media channel now than ever before. Facebook has global saturation at this point and active users are just switching over to Instagram, which Facebook owns,” said Heiser.

“Here’s the thing – surveys are always skewing perception towards something. One survey cites the 15 million loss in young Facebook users as their rallying cry to jump to audio. However, if you look at the actual numbers, not survey results, Facebook reported that there were 1.52 billion daily active users in Q4, an increase of nine-percent year-over-year.”

Facebook advertising still delivering. Weiss said his ad agency is not seeing an impact from any drops in usage. He believes the Facebook’s Stories ad product, which the company rolled out in the News Feed last year, will drive more advertising on the platform.

“With Facebook’s continued investment in analytics across all its platforms, we also expect to see advanced engagement metrics for Stories, which will ultimately boost bottom-line revenue for Facebook,” said Weiss.

He is confident Instagram advertising revenue will continue to climb, also spurred by Story ads.

“As a matter of fact, advertising revenues on Instagram’s Stories are projected to increase as early studies demonstrate brands can expect to see higher ad recall and click-through rates than from previous ads that were posted on the Instagram feed,” said Weiss.

And then there’s WhatsApp. Edison Research’s survey did not include historical usage data on WhatsApp, the encrypted messaging app owned by platform, but did show 23 percent of the survey participants age 12 to 34 years old were using it this year.

“While Facebook doesn’t report on individual app growth regularly, you can easily infer that the growth is happening on WhatsApp and Instagram, which cater and are heavily used by a younger target,” said Heiser.

Facebook has been making subtle moves to get more people on WhatsApp — announcing in January that it plans to integrate its WhatsApp, Instagram and Facebook Messenger platforms, making it possible for users to communicate between the three apps. Facebook also said it is planning to roll-out WhatsApp ads this year.

Why you should care. While the Edison Research may show declining user numbers, a loss of 15 million users on Facebook may not amount to much for a platform that has 1.5 billion daily active users. And recent reports show advertisers are ahead of the curve with Instagram, with lifts in incremental ad spending from loyal advertisers driving ad spend growth on the platform — money that is still going into Facebook’s pocket.

As Heiser noted, Facebook’s most recent earnings report isn’t showing any major impact from a drop in usage with ad revenue climbing to $16.6 billion during the fourth quarter of 2018. In fact, the company reported the average price of an ad decreased 2 percent, while ad impressions were up 34 percent. Twitter also saw increased ad revenue during the last quarter of 2018, up 23 percent year-over-year.

Overall, marketers shouldn’t make any knee-jerk reactions when it comes to their social media strategy based on one survey, marketers say.

“If you’re planning to use media, you shouldn’t be a fan of one or the other. The focus should be where your audience is most engaged: is it podcast? Instagram? Facebook? If so, that’s where you need to be,” said Heiser.

About The Author

Amy Gesenhues is Third Door Media’s General Assignment Reporter, covering the latest news and updates for Marketing Land and Search Engine Land. From 2009 to 2012, she was an award-winning syndicated columnist for a number of daily newspapers from New York to Texas. With more than ten years of marketing management experience, she has contributed to a variety of traditional and online publications, including MarketingProfs.com, SoftwareCEO.com, and Sales and Marketing Management Magazine. Read more of Amy’s articles.

If there’s one thing that is constant about social media, it’s change.

So many things influence the way we behave on social media: technology, social changes, economy, and politics. All of them are changing at a rapid speed, so you can imagine how volatile the social media world is.

This makes predicting trends for a year ahead quite difficult. However, there are tendencies that stick around and affect the industry in a major way for a long time. For example, influencer marketing has been winning the hearts of social media marketers and the pockets of consumers for a couple of years now, and the ephemeral content, even though it has been around for a while, got a significant boost with Instagram’s investments put into the Stories feature.

Considering these points, I present to you the eight social media trends of 2019. These are the tendencies that take their roots in the current cultural zeitgeist, technological development, and social platforms’ respective strategies, and are expected to take over social media this year.

1. Social listening

Social listening is not a new thing by any means, but the way we apply social listening is changing right now. In the past years, social listening was a way to manage brand mentions and reputations for big brands like Apple or Hilton. However, two things happened that altered the social media listening industry:

1. Social media monitoring tools have become more evolved, with new sources of data, new features, etc being added constantly.
2. The tools became affordable not just for huge corporations, but for mid-sized and small businesses, local businesses, and startups as well.

How did this affect social listening strategies? Well, nowadays, the new features and data sources allow going beyond basic brand monitoring. You can use social listening for social selling, SEO, and customer care to name a few.

If I’d have to point out one area where social listening could really change the current marketing landscape, I’d go with sales. Social selling is a unique tactic that gives you an opportunity to engage with people who are seeking services and products in your industry directly.

One tool in particular even added a specific feature dedicated to social selling called Awario Leads.

For now, this tactic is extremely underused, but we can expect to see more and more brands taking on social selling this year.

2. Buying on social

Social selling is one thing, but what if you could choose and order a product without even leaving the social media app?

To be fair, it’s not a new thing, Facebook already allows users to buy products from brands’ pages in their ‘Shop‘ section. They also have a Marketplace feature launched way back in 2007 which is an alternative to Craigslist, a platform where individuals can sell or exchange mostly second-hand items.

In 2019 we will see more social media companies opening up their platforms for ecommerce. It would be the next logical step for companies which already offer brands a wide range of features for advertising, like YouTube or Instagram. In fact, one of these might be already working in that direction.

Last September, The Verge reported that Instagram might be working on an ecommerce app. According to the article, the app will let users browse collections of goods from merchants that they follow and purchase them directly within the app.

Surely, the app is not an additional feature to Instagram but rather a stand-alone entity. However, this indicates Instagram’s understanding and interest in implementing e-commerce in their product (which is only natural considering that Facebook owns Instagram).

3. Transparency

Social media data has become essential to any marketing strategy, hence social listening is on this list. However, this past year proved just how little knowledge we as a society have of the scope and impact of social media data collected on a daily basis.

Last year was marked by an array of privacy scandals, with Cambridge Analytica being the most prominent one. However, Facebook wasn’t the only one who suffered, Twitter, YouTube, and even Reddit reported at least one security breach last year.

However, let’s not diminish Facebook’s role in this regard, they seemed to have one PR nightmare after another. This probably prompted Mark Zuckerberg to make a special New Year’s resolution for 2019 to organize a series of public discussions dedicated to how Facebook influences society.

That will be only one of the initiatives dedicated to bringing more transparency into the world of social media companies. Data is one of the most important resources in social media marketing, and ethical collection, as well as unbiased evaluation of it, will be a major priority for companies this year.

Our century is marked by brands developing personalities for themselves and building relationships with their audiences. According to this study by Sprout Social, millennials are expecting more transparency from brands than politicians or friends and family. Gaining the trust of the audience will become the focus of social media platforms’ strategies.

4. Live streaming

Powered by social media algorithms, pivoting to video content has been a trend for a while now. This year, however, live streaming is the new black.

Social streaming favors in-the-moment content, another trend that has been taking over social media for a while with Instagram Stories, Snapchat, and, most recently, Facebook stories. According to this Facebook report, daily watch time for Facebook live broadcasts grew four times over the course of a year.

You can use live streaming to present a new product, change the narrative during a PR crisis, or introduce a collaboration with an influencer.

What makes live streaming so special is the ability to create space for an actual dialogue with your customer in real time. Your viewers feel like they are in the middle of a natural conversation, and you’re speaking directly to them. It wins over highly produced video content because of its authenticity, the thing every marketer is trying to accomplish.

5. Private communities

2018 saw a trend of communication migrating to private channels.

More and more interactions occur in Facebook groups and private communities rather than on public pages, which is favored both by algorithms and people (unless these people are social media managers). Moreover, social media platforms keep adding new features to simplify the curation of private groups on top of integrating messaging features in their apps.

On Instagram, turning your growing Instagram account private creates a sense of exclusivity and urgency encourages people to follow, as described in this article by the Atlantic. Private groups and accounts make you feel like a part of an exclusive community, and who doesn’t want that?

Consider creating a private community for your brand, for example, a group on Facebook or LinkedIn. This will give your users an opportunity to not just communicate with you but also with each other, which contributes to building a strong community and encouraging brand advocacy.

6. Messaging

The most private communication channel is, of course, direct messaging. And for the last few years, brands have been engaging with customers through DMs and personal messages on social.

For now, brands are mostly using messaging apps and DMs for customer service purposes. But there’s untapped potential to create personalized, automated communication that’s even more effective than email.

This year, messaging will become a meaningful part of every social media strategy. Moreover, brands will finally embrace messenger automation. A study conducted by Relay revealed that out of 1000 trending B2B companies on Crunchbase, only 0.5 percent of the companies had a chatbot.

Chatbots could make messenger marketing the new email marketing, the open rate for messages is much higher than for emails, and messaging itself is seen as a more casual and personal way of communication.

Chatbots aren’t perfect yet, and people still prefer to converse with a human. However, as chatbots become more sophisticated and use more natural language, they will become necessary. You need to figure out which part of your marketing strategy could benefit from them.

Integrating eCommerce functions could also be beneficial for messaging apps. This is not the new idea if we remember WeChat, but it hasn’t been explored yet in the Western part of the world.

7. Personalization

Chatbots and messaging can also be a part of a comprehensive personalization strategy. 2019 will be the year when personalization powered by AI takes over marketing.

Considering the vast amount of personal information currently available to social media companies, it has become extremely easy to obtain insights into all kinds of information about your customers. Content consumed, purchase history, clicked links, social media interactions, and even personal messages. All this and more can be used to create a laser-targeted marketing campaign just for you.

However, some consumers may feel uncomfortable with how personalization is currently implemented in marketing. Brands need to find the fine line between being helpful and outright creepy.

One way to do this would be combining personalization and other types of marketing: influencer marketing, personalizing your messaging communication (beyond using first names), and so on. Take an example from Airbnb, which uses information about your past and upcoming trips to craft personalized traveling recommendations.

8. Augmented reality (AR)

AR can be used in a plethora of ways, from creating filters dedicated to certain events to actually implementing your product in videos or photos to let customers try it on.

At its F8 developer conference last year, Facebook announced that it was testing AR ads. In your timeline, they look like ordinary Facebook Ads but with a ‘Tap to try it on’ button that lets you try products on virtually with the help of camera filters.

AR could be the solution for those who don’t like online shopping and prefer to test a product before buying. If social media platforms successfully implement this technology on a wide scale first, they will become an even more attractive platform for advertising compared to digital space.

What you need to do in 2019

As you can see, none of these trends are coming at you completely out of the blue, most of them are a logical development of social media platforms’ strategies or the way ordinary users behave on social media.

So this year, it’s time to become an early adopter and try something new, be it a social listening tool or a messenger bot. In 2019, make sure you:

• Collect and analyze social media data to guide your marketing decisions
• Apply new technology to your social media strategy
• Stay authentic and personal

You will undoubtedly see a boost in your social media ROI.

Got any unique social media strategies chalked out for 2019? Share your thoughts in the comments.

Related reading

As demand for ad impressions on social media increases, marketers need to take extra steps to optimize campaigns and maximize their ROI for paid social.

Scaling social media can be risky because it’s about human connection. Here are 3 pieces of the puzzle you should scale — and two things you shouldn’t.

Facebook has decided to test Search Ads in selected industries in the US and Canada. What does this experiment mean for the search advertising industry?

Key social media trends to consider for a successful marketing strategy in 2019. More focus on ROI, new tech, and trust between brand and customers.

For the first time, more than half (51 percent) of the U.S. population has listened to a podcast, up from 44 percent last year. Put another way, 144 million people, or 20 million more people than just a year ago, have listened to a podcast.

Frequency is on the rise, too. An estimated 90 million, or nearly one-third (32 percent) listen monthly, up from 26 percent.

And 22 percent are weekly listeners, up from 17 percent. That’s an estimated 62 million weekly U.S. podcast listeners. The numbers come from Edison Research and Triton Digital’s latest Infinite Dial survey.

Who’s listening? Numbers are increasing among men and women, but men are more likely to be listeners with 36 percent of male respondents saying they listen to podcasts monthly, compared to 29 percent of women.

Podcasts are reaching roughly 40 percent of people age 12 to 24 and 25 to 54.  While listening among those 55 and older is up from 13 percent last year, just 17 percent of this older demographic are monthly podcast listeners.

Weekly listeners said they heard an average of seven podcasts in the last week. More than half (52 percent) of them had listened to four or more podcasts that week.

Digital audio looks to podcast market. Spotify, which has made significant overtures in podcasting with the acquisitions of podcasting network Gimlet Media and back-end services company Anchor last month, is quickly gaining traction among younger audiences. Among monthly podcast listeners age 12-24, fifty-three percent were Spotify listeners, up from just 32 percent a year ago.

Why you should care. The marketing opportunities in podcasting continue to evolve from host-read ads and branded sponsored series. As companies like Spotify invest in growing their podcast businesses, the marketing opportunities — and measurement and attribution capabilities — will become more sophisticated. This is still early days for podcasting, but growing audiences and investment means it’s an area more brands will consider incorporating into their marketing strategies.

About The Author

Ginny Marvin is Third Door Media’s Editor-in-Chief, managing day-to-day editorial operations across all of our publications. Ginny writes about paid online marketing topics including paid search, paid social, display and retargeting for Search Engine Land, Marketing Land and MarTech Today. With more than 15 years of marketing experience, she has held both in-house and agency management positions. She can be found on Twitter as @ginnymarvin.

With all this gushing about PPC and Google Remarketing campaigns, I strongly feel the need to let you know that I am not to be romanticized or this isn’t a sponsored post. I enjoy following remarketing best practices, and I’d like to provide some justifications as to why I think it is the need of the hour. 

Gone are the days when you were required to pay for people just to see your ads. Today, with PPC advertising, you only pay when a user clicks on your ad. The only downside is that you still need to pay for traffic that doesn’t buy the first time around. Here’s when remarketing comes into play.

For those who have no idea regarding the term: it is the practice of using ads to target those people who have visited your website or have already shown an interest in your products or services. The method allows you to show ads to people who have previously visited your website, as they are more likely to click on your ads in comparison to the new ones.

Renowned networks like Google Ads, Facebook Ads, and Bing Ads allow you to set up such campaigns easily. All you have to do is install a remarketing pixel on your existing site. This will automatically add a cookie on your visitor’s browser. Your ad network automatically identifies the cookie and lets you display a customized presentation to allure them.

Why consider Google Dynamic Remarketing?

The term allows you to show ads to those who have previously visited your website, but Google Dynamic Remarketing works on another level. Here it will enable you to show previous visitors’ ads that contain products and services they viewed on your site.

So why should you use it? A few reasons.

1. Retain site abandoners

One of the prime reasons is that Google Dynamic Remarketing enables advertisers to display ads to visitors who have abandoned their site, but it is mainly based on prior engagement. Which means ads can be displayed to those who have:

1. Already visited your site
2. Viewed a specific product
3. Added a product to the shopping cart but didn’t purchase
4. Already purchased products

2. Google display network

In layman’s terms, Google’s display network includes web pages or sites where Google ads appear. Right from Google search, YouTube, and Gmail, Google’s display network covers Google’s partner sites across the web. It’s pretty significant and is substantiated where retailers can get the opportunity to reach customers across different sites using different ad formats. In fact, you can choose which sites you want your remarketing ads to appear on, analyze site impressions, clicks, costs, revenue, and so forth.

3. Bid competitively

By using Google’s conversion optimizer, you can use conversion tracking on the Google display network to identify purchase behavior from click to purchase. By doing so, retailers can optimize their spend on remarketing. It may quite interest you to know that with the help of this conversion data you will know who purchased (and from where), the Conversion Optimizer identifies trends to help you avoid over-bidding for ad placements.

Here are five ways to reduce cart abandonment rates

As I said before, cart abandonment is a major concern these days. Like it or not, unless you are a master of remarketing you won’t be able to reach out to your previous visitors and get them back. Fret not! Down below I would like you to get acquainted with a few dynamic techniques that can increase customer retention.

1. Narrow down your audiences

Before you start any campaign, it is essential to segment your audiences. I often find businesses making this terrible mistake of targeting every visitor with the same campaign. No, that’s not how it should work. What’s a better way to split your audiences?

• U-turners – People who leave your site within seconds
• Scrollers – Visitors who spend more and more time on your page before leaving
• Clickers – Users who visit multiple pages and spend minutes on your site
• Easy quitters – Users who start the conversion process but quit before converting

2. There is a way beyond the landing page

Is a landing page everything that your visitors need? Probably not. To make the most of your remarketing efforts, you need to track users beyond the landing page to determine the pages they visit. This includes the landing page, product page, product category page, checkout and what not. Checking all these pages tells you a lot about a visitor’s interest. For example, the products they are interested in or the item they almost bought, and so forth.

If someone is showing a clear interest in your product, it apparently means stop targeting them with ads featuring your brand logo. Instead, target them with ads featuring the product they’re interested in and make it too tempting to resist.

3. Cart abandonment campaigns

Dynamic remarketing can reduce your cart abandonment rates. It all starts with tracking page visits. Try identifying users who tend to make it as far as the checkout but never reach the confirmation page. With the help of event tracking, one can track which products people add to their carts. In case if their products are still waiting for them, you can remind them.

Many people quit halfway through signing up for your webinar, filling out a quote, etc — you can track them as well.

4. Create campaigns for existing customers

In the quest for retaining previous customers, don’t forget to pursue the existing customers. According to several experts, it takes five times more effort to acquire a new customer than it does to keep your existing ones. So what can be done is:

• Cross-selling
• Up-selling
• Renewing
• Rebuying
• Reinventing
• Loyalty campaigns

5. Guide users along the buying process

Making a purchase is a complex journey for the end user as he/she has to make a ton of interactions with brands. The best advertisers tend to create campaigns that guide users along this journey.

Wrapping it up.

I hope I have made my point pretty clear stating why Google Dynamic Remarketing is apt for your online store. Share your thoughts in the comments.

Charles Richards is a Business Analyst at TatvaSoft UK.

Related reading

$7.2 billion was lost to click fraud between 2016 and 2018. Here are common types of click fraud on Google Ads and what you can do to prevent and report it.

Over 600 million users visit FB business pages every day. 52% of consumers have discovered a brand there. Why and how to optimize for Facebook local search.

As demand for ad impressions on social media increases, marketers need to take extra steps to optimize campaigns and maximize their ROI for paid social.

Looking for how to automate PPC in 2019? Here are the essential do’s and don’ts of bid automation and content creation in Google Ads.

Twitter has launched a publisher insights tool called “Timing Is Everything” that uses historical data to highlight when users are most often watching and engaging with video on the platform. The tool offers an aggregate look at when Twitter users are generally watching videos on the platform. It does not offer publisher-specific insights on when their own organic followers watch.

Why you should care

While the insights tool is only giving a broad overview of video-consumption on the platform, it can be of service to publishers — helping them optimize video content by posting it when users are most likely to watch a video according to Twitter’s historical data.

“We encourage publishers to continue to post throughout the day in order to maximize reach,” wrote Twitter product manager Ellen Fitzgerald on Twitter’s media blog, “However, consider including posting during the most engaging times of the day and week as part of that strategy.”

More on the news

• The “Timing is Everything” tool can be found within the Twitter Media Studio in the Analytics drop down menu.
• In September, Twitter gave video content a push when it began putting livestreams atop user timelines, giving in-stream video ads prominent placement.
• Last year, Twitter reported more than half of the $575 million it earned in ad revenue during the first quarter of 2018 was from video ads.

About The Author

Amy Gesenhues is Third Door Media’s General Assignment Reporter, covering the latest news and updates for Marketing Land and Search Engine Land. From 2009 to 2012, she was an award-winning syndicated columnist for a number of daily newspapers from New York to Texas. With more than ten years of marketing management experience, she has contributed to a variety of traditional and online publications, including MarketingProfs.com, SoftwareCEO.com, and Sales and Marketing Management Magazine. Read more of Amy’s articles.

It’s been nearly 3½ years since Google first announced their usage of RankBrain (October 26th 2015, but it had started being rolled out early 2015, in multiple languages).

In that time, there’s been little in the way of details coming from G about what it is or how it works.

The result is that numerous SEOs have stepped up to fill that void with their own speculations and opinions, and in doing that, have caused all sorts of confusion.

This is my attempt to correct and clean up some of that mess.

(There is a TL:DR at the bottom if you want to skip the verbiage :D)

What does RankBrain do?

Though there isn’t much publicly available, what we do have is fairly specific:

“If RankBrain sees a word or phrase it isn’t familiar with, the machine can make a guess as to what words or phrases might have a similar meaning and filter the result accordingly, making it more effective at handling never-before-seen search queries.”

– Greg Corrado, from Bloomberg’s Google Turning Its Lucrative Web Search Over to AI Machines}

Or, if you want it more succinct than that;

“… Lemme try one last time: Rankbrain lets us understand queries better. …”

– Gary Illyes (@methode), on Twitter

Google receives a fair percentage of queries per day that it hasn’t seen before: 15% at last check.

These may include misspellings and typos, elisions/omissions, unusual phrasing/syntactic structures, the wrong word(s) being used, negations (“not x”), things that have only just happened etc. etc. etc.

RB receives these weird, wonderful, and new searches, and attempts to identify existing searches and results that are probably suitable for the searcher’s query.

How does RankBrain work?

Again, we aren’t exactly given a guided tour by G on this, but there are a few bits and pieces.

“… RankBrain uses artificial intelligence to embed vast amounts of written language into mathematical entities — called vectors — that the computer can understand. If RankBrain sees a word or phrase it isn’t familiar with, the machine can make a guess as to what words or phrases might have a similar meaning and filter the result accordingly, making it more effective at handling never-before-seen search queries. …”

– Greg Corrado, from Bloomberg’s : Google Turning Its Lucrative Web Search Over to AI Machines

So, rather than looking at words and attempting to parse them and understand the semantics (traditional Natural Language Processing [NLP]), it converts them into numbers and plots them on a chart (with multiple dimensions, not just X and Y).

Items near each other possess some form of relationship. The type of relationship will be reflected by each term’s position and distance from its neighbors.

If that sounds vaguely familiar, that’s because it sounds very similar to Word2Vector.

So when G receives a query it doesn’t quite recognize, it can find semantically related pieces, and look at the results.

But, what if it’s wrong?

Well, that’s where Gary Illyes’s answer to a question on his recent Reddit AMA may come in:

“…

RankBrain is a PR-sexy machine learning ranking component that uses historical search data to predict what would a user most likely click on for a previously unseen query. It is a really cool piece of engineering that saved our butts countless times whenever traditional algos were like, e.g. “oh look a “not” in the query string! let’s ignore the hell out of it!”, but it’s generally just relying on (sometimes) months old data about what happened on the results page itself, not on the landing page. Dwell time, CTR, … those are generally made up crap. Search is much more simple than people think.

…”

– Gary Illyes (@methode), on Reddit

I’ve added the bold to draw your eye to the key part.

G may go back and look at what gets clicked for different searches, and check their performance. This can help the system learn what suggestions are suitable, and which ones are fails.

If you want something with a bit more meat, you may be wanting some patents?

If so, I was lucky enough to get some help from Bill Slawski, who pointed me to two potentially interesting patents:

The first patent (computing numeric…) was worked on by Greg Corrado, from the Bloomberg quote previously referenced.

If you don’t fancy suffering the trauma of reading the patents, Bill has two far nicer bits that get you the insights without the need for painkillers:

Example of what RankBrain may be doing

How about we walk through a simple demo of the type of thing that RB does?

Query: How Nemee 2020

Google receives that query, and has nothing that appears to be a match and little that seems above a weak relevance.

So, it needs to do some work.

• It can identify the type of query by the use of “how”.
• It can identify a time factor by “2020”.
• Or it can identify several potentials for “nemee”, including “meme”.

The query is vectorized, and the nearest neighbors for those vectors are found.

Included in the results are vectors that represent:

• “How to”
• “how do I”
• “how do people”
• “create a meme”
• “pronounce meme”
• “say meme”

So we have two probable query types:

1. A question of how to say …
2. A question of how to make …

But we have a 3rd factor, the “2020”. When we look at the result groups, there are barely any pre-existing queries or results that include time with pronunciation, where are there are a moderate number of “how to” queries and results that do.

RB decides that the most likely results that match this query are those from the “how to make” queries, and so the results you would receive would match;

“how to make a meme 2020”.

Does RankBrain use user experience signals?

No.

And that’s what this post is about — clearing up all the baloney some people have been pushing about “Dwell Time” and “Click Through Rate” and “Bounces” etc.

RankBrain doesn’t use UX signals from your pages.

For quick confirmation;

“… Dwell time, CTR, … those are generally made up crap …”

That’s from Gary’s AMA response I quoted above.

But, you can use a little common sense yourself at this point.

Ask yourself the following question:

Why would a system that is built to try to encapsulate relationships between text-strings be looking at how long someone spent on a page, or how fast they left?

When you stop and look at it that way, and consider the example above, you can see how site based UX signals have no relevance for RankBrain.

The only such metric we know they may use are SERP-based clicks to identify what type of results appeared relevant to that type of query.

Can you optimize for RankBrain?

Yes.

Google has even told us that we can 😀

“…
Optimizing for RankBrain is actually super easy, and it is something we’ve probably been saying for fifteen years now, is – and the recommendation is – to write in natural language. Try to write content that sounds human. If you try to write like a machine then RankBrain will just get confused and probably just pushes you back. But if you have a content site, try to read out some of your articles or whatever you wrote, and ask people whether it sounds natural. If it sounds conversational, if it sounds like natural language that we would use in your day to day life, then sure, you are optimized for RankBrain. If it doesn’t, then you are “un-optimize
…”

– Gary Illyes (@methode), talking to TheSEMPost

I know — it’s a bit lame.

But, if you roll back a bit, G have actually spelled out how to optimize for RankBrain!

• “… If RankBrain sees a word or phrase it isn’t familiar with …”
• “… making it more effective at handling never-before-seen search queries …”
• “… predict what would a user most likely click on for a previously unseen query …”

All you have to do is fly in the face of standard SEO practices, and aim for the exact opposite of what you would normally go for — high search volume.

Instead, look at all the queries, and then generate variants that aren’t in the lists.

I know, that’s even lamer!

(But, be honest, you did want to know :D)

But there is more — particularly for those that deal with time-relevant content; events and occurrences.

As these are “new”, the queries likely will be too (at least partially). To gain an advantage here, you might be able to look at similar searches yourself, and look at the patterns they possess. Once you have some samples and associated search volume data, you can pick and choose the ones you feel are most advantageous and relevant, and then weave them into your content.

If you want a little more insight into RB, and things like Association Rule Learning (delving deeper into the computing side of things), Dan Taylor has a previous article that may be of interest: Here’s how RankBrain does (and doesn’t) impact SEO

Does RankBrain influence rankings?

No — it’s a matter of inclusion.

Though Google has stated that RB is one of the most influential Ranking Factors, it’s not a typical SEO factor.

Unlike Titles or Link Text, it’s not a gradient or variable — it’s Boolean.

Either you are perceived as relevant, and included in the SERPs for a query — or you aren’t.

So you can optimize for RankBrain — but it isn’t a matter of ranking influence, it’s a matter of index inclusion.

TL;DR

What does RB do?

It attempts to answer unknown queries by looking at previous search data and the relationship of the terms used in those searches.

How does RB do that?

By converting words into numbers and plotting them into vector-space.  

It can then break a query into parts and look for similar terms in the vector space to try to understand the relationship and potential intent of the search.

Example:

Query : “how nemee 2020”

Convert query to vectors, find closest vectors, try to calculate probable matches.

Two distinct query types are surfaced; “create” and “say”.

“2020” associates more strongly with “create” than “say”.

RB will return SERPs for “how to make a meme 2020”.

Does RB use UX?

No.

It handles words and vectors.  

Things like Bounce Rate, Long Clicks etc. aren’t used.

Can you optimize for RB?

Yes.

By writing naturally and ensuring your content contains variations.

For some types of content (occurrences/events/news) you may be able to check similar searches and get ahead of the pack.

Does RankBrain influence rankings?

Not in the traditional SEO sense. It’s not about “position”, it’s about whether you show for that query or not.

Related reading

A few weeks ago, Google published a blog post on its webmaster blog sharing some tips on how to get more success in Google News search in 2019. 

Featured snippets are one of the main engines of economic growth today, with countless businesses and aspiring entrepreneurs relying upon them to get their message out to prospective clients.

If your SEO strategy is working well, you can expect to see results in about three months. Here are ten reasons why that might not be the case.

Eight in 10 CMOs say brand safety keeps them up at night, according to a study from December 2018. The latest advertiser concerns from YouTube: What’s next?