More than ever, users are relying on Google products to do their jobs, educate their kids, and stay in touch with loved ones. Our Google Product Experts (PEs) play a vital role in supporting these users in community forums, like the Webmaster Help Community, across many languages.
For several years now, we have been inviting our most advanced PEs from around the world to a bi-annual, 3-day PE Summit. These events provide an opportunity not only to share latest product updates with PEs, but also to acknowledge and celebrate their tireless contributions to help our users. As the world was going into lockdown in March, we quickly decided that we don’t want to miss out on this annual celebration. So the summit team shifted focus and started planning an all virtual event which came to be called [email protected]
Through the house-themed virtual event platform, PEs participated in over 120 sessions in the “office”, got a chance to engage with each other and Googlers in the “kitchen”, had fun on the “rooftop” learning more about magic or mixology, and – hopefully – came out feeling reconnected and re-energized. In addition to a large number of general talks, Webmaster PEs were able to attend and ask questions during eight product specific breakout sessions with Search product managers and engineers, which covered topics like page experience, Web Stories, crawling, Image Search, and free shopping listings.
We are truly overwhelmed and grateful for how Webmaster PEs continue to grow the community, connection, and engagement in such a strange time. As a testament to the helpful spirit in the Webmaster community, we were thrilled to present the “Silver Lining Award” for someone who demonstrates a sense of humour and emphasizes the positive side of every situation to one of our own Webmaster PEs.
In the name of all the countless people asking product questions in the forums, we’d like to express our thanks to the patient, knowledgeable, helpful, and friendly Webmaster Product Experts, who help to make the web shine when it comes to presence on Search.
If you want to read more about the summit, check out this summary from a Webmaster PE point of view.
30-second summary: In line with last year’s changes, customers’ behaviors and expectations have likewise evolved drastically over the previous year
31 percent of clients are more likely to acquire online in 2021 than they were simply a year prior
Cutting through the mess and developing meaningful experiences for valued consumers will be a top priority for brand names
Donna Tuths, Chief Transformation and Innovation Officer at Sutherland foresees 4 key patterns playing out in 2021
2020 has forced brands to completely transform the way they operate in the wake of the pandemic, and it appears that some of the changes we are experiencing will be long-term. When defined by going to shops or face-to-face conversations with salesmen are now being reimagined as remote interactions, brand name relationships that were. Necessary physical girth the world, combined with the increase of digital connectivity, has led to many brand names transitioning from brick-and-mortar to online.
In line with this modification, consumers’ habits and expectations have actually likewise evolved significantly over the past year. Customers were 31 percent more likely to purchase online in 2021 than they were just a year prior.
While online or remote interactions are not an entirely new concept, the obstacle brand names face is cutting through the clutter and producing significant experiences for their valued clients. Here are the four essential patterns I anticipate playing out in 2021 to make that a reality.
Client care will move to a service motorist
Marketers are taking notice. In the battleground of experience, remote interactions with clients have become crucial. With the large majority of them now taking place in the contact center, business have concerned recognize these interactions are gold. With the omnichannel abilities available today, online marketers have terabytes of information generated every day by their interactions with their customers that could be mined to hyper-personalized interactions, wow their customers, and make every contact count.
Investments in staff member experience will have a greater impact on client experience than ever prior to
Delighted workers equivalent happy consumers. The more brands buy the worker experience, the more the customer benefits. AI-enabled tools utilized for recruiting can turn the power of information into developing a best match in between their target consumers and individuals they entrust to engage with them day in and day out. Additionally, AI-enabled tools can make it possible for those human beings to supply the support that is smooth, with less effort.
This year will take brands much better to getting the human-machine balance right
Instead of replacing humans, makers are raising what human beings do, giving them powers that reach beyond area and time. This delivers advantages to employees and consumers alike. While humans are hectic communicating with clients, AI-enabled bots trained on belief data analysis and more can scour chat, e-mail, and other channels to identify customers that require assistance and fast.
2021 may be the year AI-enabled marketing explodes
This would actually provide the term “marketing automation” a brand-new meaning. With huge quantities of interaction data readily available to lots of business and advances in machine learning, brands might see next-generation, real-time, AI-enabled marketing where signals are spotted and hyper-personalized messages and deals are quickly dispatched without nary an online marketer or marketing operations person raising a finger.
2021: A restored concentrate on producing winning experiences
For brands to be more intentional about developing winning experiences throughout their numerous customer touchpoints, they need to enhance on the way they leverage data, deploy helping technologies and empower their employees to drive these interactions.
It is just by striking the right balance in between the 3 that brand names can provide the sort of experiences that ensure success in driving increased consumer delight and loyalty.
Donna Tuths is Chief Transformation and Innovation Officer and Chief Marketing Officer at Sutherland.
With today’s announcement that it has entered a definitive agreement to acquire Dublin-based Boxever, Sitecore will become the latest ecommerce and CMS provider to include an integrated CDP as part of its offering. The news comes some fourteen months after Sitecore competitor Acquia picked up enterprise CDP AgilOne.
As part of the same announcement, Sitecore will also acquire Minneapolis-based ecommerce platform Four51. Four51’s API-driven, headless solution, which can deliver customer experience direct to a range of channels and devices. Sitecore is describing this as complementary to their existing solutions.
Where Four51 fits. Given that Sitecore provides hybrid or headless CMS options, we asked how Four51 enhances the offering. CEO Steve Tzikakis told us: “Sitecore’s current CMS platform is headless. Four51 will add a composable, headless commerce solution that will be quickly and seamlessly integrate into our product portfolio. Four51’s highly flexible solution tailors to the unique needs of business buyers.”
Starting to spend. These acquisitions follow on the heels of Sitecore’s attention-grabbing $1.2 billion funding round in January, which suggests that Tzikakis had a wish-list clearly in mind.
The moves certainly reflect Tzikakis’ belief that: “Sitecore is a category leader that hasn’t had the opportunity to take the next step. We now need to become a ‘billion-dollar company.’ That’s not so much a financial objective, it’s more a behavioral change. The pace with which we release products, the integration of our products, the level of service we provide to our customers, how we operate with our partners and taking advantage of our biggest asset, our own employees.”
The cost of the acquisitions, which are expected to close by end of March, has not been disclosed.
Why we care. As we’ve said before, with adoption of digital commerce expanding, even among verticals never considered digital-first, the race between ecommerce vendors is white hot, with Episerver acquiring (and then re-branding as) Optimizely, and now these moves by Sitecore.
This story first appeared on MarTech Today.
About The Author
Kim Davis is the Editorial Director of MarTech Today. Born in London, but a New Yorker for over two decades, Kim started covering enterprise software ten years ago. His experience encompasses SaaS for the enterprise, digital- ad data-driven urban planning, and applications of SaaS, digital technology, and data in the marketing space. He first wrote about marketing technology as editor of Haymarket’s The Hub, a dedicated marketing tech website, which subsequently became a channel on the established direct marketing brand DMN. Kim joined DMN proper in 2016, as a senior editor, becoming Executive Editor, then Editor-in-Chief a position he held until January 2020. Prior to working in tech journalism, Kim was Associate Editor at a New York Times hyper-local news site, The Local: East Village, and has previously worked as an editor of an academic publication, and as a music journalist. He has written hundreds of New York restaurant reviews for a personal blog, and has been an occasional guest contributor to Eater.
Google is going in a privacy-first instructions. Image credit: Google
Technology huge Google has confirmed that it will not introduce alternate identifiers to track users online once it phases out third-party cookies, opting to utilize “privacy-preserving” options for digital marketing.
More than ever, users are relying on Google products to do their jobs, educate their kids, and stay in touch with loved ones. Our Google Product Experts (PEs) play a vital role in supporting these users in community forums, like the Webmaster Help Community, across many languages.
For several years now, we have been inviting our most advanced PEs from around the world to a bi-annual, 3-day PE Summit. These events provide an opportunity not only to share latest product updates with PEs, but also to acknowledge and celebrate their tireless contributions to help our users. As the world was going into lockdown in March, we quickly decided that we don’t want to miss out on this annual celebration. So the summit team shifted focus and started planning an all virtual event which came to be called [email protected]
Through the house-themed virtual event platform, PEs participated in over 120 sessions in the “office”, got a chance to engage with each other and Googlers in the “kitchen”, had fun on the “rooftop” learning more about magic or mixology, and – hopefully – came out feeling reconnected and re-energized. In addition to a large number of general talks, Webmaster PEs were able to attend and ask questions during eight product specific breakout sessions with Search product managers and engineers, which covered topics like page experience, Web Stories, crawling, Image Search, and free shopping listings.
We are truly overwhelmed and grateful for how Webmaster PEs continue to grow the community, connection, and engagement in such a strange time. As a testament to the helpful spirit in the Webmaster community, we were thrilled to present the “Silver Lining Award” for someone who demonstrates a sense of humour and emphasizes the positive side of every situation to one of our own Webmaster PEs.
In the name of all the countless people asking product questions in the forums, we’d like to express our thanks to the patient, knowledgeable, helpful, and friendly Webmaster Product Experts, who help to make the web shine when it comes to presence on Search.
If you want to read more about the summit, check out this summary from a Webmaster PE point of view.
Marketing Land’s daily brief features daily insights, news, tips, and essential bits of wisdom for today’s digital marketer. If you would like to read this before the rest of the internet does, sign up here to get it delivered to your inbox daily.
Good morning, Marketers, how’s your martech stack looking this year?
As we celebrate the recent launch of our Enterprise Marketing Attribution and Predictive Analytics Martech Intelligence Report(MIR) I’ve been thinking deeply about effectiveness data. I find it fascinating that our industry continues to raise the bar in terms of what is possible to measure, innovating past hurdles like new privacy regulations and the deprecation of cookies. It’s one of the things that most energizes me about working in this space — it never stands still.
And speaking of not standing still, this is the first newsletter issue that embodies our new Tuesday focus — research. Each week, I’ll aggregate important and insightful research we’ve recently come across, and we’ll also do a bit of original research ourselves, asking our audience for their perspectives on subjects challenging the industry — from strategic thinking to today’s best practices. We’ll gather what you say and then share the results so we can all learn from one another — we hope you’ll participate and that you’ll find the conclusions valuable in your day-to-day work.
This week, we ask that you share how your martech stack has changed in 2021. We’re so curious how the events of 2020 have impacted your workflows.
Read on for more data on how searchers’ devices impact their likelihood of clicking on the first result, and for a look at trends in the call analytics space.
Pamela Parker,
Research Director
The real-world uses for synthetic data
There are privacy concerns with handling personally identifiable data (PII). One solution has been to anonymize the data records before analyzing them. Another solution is to use an algorithm to “synthesize” online data, creating synthetic data not attributable to real world individuals. Let’s be clear, synthetic data is not as accurate and reliable as real data, but it has some important use cases for digital marketers.
One use case is precisely to sidestep regulations like GDPR which govern PII, the real world data which identifies actual people. Synthetic data can be acquired, stored and managed in a way that, under GDPR-type regulations, may not be possible. Other uses involve the need for data acquisition to extend real world data sets. It can be used, for example, to extend data sets for predictive analytics, or the training data needed to train AI models. It may even be easier to generate bias-free synthetic data sets for AI training.
There are use cases where synthetic data might be every bit as useful as real data, like training the models which will control self-driving cars, or to extend the data-sets for deep learning-based image processing. Those are not cases where the objective is to understand and predict consumer behavior. “[S]ynthetic data will never be as accurate as real data,” Maciej Pondel, a researcher and machine learning specialist at Warsaw’s Unity Group told us. “Even if generated based on real patterns, synthetic data always misses the essential ‘reality factor’, which only makes it useful in a limited number of business cases.”
Applying synthetic data to digital marketing is going to be an evolution, not a revolution. Applications will be narrow and need-driven. It will become another tool in the toolbox.
Read more>>
Telephone calls emerge as critically important in the pandemic
Even before the coronavirus pandemic disrupted American lives and businesses, the telephone – particularly the smartphone – had become an integral part of the consumer purchase journey. More than 170 billion inbound mobile calls to U.S. businesses were forecast in 2020, according to BIA Advisory Services.
When faced with the worst public health crisis in more than a century, U.S. consumers used the telephone more than ever before. During the first half of 2020, Google My Business recorded a 61% jump in consumer calls, from inquiries about open hours to arrangements for curbside pickups. For the 12 months ending June 2020, call volume increased 35% and continues to track 27% higher than pre-pandemic levels.
Learn about enterprise call analytics solutions>>
New perspectives on the eternal question
Savvy search advertisers are continuously optimizing their campaigns to achieve the best results for the lowest spend, and new research published in the Journal of Advertising Research (JAR) sheds light on the importance of one critical factor: the device upon which the ad is displayed. The study concludes that the device people are using when searching significantly influences whether they’re more likely to click on the first result or scroll further down — at least where non-branded queries are concerned.
Users on tablets or smartphones were more likely than those on desktops to click on the first result for unbranded queries. When tablets and smartphones were compared, interestingly, people using tablets were most likely to click on the top result for unbranded searches, which would seem to confound an interpretation that smaller devices = more reliance on the top results. For branded searches, the lure of the top result held steady when it came to tablet users, but there wasn’t a significant difference between desktop and smartphone users.
The results add weight to what’s become a best practice for search engine advertisers — to use bid customizers and even break out devices into separate campaigns, so you can tailor placements to the characteristics of those users. For example, you could compete aggressively for the top spot in campaigns running on tablets and for non-branded campaigns running on smartphones.
The study’s authors, Chongyu Lu of Pace University and Rex Yuxing Du of the University of Houston, analyzed more than 20 million ad impressions from 13 different advertisers across a variety of industries.
On the move
Confluent, the event streaming platform, yesterday announced that Stephanie Buscemi is joining the company as CMO. Most recently, Buscemi was CMO at Salesforce, a position she held for two-and-a-half years leading a team of 1,400 marketers. She was in marketing roles at Salesforce for a total of more than six years.
In January, as Buscemi announced her departure, Salesforce elevated EVP and GM, Platform & AppExchange, Sarah Franklin, to the CMO role.
Buscemi spoke to us about plans for Dreamforce last year.
Quote of the day
“Wow, Belgium Marketing Technology is booming! 78% more tools in 2021.” Frans Riemersma, founder, Martech Tribe.
About The Author
Pamela Parker is Research Director at Third Door Media’s Content Studio, where she produces Martech Intelligence Reports and other in-depth content for digital marketers in conjunction with Search Engine Land, Marketing Land, MarTech Today and Digital Marketing Depot. Prior to taking on this role at TDM, she served as Content Manager, Senior Editor and Executive Features Editor. Parker is a well-respected authority on digital marketing, having reported and written on the subject since its beginning. She’s a former managing editor of ClickZ and has also worked on the business side helping independent publishers monetize their sites at Federated Media Publishing. Parker earned a master’s degree in journalism from Columbia University.
Global Rich List 2021. Image credit: Taylor/Heisenberg Media In 2020, the world included 412 billionaires, about eight billionaires a week, to take the world total record to 3,228 billionaires, according to
Hurun.< img src=" https://pubads.g.doubleclick.net/gampad/ad?iu=/60923973/mid-article-micro-bar&sz=234x60&c=85099116&tile=1 "width > Hurun’s”Global Rich List 2021 “states that China is retreating from the United States, leading with 1,058 billionaires, compared to 689 billionaires within the U.S. The 2 countries make up over half of the “recognized” billionaires in the world, and Tesla creator Elon Musk became the richest guy in the world for the very first time.
“Despite the disruption brought on by COVID-19, this year has actually seen the most significant wealth boost of the last years,” stated Rupert Hoogewerf, chairman and chief researcher at Hurun, in a declaration. “A stock market boom, driven partly by quantitative easing, and flurry of new listings have actually minted 8 brand-new dollar billionaires a week for the past year.
“The world has actually never ever seen this much wealth created in simply one year, a lot more than maybe could have been anticipated for a year so terribly interfered with by COVID-19,” he said.This marks
the 10th edition of the Hurun Global Rich List, which expresses the wealth modifications of the world’s most successful business owners in the year ending Jan. 15, 2021.
The wealthiest According to the report, Mr. Musk became the richest man on the planet for the very first time, adding $151 billion from Tesla, making his overall worth a $197 billion.Amazon creator and outbound CEO Jeff Bezos, who was the richest man included in the report last year, fell to 2nd location with$189 billion, regardless of having actually included $49 billion to his wealth. Bernard Arnault made third area on the leading richest list. Image credit: LVMH French billionaire and LVMH head Bernard Arnault took 3rd put on the list, with Bill Gates
and Mark Zuckerberg in fifth and 4th location, respectively. Mr. Arnault’s worth is approximated at$114 billion, Mr. Gates’s worth is approximated at$ 110 billion and Mr. Zuckerberg’s worth is at a tape-recorded$101 billion.Luxury sectors flourished, with 2 luxury brands ‘leaders being included in the top 10 of the list for the first time.
Signing Up With Mr. Arnault in the top 10 for the very first time was Bertrand Puech of the French style house Hermès.The COVID-19 pandemic increased billionaires from health care and retail the fastest. The report notes electric vehicles and ecommerce as specific winners from those sectors.Asia presently represents 51 percent of the world’s billionaires and 45 percent of their wealth. The United States and Canada holds 24 percent of the world’s billionaires and 33 percent of their wealth.Retail created more than ten percent of overall wealth in the report. SKP Mall, Bejing. Image credit: VCG Bejing rules the world’s billionaire capital for the 6th year, real estate 145 billionaires. Shanghai is in 2nd place for real estate the most billionaires with 113. 6 of the leading 10 cities with the greatest concentration of billionaires are now in China.Hurun reports that 2,312 billionaires saw their
wealth boost while 635 billionaires saw their wealth decrease.Thirty-two billionaires died and 282 saw their wealth stay the exact same. The average age of billionaires is 59, but 121 billionaires included are forty years younger.the or old report mentions 231 self-made ladies, a boost of 51 from last year. China as soon as again controlled with 66 percent of the world’s self-made women billionaires, led by Zhong Huijuan, CEO of Hansoh Pharmaceutical, worth $23 billion.The richest female worldwide is Alice Walton of Walmart, with a recorded worth of$74 billion.As of March 2021, Jeff Bezos has actually regained the area of richest man worldwide, reporting an existing worth of$183.1 billion at the publication time of this article.Do not bet against billionaires
Experts anticipate the wealth and success of billionaires throughout the world to continue to grow.The ease of access of ecommerce and customer desire to shop have actually added to this continued growth.Internet users are spending more time online, sustaining the development of social shopping.”The Global State of Digital 2021″found that users are balancing seven hours of a day of Internet use, a 9 percent increase from last year (see story). Amazon’s supremacy and the significance of ecommerce have only grown. The COVID-19 pandemic, which shuttered stores for months on
end, further underscored the value of offering high-end items online (see story ).”Don’t bet against the billionaires,” Mr. Hoogewerf stated.”Electric automobiles, ecommerce, blockchain and biotech have actually been the fastest-growing industries of the previous year.”
More than ever, users are relying on Google products to do their jobs, educate their kids, and stay in touch with loved ones. Our Google Product Experts (PEs) play a vital role in supporting these users in community forums, like the Webmaster Help Community, across many languages.
For several years now, we have been inviting our most advanced PEs from around the world to a bi-annual, 3-day PE Summit. These events provide an opportunity not only to share latest product updates with PEs, but also to acknowledge and celebrate their tireless contributions to help our users. As the world was going into lockdown in March, we quickly decided that we don’t want to miss out on this annual celebration. So the summit team shifted focus and started planning an all virtual event which came to be called [email protected]
Through the house-themed virtual event platform, PEs participated in over 120 sessions in the “office”, got a chance to engage with each other and Googlers in the “kitchen”, had fun on the “rooftop” learning more about magic or mixology, and – hopefully – came out feeling reconnected and re-energized. In addition to a large number of general talks, Webmaster PEs were able to attend and ask questions during eight product specific breakout sessions with Search product managers and engineers, which covered topics like page experience, Web Stories, crawling, Image Search, and free shopping listings.
We are truly overwhelmed and grateful for how Webmaster PEs continue to grow the community, connection, and engagement in such a strange time. As a testament to the helpful spirit in the Webmaster community, we were thrilled to present the “Silver Lining Award” for someone who demonstrates a sense of humour and emphasizes the positive side of every situation to one of our own Webmaster PEs.
In the name of all the countless people asking product questions in the forums, we’d like to express our thanks to the patient, knowledgeable, helpful, and friendly Webmaster Product Experts, who help to make the web shine when it comes to presence on Search.
If you want to read more about the summit, check out this summary from a Webmaster PE point of view.
“Great content” yields amazing results — for both organic rankings and paid search ROI. But how is “great” content defined? And more importantly… how is it created?
Join us at SMX Create — online April 13 — for just $99 to find out.
This exclusive one-day event delivers actionable tactics to create compelling content that helps drive awareness, traffic, conversions, and sales. After attending, you’ll be able to…
Develop and execute a successful content strategy
Craft compelling content that supports SEO initiatives
Create visually stunning display ads that grab user attention
Identify winning PPC copy through robust A/B testing
Optimize landing pages for higher conversions
… and that’s just the start. Together with the Search Engine Land experts and special guest speakers, you’ll explore key changes in automation, ML, and AI, their impact on content creation and copywriting, how you can use these technologies to your benefit — and much more.
Check out the full agenda here!
Attend live for the chance to ask speakers your specific content questions, or access all sessions on-demand to train at your convenience.
Hungry for more? Add a two-day, post-conference workshop to your itinerary and dive deep into content marketing for SEO or Google Data Studio.
Register by March 27 to secure your All Access pass for just $99 — or bundle with a workshop for $209.
Psst… Check out the rest of the 2021 SMX lineup, featuring the first-ever 100% virtual SMX Advanced!
About The Author
Lauren Donovan has worked in online marketing since 2006, specializing in content generation, organic social media, community management, real-time journalism, and holistic social befriending. She currently serves as the Content Marketing Manager at Third Door Media, parent company to Search Engine Land, Marketing Land, MarTech Today, SMX, and The MarTech Conference.
Google is going in a privacy-first instructions. Image credit: Google 
Elon Musk made leading area on the Hurun 
for the 6th year, real estate 145 billionaires. Shanghai is in 2nd place for real estate the most billionaires with 113. 6 of the leading 10 cities with the greatest concentration of billionaires are now in China.Hurun reports that 2,312 billionaires saw their
