This collection of social media marketing and new hire announcements is a compilation of the past week’s briefs from our daily Marketing Land newsletter. Click here to subscribe and get more news like this delivered to your inbox every morning.

Instagram Marketing Partner caught scraping data. Instagram has sent HYP3R, one of its former ad partners, a cease-and-desist letter after Business Insider revealed the company was scraping user data. According to Business Insider’s report, the company had taken advantage of “configuration errors and lax oversight” on Instagram’s part, making it possible to harvest a high volume of public user data that was meant to vanish after 24-hours.

An Instagram spokesperson said HYP3R’s actions were not sanctioned and violated its ad policies: “As a result, we’ve removed them from our platform. We’ve also made a product change that should help prevent other companies from scraping public location pages in this way.”

But HYP3R argues it didn’t break the rules, claiming it was accessing public data and that, “Any issue with Instagram would be resolved shortly.” Business Insider said it is unclear how much data HYP3R accessed, but the company claims it has a dataset that includes “hundreds of millions of the highest value consumers in the world.” Sources connected to HYP3R told Business Insider that more than 90% of that data was from Instagram.

Facebook’s latest move to fight ad fraud. Facebook has filed a lawsuit against LionMobi and JediMobi, two app developers accused of click injection fraud on the Facebook Audience Network ad platform. According to Jessica Romero, Facebook’s Director of Platform Enforcement and Litigation, the app developers created apps available via the Google Play store designed to infect users’ phones with malware that produced fake user clicks on Facebook ads.

“Our lawsuit is one of the first of its kind against this practice,” writes Romero on the Facebook Newsroom blog, “Facebook detected this fraud as part of our continuous efforts to investigate and stop abuse by app developers and any abuse of our advertising products. LionMobi and JediMobi have been banned from Audience Network and their accounts have been disabled.” Romero said the advertisers impacted by LionMobi and JediMobi’s ad fraud practices were refunded in March of this year.

Ad fraud continues to be an industry-wide problem, but platforms are paying more attention to publisher and advertiser concerns and taking actions to reduce problematic activity. Google announced this week that Google Ad Manager and AdMob, Google’s mobile ad network, will support IAB Tech Lab’s app-ads.txt anti-fraud protocol for app publishers beginning August 27. When implemented, the app-ads.txt protocol blocks ad serving of unauthorized in-app ad inventory for publishers.

ProKarma expands offerings with latest acquisition. The digital services company ProKarma has acquired Connective DX, a digital experience agency with offices in Portland, Oregon and Boston, Massachusetts. “Together, we will expand on our end-to-end digital capabilities while defining, designing, and engineering best-in-class solutions that transform businesses and elevate the customer experience,” said ProKarma Co-Founder Vijay Ijju.

“It’s a remarkable fit between our two organizations, and I am thrilled to see the meaningful growth potential with our joint teams and clients,” said Connective DX CEO Paul Williams.

Both companies currently have their headquarters in Portland, Oregon. According to the announcement, the acquisition will help “fuel” ProKarma’s expansion into the Northeast U.S., as well as help build out ProKarma’s content and martech capabilities with the addition of Connective DX’s customer-focused solutions.

On the Move

Leo Burnett Chicago has promoted Jordan Doucette to Chief Creative Officer, reporting to the agency’s President and Chief Strategy Officer, Emma Montgomery and Leo Burnett Worldwide’s Chief Creative Officer, Liz Taylor. “Jordan’s open approach to creativity helps deliver great work from big, integrated teams and brands. She is a true partner and is the evolution of what a creative leader needs to be in today’s environment,” said Montgomery. Previously, Doucette held the role of EVP/Executive Creative Director at the agency, and was the creative lead for The Kellogg Company and Miller-Coors accounts. In her new role, she will continue as the creative lead for marquee clients and oversee the agency’s creative and production departments.

Saad Rehmani has been named Vice President of Engineering at Reddit. He is tasked with scaling the company’s engineering organization, optimizing site performance and supporting the launch of new features on the platform. “With the growth of our engineering teams in recent years, we knew we needed someone that had proven themselves in leading large teams with a focus on staying flexible and nimble. Saad has the right mix of experience to evolve and support our teams as they tackle our ambitious plans for the future,” said Reddit CTO Chris Slowe. Rehmani comes to the social platform with more than 15 years of experience leading engineering teams, most recently as the VP of Engineering for GrubHub.

Veracode, an application security testing platform, has named Elana Anderson Chief Marketing Officer. She will report to CEO Sam King and lead the technology company’s global marketing, branding and communications programs. “Elana’s success building global brands in established and emerging markets is a testament to her deep technology expertise and marketing prowess. She is a proven executive with boundless energy and innovative ideas that will help us further our mission to help our customers change the world securely and drive the next chapter of Veracode’s growth,” said King. During her career, Anderson has served as the CMO for Vidyo and SVP of Worldwide Marketing for Demandware.

Craig Stimmel, the former head of digital media and global partnerships for P&G, has been recruited by Snap to serve as its new head of brand partnerships. Based in Chicago, Stimmel will lead efforts to gain bigger budgets from Fortune 500 brands on the social platform, according to Business Insider. Stimmel was with P&G for more than eight years. During his time there, he led efforts to bring more media buying in-house and gathered first-party data from P&G’s own platforms.

Paradigm Talent Agency has named Lori Feldman as its first chief marketing officer. In her new role, Feldman will lead brand partnerships and marketing efforts for clients in the music area, as well as work on enhancing brand and partnership opportunities for the agency’s talent and literary clients. “She is an innovative thinker with vast experience working with artists and brands to create cultural moments that resonate around the world,” said Paradigm CEO Sam Gores. Before joining Paradigm, Feldman served as the executive vice president of strategic marketing for Warner Records.

Pet food company WellPet LLC has appointed Clark Reinhard as its new chief marketing officer. Clark will be charged with accelerating global growth across WellPet’s family of brands and oversee brand management, marketing, advertising and public relations for a number of the company’s product lines. “We’ve strategically invested in brands that are shaping the pet nutrition category and are putting team members in place uniquely experienced to help them flourish,” said the company’s CEO Camelle Kent. “There’s no doubt in my mind Clark will do just that for all of our brands at WellPet.” Reinhard previously led growth strategy efforts, marketing and product innovation at Ocean Spray.

Part two of our article on “Robots.txt best practice guide + examples” talks about how to set up your newly created robots.txt file.

If you are not sure how to create your own robots.txt file or are not sure what one is, head on over to our first part of this article series, “Robots.txt best practice guide + examples” were you will be able to learn the ins and outs of what a robots.txt file is and how to properly set one up. Even if you have been in the SEO game for some time, the article offers a great refresher course.

How to add a robots.txt file to your site

A Robots.txt file is typically stored in the root of your website for it to be found. For example, if your site were https://www.mysite.com, your robots.txt file would be found here: https://www.mysite.com/robots.txt. By placing the file in the main folder or root directory of your site, you will then be able to control the crawling of all urls under the https://www.mysite.com domain.

It’s also important to know that a robots.txt is case sensitive, so be sure to name the file “robots.txt” and not something like Robots.txt, ROBOTS.TXT, robots.TXT, or any other variation with capital letters.

Why a robots.txt file is important

A Robots.txt is just a plain text file, but that “plain” text file is extremely important as it is used to let the search  engines know exactly where they can and cannot go on your site. This is why it is an extremely import part of your website.

Once you have added your brand new robots.txt file to your site or are simply just making updates to your current robots.txt file, it’s important to test it out to make sure that it is working the way that you want.

While there are lots of sites and different tools that you can use to test out your robots.txt file, you can still use Google’s robots.txt file tester in the old version of Search Console. Simply log in to your site’s Search Console, scroll down to the bottom of the page and click on → Go to old version

Then click on Crawl → robots.txt tester

From here, you’ll be able to test your sites robots.txt file by adding the code from your file to the box and then clicking on the “test” button.

If all goes well, the red test button should now be green and should have switched to “Allowed”, once that happens, it means that your new created or modified robots.txt file is valid. You can now upload your robots.txt file to your sites root directory.

Google updates to robots.txt file standards effective Sept 1

Google recently announced that changes are coming to how Google understands some of the unsupported directives in your robots.txt file.

Effective September 1, Google will stop supporting unsupported and unpublished rules in the robots exclusion protocol. That means that Google will no longer support robots.txt files with the noindex directive listed within the file.

If you have used the noindex directive in your robots.txt file in the past to control crawling, there are a number of alternative options that you can use:

Noindex in robots meta tags: Both of these tags are supported in both the HTTP response headers and in HTML. However, the noindex directive is the most effective way to remove URLs from the index when crawling is allowed.

404 and 410 HTTP status codes

Both of these status codes mean that the page does not exist, which will drop any URLs that return this code from Google’s index once they’re crawled and processed.

Password protection

Adding password protection is a great way to block Google from seeing and crawling pages on your site or your site entirely (thinking about a dev version of the site) Hiding a page behind a login will generally remove it from Google’s index as they are not able to fill in the required information to move forward to see what’s behind the login. You can use the Subscription and paywalled content markup for that type of content, but that’s a whole other topic for another time.

Disallow in robots.txt

Search engines can only index pages that they know about (can find and crawl), so by blocking the page or pages from being crawled usually means its content won’t be indexed.  It’s important to remember that Google may still find and index those pages, by other pages linking back to them.

Search Console Remove URL tool

The search console removal tool offers a quick and easy way for you to be able to remove a URL temporarily from Google’s search results. We say temporarily because this option is only valid for about 90 days. After that, your url can again appear in Google’s search results.

To make your removal permanent, you will need to follow the steps mentioned above

• Block access to the content (requiring a password)
• Add a noindex meta tag
• Create a 404 or 410 http status code

Conclusion

Making small tweaks can sometimes have big impacts on your sites SEO and by using a robots.txt file is one of those tweaks that can make a significant difference.

Remember that your robots.txt file must be uploaded to the root of your site and must be called “robots.txt” for it to be found. This little text file is a must have for every website and adding a robots.txt file to the root folder of your site is a very simple process

I hope this article helped you learn how to add a robots.txt file to your site, as well as the importance of having one. If you want to learn more about robots.txt files and you haven’t done so already, you can read part one of this article series “Robots.txt best practice guide + examples.”

What’s your experience creating robots.txt files?

Michael McManus is Earned Media (SEO) Practice Lead at iProspect.

Related reading

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What is considered duplicate content? What steps can you take to make sure it doesn’t hamper your SEO efforts? Pressing SEO questions answered.

If you care about where and how you appear on search engines, Google Search Console and its updates will be of much interest to you.

In part three, we will learn how to automatically group pages using machine learning to recover SEO site traffic using Python.

American society isn’t just more diverse than it’s ever been – that diversity is now highly visible. More than ever, consumers are demanding marketing that pays attention to representation and shows the American public as it is: A huge and varied spectrum of races, bodies, genders and socioeconomic classes.

It’s understandable that some companies are struggling with these new standards – after all, things have changed rapidly in the past decade – but it’s time for anyone who’s been on the fence to start making an active attempt to create better representation in their marketing. Today, we’ll take a look at a few key questions that can help your team create respectful, inclusive and, ultimately, more effective marketing campaigns.

How is diversity defined?

First, let’s talk about what we mean by the term “diversity.” You might hear the word tossed around a lot, but what does it mean on a practical level? Diversity, as we’re going to be discussing it, is:

• Creating spaces and media that are inclusive to people of color, people with disabilities, people outside the gender binary and more.
• Acknowledging the existence of and representing these people in your marketing campaigns.
• Following established best practices for using language about race, gender, disabilities, etc.
• Avoiding harmful stereotypes and not using race, gender or disability as a punchline.

While these definitions will be helpful, it’s equally important to figure out what diversity means to your business specifically. It might mean fixing the representation in your ads when it doesn’t accurately reflect your brand’s demographics, or it might mean taking a stand on an issue that’s important to many people in your audience. For some businesses, it may even mean acknowledging harmful things that have been associated with your brand in the past and taking responsibility for them.

Why does diversity in digital marketing matter?

So, why is it so important that your digital marketing campaigns feature inclusive representation? Several different studies suggest that there are a variety of ways that diversity matters in marketing, including:

• 80 percent of marketers agree that using diverse representation in ads helps a brand’s reputation.
• Millennials and Generation Z consumers alike prefer media with diverse casts, view ads with diverse representation more favorably and are more comfortable with brands taking social stances.
• Aiming products and campaigns at previously unserved markets can create great new revenue streams, as the story of Fenty Beauty’s expanded foundation range shows.
• Diversity and representation are top drivers of engagement with content and Black millennial audiences have actively asked for more in surveys. 

Diversity in digital marketing also has a defensive side. A solid grounding in diversity principles is important for reducing costly gaffes and potential PR disasters such as Dolce & Gabbana’s ill-advised campaign featuring a Chinese woman attempting to eat various American foods with chopsticks. Saying the wrong thing can be much worse than saying nothing at all, and having a diverse staff who are empowered to candidly call out a misstep is the best way to prevent that.

How can you make your digital marketing more diverse?

Unfortunately, there’s no magic wand to wave and create “instant diversity.” Inclusion has to be grown organically from a marketing philosophy that rewards and celebrates it, and that usually requires some long-term work. Some of the diversity steps that marketers can begin taking today include:

• If diversity is like growing a flower garden, you have to prepare the soil first, so the best way is to start with your team. Diversity-centered hiring practices are a subject unto themselves, and if you haven’t yet embraced them, that’s something to work on first. If you don’t have representation on your marketing staff, your representation in your campaigns will suffer. 
• Businesses that already have a diverse team in play should remember that their minority team members aren’t there to rubber-stamp marketing materials as “certified unproblematic.” Make sure that they’re being asked to take the lead on plenty of projects, particularly ones that are aimed at a group they’re a member of. 
• Robust market research can help identify demographics your brand may have been under-serving. Try to understand the specific concerns that motivate people from different cultures and how your marketing may have been missing a beat. Using social media listening services can be a great choice for discovering how a diverse audience relates to your brand on social channels.
• Curate some customer-centered diversity by offering customers a place to upload content related to your brand, such as a YouTube channel. And if you work with social media influencers in your campaigns, you have another great opportunity to improve representation by making the effort to reach out to a demographically varied group of relevant influencers. 

Remember that these aren’t one-and-done tricks to score some easy points. It’s critical to approach diversity as a constant process rather than as an achievement. Keep a running list of improvements you’d like to make and don’t be afraid to add to it.

What mistakes can derail digital marketing diversity?

With issues as potentially sensitive as those surrounding diversity and representation, it’s no surprise that there are some important pitfalls to be aware of and avoid. Some key mistakes many brands make when they’re trying to create inclusion and diversity include:

• Using people as token representatives to pander to a certain group.
• Trying to wade into social issues that are out of your brand’s depth.
• Getting defensive (rather than listening and learning) when your marketing is criticized for lack of diversity or sensitivity.
• Using “victim/hero” language when discussing people with disabilities.
• Not aligning your message and your practice (such as publicly supporting transgender rights when the brand’s physical spaces don’t offer gender-neutral restrooms).

Representational diversity can be a fine line to walk, and it takes practice and commitment. Diversity in marketing is best created from the ground up by a team that already has a culture of inclusion in place. Without a foundational grounding in what it means to be diverse, your efforts will often fall short or backfire. That means that there’s no shortcut – only the hard but extremely rewarding work of building up your business as an inclusive institution.

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

Taking control of a site’s technical SEO is both an art and a science. Take it from me — a content strategist guy at heart — technical SEO requires a balance of knowledge, diligence, and grit to be proficient. And for many, it can feel both daunting and complicated undertaking such technical matters.

But as code-heavy and cumbersome as technical SEO may seem, grasping its core concepts are closely within reach for most search marketers. Yes, it helps to have HTML chops or a developer on hand to help implement scripts and such. However the idea of delivering top-tier technical SEO services shouldn’t feel as intimidating as it is for most agencies and consultants.

To help dial-in the technical side of your SEO services, I’ve shared five places to start. These steps reflect the 80/20 of technical SEO, and much of what I have adopted from my code-savvy colleagues over the past decade.

1. Verify Google Analytics, Tag Manager, and Search Console; define conversions

If you maintain any ongoing SEO engagements, it’s critical to set up Google Analytics or an equally sufficient web analytics platform. Additionally, establishing Google Tag Manager and Google Search Console will provide you with further technical SEO capabilities and information about a site’s health.

Beyond just verifying a site on these platforms, you’ll want to define some KPI’s and points of conversion. This may be as simple as tracking organic traffic and form submissions, or as advanced as setting-up five different conversion goals, such as form submissions, store purchases, PDF downloads, Facebook follows, email sign-ups, etc. In short, without any form of conversion tracking in place, you’re essentially going in blind.

Determining how you measure a site’s success is essential to delivering quality SEO services. From a technical standpoint, both Google Search Console and Analytics can provide critical insights to help you make ongoing improvements. These include crawl errors, duplicate meta data, toxic links, bounce pages, and drop-offs, to name a few.

2. Implement structured data markup

Implementing structured data markup has become an integral element to technical SEO. Having been a topic of focus for Google in recent years, more and more search marketers are embracing ways to employ structured data markup, or Schema, for their clients. In turn, many CMS platforms are now equipped with simple plugins and developer capabilities to implement Schema.

In essence, Schema is a unique form of markup that was developed to help webmasters better communicate a site’s content to search engines. By tagging certain elements of page’s content with Schema markup (i.e. Reviews, Aggregate Rating, Business Location, Person, etc.,) you help Google and other search engines better interpret and display such content to users.

With this markup in place, your site’s search visibility can improve with features like rich snippets, expanded meta descriptions, and other enhanced listings that may offer a competitive advantage. Within Google Search Console, not only can use a handy validation tool to help assess a site’s markup, but this platform will also log any errors it finds regarding structured data.

3. Regularly assess link toxicity

It should be no secret by now that poor quality links pointing to a site can hinder its ability to rank. Even more so, a site that has blatantly built links manually using keyword-stuffed anchor text is at high risk of being deindexed, or removed from Google entirely.

If you just flashed back 10 years to a time when you built a few (hundred?) sketchy links to your site, then consider assessing the site’s link toxicity. Toxic links coming from spammy sources can really ruin your credibility as a trusted site. As such, it’s important to identify and to disavow any links that may be hindering your rankings.

[Not only does the Backlink Audit Tool in SEMRush make it easy to pinpoint potentially toxic links, but also to take the necessary measures to have certain links removed or disavowed.]

If there’s one SEO variable that’s sometimes out of your control, it’s backlinks. New, spammy links can arise out of nowhere, making you ponder existential questions about the Internet. Regularly checking-in with a site’s backlinks is a critical diligence in maintaining a healthy site for your SEO clients.

4. Consistently monitor site health, speed, and performance

An industry standard tool to efficiently pinpoint technical bottlenecks for a site is GTmetrix. With this tool, you can discover key insights about a site’s speed, health, and overall performance, along with actionable recommendations on how to improve such issues.

No doubt, site speed has become a noteworthy ranking factor. It reflects Google’s mission to serve search users with the best experience possible. As such, fast-loading sites are rewarded, and slow-loading sites will likely fail to realize their full SEO potential.

In addition to GTmetrix, a couple additional tools that help improve a site’s speed and performance are Google PageSpeed Insights and Web.Dev. Similar to the recommendations offered by GTmetrix and SEMRush, these tools deliver easy-to-digest guidance backed by in-depth analysis across a number of variables.

The pagespeed improvements provided by these tools can range from compressing images to minimizing redirects and server requests. In other words, some developer experience can be helpful here.

A last core aspect of maintaining optimal site health is keeping crawl errors at a bare minimum. While actually quite simple to monitor, regularly fixing 404 errors and correcting crawl optimization issues can help level-up your technical SEO services. These capabilities are available in the Site Audit Tool from SEMRush.

[The intuitive breakdown of the Site Audit Tool’s crawl report makes fixing errors a seamless process. Users can easily find broken links, error pages, inadequate titles and meta data, and other specifics to improve site health and performance.]

5. Canonicalize pages and audit robots.txt

If there’s one issue that’s virtually unavoidable, it’s discovering multiple versions of the same page, or duplicate content. As a rather hysterical example, I once came across a site with five iterations of the same “about us” page:

• https://site.com/about-us/
• https://www.site.com/about-us/
• https://www.site.com/about-us
• https://site.com/about-us
• http://www.site.com/about-us

To a search engine, the above looks like five separate pages, all with the exact same content. This then causes confusion, or even worse, makes the site appear spammy or shallow with so much duplicate content. The fix for this is canonicalization.

Because canonical tags and duplicate content have been major topics of discussion, most plugins and CMS integrations are equipped with canonicalization capabilities to help keep your SEO dialed-in.

[In this figure, the highly-popular Yoast SEO plugin for WordPress has Canonical URL feature found under the gear icon tab. This simple functionality makes it easy to define the preferred, canonical URL for a given page.]

Similarly, the robots.txt file is a communication tool designed to specify which areas of a website should not be processed or crawled. Here, certain URLs can be disallowed, preventing search engines from crawling and indexing them. Because the Robots.txt file is often updated over time, certain directories or content on a site can be disallowed for crawl and indexation. In turn, it’s wise to audit a site’s Robots.txt file to ensure it aligns with your SEO objectives and to prevent any future conflicts from arising.

Lastly, keep in mind that not all search engine crawlers are created equal. There’s a good chance these pages would still be crawled, but it is unlikely they would be indexed. If you have URLs listed as ‘do not index’ in the robots.txt file, you can rest easy knowing anything in those URLs will not be counted as shallow or duplicate content when the search engine takes measure of your site.

Tyler Tafelsky is a Senior SEO Specialist at Captivate Search Marketing based in Atlanta, Georgia. Having been in the industry since 2009, Tyler offers vast experience in the search marketing profession, including technical SEO, content strategy, and PPC advertising. 

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Agencies are faced with a growing challenge – many of their corporate clients are transforming to agile and the ways they’ve always worked together needs to change, but how?

I’ve seen corporate marketing departments embark on their agile transformation journey, but they forget to tell their agency partners about the change. The agency becomes the last to know and it causes tremendous strain to the relationship.

The agency/client relationship needs to be re-defined when implementing an agile practice. Before you make the same mistakes that many of my clients have, here are some early conversations you can have.

Contracts need to be flexible

A traditional agency/client contract is very detailed in its scope of work. An agile team needs the ability to pivot quickly based on customer responses and if all work is a contractual obligation, this hamstrings the agile team.

Instead of a detailed scope contract, turn to a flexible working agreement. The flexible working agreement is best done in the form of a retainer. Here’s an example of what’s included:

• The goal of the engagement.
• The desired outcomes of the work.
• The people needed to do the work.
• The duration of time the agency will engage with the team.

When an agile team is formed, their goal is to have all of the necessary people to do the work from start-to-finish. However, many companies are still missing key skill-sets internally and need to engage an agency.

So on an agile team, the objective of the agreement should be to beef up some missing skills on the agile team.

The best way that agencies can work with agile teams is to bring the fulltime talent to be embedded with the team. While this may not always be possible, it is a lot more effective for the client to have a few agency team members that can be part of the team than a dozen that swoop in and out. That’s because agile is all about collaboration, teamwork and working together every day. A bunch of agency people that come in and out becomes really inefficient and disruptive to how the team is trying to work.

I worked with a team of content marketers that had some great writers but were missing development and design people on the team. By lending two people to the agile team for a six-week project, it was a win-win for everyone. The agency was able to provide fixed pricing for the needed skills on the team without locking them into specific deliverables.

The relationship becomes a partnership

We just talked about the people that do the work, but I realize that agencies also add tremendous value by helping with strategy, consumer insights and pitching concepts. These are still all great assets to an agile team, but how and when this work is performed takes on a new spin when working with an agile team.

Traditionally, agencies spend a lot of upfront time coming up with a strategy and concepts and presenting a multitude of ideas to their clients.

With agile marketing, the team typically has a product owner (often referred to as a marketing owner in the marketing department) that is responsible for strategy and prioritization of work.

So rather than ideas being pitched to the marketing owner for a reaction, the agency and the marketing owner become a collaborative pair and work through strategy together, ahead of the agile team who is responsible for implementation.

In agile marketing, the team works off of a single prioritized marketing backlog. The marketing owner should work with a single strategist from the agency to help populate the backlog. There may be others engaged from the agency behind the scenes, but to the agile team there should be one primary contact.

The goal of the prioritized marketing backlog is to have the highest value items that the team is going to work on clear and ready to go. However, the backlog really just gets into what the team will work on and some expected outcomes – it’s the team that figures out how the work gets done.

Populating the backlog happens at the beginning of any new initiative and before the team starts implementation, but it isn’t a one-and-done task. The backlog evolves throughout the engagement as the team gets real feedback from stakeholders and customers.

Agencies and companies can be fantastic partners in an agile organization as long as they work together upfront to redefine the relationship in a way that’s flexible and team-based.

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

Ecommerce companies know this to be true, but it bears repeating: the holiday season will be on top of you before you know it, and it’s time to start getting your Q4 plan ready.

There are many reports and analysis you can pull and put together to develop our Q4 plan. Use the summer’s relative slowness to audit your accounts to see if there is anything to improve before the busy season comes. In this post, I’ll walk through five SEO reports that can help set a plan for Q4:

1. YoY (Year-over-Year) Comparison
2. Search Query Report
3. Impression Share
4. Top Products/Top Movers
5. Optiscore

YoY comparison

For many ecommerce companies, the holiday season brings higher volume and spend to your paid media efforts. It’s important to allocate enough budget to keep up with demand on the high-volume days, like Black Friday, Cyber Monday, Green Monday, etc. The first report I pull to start serious holiday prep is a YoY comparison by day for 2017 to 2018 to see what campaigns and dates were the most successful.

It’s never apples to apples, of course; last year, you might have tested a new campaign or strategy that wasn’t tested in 2017, allocated spend across a different number of channels, etc.

Questions that you want to consider with this pull are:

• What did performance look like on high-volume days?
• Could you have spent more to get more return?
• What was the makeup of search, display, and shopping campaigns?
• Should you use your marketing dollars differently this year?
• Did you have holiday-specific keywords, products, campaigns, etc., that need to be reactivated this year?

Search query reports

Google has recently made changes to close variant matching. I have noticed some shifts in matching and budget allocation across different campaigns and a wider range of irrelevant matches. Search query reports will help to identify irrelevant matching to find keywords to negate and opportunities for new keywords to build out before the holiday rush.

Impression share reports

It’s important to understand what your impression share looks like currently and what it looked like over the last holiday season. If you’re paying attention, you’ll see competitors come in and out of the auction during different points of the year, and you’ll see competition increase during Q4. Impression share reports from the 2018 holidays will help you anticipate potential competitors as budgets increase. Note that Google has introduced additional metrics for impression share now that average position will be sunsetted. These metrics include absolute top impression share and top impression share. Current impression share reports will help you understand and prioritize areas where you should increase impression share, both now and going into Q4.

Top products

To accommodate the upcoming spike in search volume, spend, and conversions, you have to be armed with a large inventory of your top products, including last holiday season’s top products, your current top products, and any highly seasonal products. I recommend that you pull Shopping performance of top products by item id in the Google Ads UI or pull a report in Google Analytics to understand top products across all platforms.

OptiScore

Google has rolled out a new product to all accounts that will help find areas of opportunity and easy wins to keep accounts successful as the holiday season rolls in. OptiScore provides recommendations to advertisers to include bids and budgets, recommendations for keywords, and recommendations for ads and ad extensions. I’ve generally found these to be helpful – at least worth testing! – and make a habit of checking every week or two to get new suggestions.

OptiScore can be found under the Recommendations tab in the Google UI:

This is an easy way to make sure that accounts are set up for success; it will alert you if you have ad groups that aren’t serving because they don’t have active ads or keywords, provide budget suggestions, and give you an anticipated number of conversions with an increase in budget. It is very easy to apply the suggestions with a click of the button, which saves you time during the busy season.

You can get lost in a sea of reports if you’re trying to find levers to use this holiday season. It’s important to prepare by understanding historical performance to anticipate this year’s performance by looking at efficient campaigns and areas from 2018 and pulling back in inefficient areas.

Make sure to spend time auditing and optimizing accounts now: pull SQRs, make sure all campaigns have ad extensions, and double-check active ad groups for active keywords and good copy. With the correct preparation and plan in place, your Q4 will be less chaotic and more profitable.

Lauren Crain is a Client Services Lead in 3Q Digital’s SMB division, 3Q Incubate.

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It’s not exactly news that programmatic advertising, automation and agency consolidation have upended the media industry. Such changes have been well documented (as well as felt personally by many of our colleagues).

But change, like time, marches on, and these trends continue to turn the media world upside down. Exhibit A: the sales organizations of media and digital ad tech companies that sell to agencies. Programmatic and consolidation have imposed a new sales team structure, though many not quite realize it yet. Any organization that sells to agencies, and seek that all-important master services agreement (MSA) with any of the holding companies, will need to adapt their organizations to the new reality.

In the old days (by which I mean just a few years ago), the sales organization inside of a media company, ad network or any other entity that sold into an agency needed to be vertically aligned with the agency. For instance, GroupM has many agencies under its umbrella, and some of those agencies have multiple sub-agencies. Each agency, and sometimes even the sub-brands, acted as separate entities to sign their own contracts with media owners (or ad networks and digital ad companies).

To support these multiple contracts, the media sales organizations had layers of employees. There are executive-level salespeople who negotiated and signed I/Os with an agency or sub-agency; senior-level managers who oversaw the relationship; and legions of staff who took care of the day-to-day business of processing I/Os, executing campaigns and providing general agency support.

But as programmatic took off, as agency consolidation accelerated, and as brands began to squeeze margins, the holding companies realized they needed to drive efficiency. One strategy  — which is occurring as I write this — is to replace the multiple I/Os with a global MSA at the holding company level. This approach requires less administrative overhead, lends itself to the potential of automation and provides both sides more ability to negotiate services and costs with the sellers.

As a result of global MSAs, seller sales teams can function with a new streamlined staff. They essentially need executive-level employees to negotiate the global MSAs, a rank and file sales staff who can provide the day-to-day support to get deals closed and live.

This change is notable for a few reasons. First, contrary to popular belief, programmatic and automation haven’t eliminated jobs, though it has changed the jobs themselves. Sell-side sales team members are just as busy as ever, albeit they’re doing different things.

Second, the required skill set of the executive-level salesperson is now far more complex. It’s one thing to negotiate an MSA with a sub-agency, it’s another animal altogether to negotiate one across a global holding company that spans many countries and sectors. Add to that, the holding companies are bombarded with requests for MSAs, and the executive level salesperson must figure out a way to distinguish his or her company from the rest of the pack. That takes some imagination and foresight.

What does this mean for sales organizations?

Without a doubt, sales organizations need to position themselves to this new world order. Doing so requires three main actions. First, they must organize around an executive-level salesperson who has the necessary skills to make those MSAs happen.

Next, that executive must learn and understand what it takes to create those agreements and get those deals signed. This isn’t an easy task given that the individual must understand the inner workings of a holding company along with their requirements for brand safety, SLAs, measurement, verification and so on. Add to that, this executive must articulate to the holding company why his or her company is unique and worthy of the MSA.

Finally, some reorganization is required. The senior-level salesperson, in particular, will need to be redeployed, as his or her function is essentially going away. I suspect many or most have tech skills that can easily be repurposed within their organizations.

I share this insight based on our team’s experiences working with agencies in the sincere hope that sales organizations begin making the necessary adjustments so they can be even more successful selling in ideas, concepts and products so that they can grow their businesses.

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

Microsoft has acquired vendor marketing platform PromoteIQ. PromoteIQ is an automated product marketing platform that enables brand manufacturers to run sponsored ads on participating retailers’ e-commerce sites to generate visibility and revenue from those sites. The company offers analytics dashboards both retailers and advertisers to track campaign performance.

Sponsored product ads bought through PromoteIQ appear on retailer’s e-commerce sites.

The capability is similar to that of HookLogic, which was acquired in 2016 by Criteo. Google experimented with running its product listing ads on retailer sites through a program called AdSense for Shopping, but it hasn’t gone anywhere since launching in 2014. Amazon, and now Walmart, have their own sponsored product ad offerings.

Why we should care

Programs aimed at supporting retail customers is an area of focus for Microsoft, and the PromoteIQ acquisition fits into this effort. Microsoft is looking to pair its AI and machine learning technologies with PromoteIQ’s targeted ad placement capabilities and expects the integrations to be completed later this year. Additionally, it can help Microsoft Advertising address consistent calls from advertisers for more reach.

Microsoft Advertising offers product ads on Bing.com, but its limited reach put its reach behind Google and Amazon. PromoteIQ’s portfolio of clients includes thousands of global brands and retailers.

“PromoteIQ has pioneered the private marketplace approach to digital vendor marketing. PromoteIQ’s technology strategically complements Microsoft’s current retail advertising offerings, and together, we can enable retailers with a portfolio of technology solutions to modernize their e-commerce platforms and maximize their monetization opportunity,” said Rik van der Kooi, corporate vice president of Microsoft Advertising.

More on the news: 

• PromoteIQ will keep its own branding and become a division within Microsoft Advertising.  Terms of the deal have not been provided at this time.
• Kroger, Kohl’s and Overstock.com are among PromoteIQ’s current retailer customers.  
• PromoteIQ advertisers include Sony, P&G, Kraft and HP.