Global ad tech provider Centro announced Tuesday that it will be enforcing app-ads.txt in its DSP, Basis. As part of an industry-wide effort to mitigate fraudulent ad selling, Basis will now default to targeting app ads from authorized and validated sellers.

The app-ads.txt specification, launched earlier this year by the IAB Tech Lab, allows app publishers to take advantage of the ads.txt protocol by linking their app store listings to their websites and uploading a text file listing authorized sellers to their back end. It’s also designed for connected TV (CTV) inventory sellers, but CTV app stores don’t yet support it.

“Authorization and validation of sellers is an important step in creating brand-safe environments for marketers,” said Ian Trider, director of RTB platform operations at Centro. “As app-ads.txt gains wider adoption and as other DSPs follow our lead, there will be fewer and fewer opportunities for fraudulent entities in the digital media ecosystem.”

Why we should care

Centro joins Google, which said DV360 will stop buying unauthorized app inventory as identified by app-ads.txt files. As more DSPs start enforcing it, app publishers will be under more pressure to implement it so as not to miss out on revenue as the industry pushes for wider adoption.

More on the news

• Agencies using Basis will no longer be able to submit open market bids on mobile app inventory from unauthorized suppliers when app developers have implemented the app-ads.txt file.
• Now, bidding only occurs on supply paths explicitly authorized by app publishers.
• Enforcement is automatic, meaning there are no additional fees needed from agencies and media teams in order to bid on authorized inventory.

As regular users of the Internet, we all want what we’re searching for to appear instantly. Therefore, in 2010, Google released the PageRank algorithm, which made website and page speed a high ranking factor for crawlers to assess and rank in search engine results pages.

53% of mobile site visits leave a page that takes longer than three seconds to load.

Throughout the digital years, a distinct correlation has become evident between page speed and visitor retention and bounce rate. And with visitor retention becoming increasingly important in terms of meeting revenue goals and other annual targets, page speed is one of the most vital focus areas for customer experience today.

Performing page speed tests should be a high priority (if it isn’t already) for your website. Looking at it from Google’s perspective, if your pages take an age to load, the search engine is not able to crawl as many pages, which results in Google using its crawl budget ineffectively, potentially negatively impacting your site’s organic performance.

The many benefits of boosting page speed

The benefits of improving your site’s page load speed are myriad and fall into three key areas.

1. Improved user experience

• Google reported that just a one-second delay in load time will decrease visitors’ satisfaction by 16%, and 79% of those users will not buy your product or service if they aren’t satisfied by your overall website performance.
• Many users nowadays will abandon a website if it performs poorly, particularly if a page takes a substantial amount of time to load. By having quick loading pages, you can resonate more with users by leaving them free to navigate and explore your site’s content.

2. Better overall marketing performance

• Whether your goal is to improve your overall conversion rate for a “consideration” page or to reduce your bounce rate on a particular page to below 30%, there is plenty of evidence to suggest that a speedy website greatly contributes towards achieving these goals.
• In the UK, studies have shown that 67% of online shoppers will abandon their shopping basket on a slow website. However, if you improve a page’s load time by just one second, this can result in an uplift in the conversion rate of between 10 – 20%.
• If you’re aiming to achieve higher website traffic to a certain page, such as your “best sellers” or possibly a new blog post you’ve just published, page speed is one of the many factors you should take into consideration when trying to achieve this type of goal. Google studies have in fact shown that by having a delay of half a second can cause a 20% loss in traffic.

3. Enhanced SERP positioning

• Back to Google’s PageRank algorithm update – as mentioned this took into account page loading time and overall website speed, amongst other measures such as page views, so a focus on page speed is vital if you want to rank in the SERPs.
• What’s more, if your web pages load quickly, Google crawlers are able to search through your website at a faster rate. This means that more individual pages stand a chance at ranking in a SERP.

Eight steps to speed up your site

Page speed can be improved through a variety of different methods that will allow you to quickly see the true potential of your business’ website.

1. Compress files

For compressing files, a highly recommended tool to use is Gzip. Gzip allows you to reduce the size of HTML or CSS files among others, reducing overall HTTP response time. However, do not use Gzip on image files, as this may affect image quality.

2. Reduce redirects

Having a lot of redirects on your site results in more HTTP requests, which can translate into a reduction in page speed. Additionally, don’t neglect to fix broken links which can massively impact the user experience.

3. Remove render-blocking JavaScript

In terms of your website structure, try to refrain from the use of render-blocking JavaScript, including external scripts which are fetched before they can be executed. When scripts are inputted for rendering page content, they can be used to avoid extra network requests.

For faster page speed, the content needs to be smaller in terms of quantity and must execute at a fast rate to deliver a good performance. Also, if certain scripts are not critical to render straight away, they should be made to be asynchronous or deferred until the first render has completed.

4. Leverage browser caching

Each time a user visits a website, it collects a cache which involves information about the stylesheets, images, JavaScript and more. This is so when a visitor visits this website again, it doesn’t have to reload the entire page.

This benefits page speed, as this saves on time spent sending multiple HTTP requests to the server. An additional benefit is the reduction of bandwidth and therefore the overall cost of hosting your site.

5. Improve server response time

When reviewing your server response time, many factors can affect its rate, including everything from the amount of traffic your website receives, to the type of software your server uses and the hosting solution you require.

As a ballpark figure, you should be aiming towards a time of under 200ms. This can be done by reviewing different performance metrics and looking out for things like slow routing, lack of memory or slow database requests.

6. Make the most of content distribution networks (CDNs)

One of the main benefits of using CDNs is that they consist of multiple networks, which each make a copy of the website. This is then stored into multiple geographical data centers that provide users with faster and more reliable access to your site.

7. Ensure all images are optimized

When importing images into your website, be sure to use the correct size and file format (PNGs for graphics which are less than 16 colors and JPEGs for photographs), as well as ensuring they are compressed for web purposes. The volume of images used across your website can also affect page load time.

If your website is image-heavy, one solution is to combine the images together into fewer output files by using CSS Sprites. This will reduce latency and result in improvements to your page speed because it reduces any possibility of a delay or the number of round trips produced.

8. Minimize wasted white spaces

If you have white space, line returns or even comment tags, HTML and text can accumulate and increase your page size by 10 – 20%, negatively impacting page load time. It’s therefore worth reviewing your pages and examining each line of code to make the suitable amendments required to maximize performance.

Reviewing success and continually improving

Once you’ve taken some of the measures outlined above, it’s important to keep a close eye on your website’s performance, in order to identify any areas that require further improvement. Here are just some of the tools at your disposal.

Pingdom Speed Test

Pingdom’s Website Speed Test provides reports that are categorized into four areas: Waterfall breakdown, performance grade, page analysis, and history. By having such a comprehensive breakdown of your website’s performance, this allows you to not only complete a simple speed check but also see a useful overview with additional metrics, such as size analysis, size per domain or what type of content has the most requests.

Furthermore, you are able to narrow down your results by content type, page size by domain, requests by content type and requests by domain – therefore, you are able to identify exactly which pages are performing best – and worst.

Google PageSpeed Insights

The PageSpeed Insights tool by Google provides you with page insights into how well your website is performing in terms of speed, with a grade given on a scale of 1 to 100. This completes a review on both desktop and mobile versions of your website, by completing a page speed test. Anything above 85 indicates that your website is performing well.

The insights measure your page in two parts: Time to above-the-fold content to load and time to full page load.

GTmetrix

Another free tool, GTmetrix goes into great detail about both page speed and YSlow metrics by dividing reports into five sections: Page speed, YSlow, waterfall breakdown, video, and history.

The difference between this tool and other tools available like Google PageSpeed Insights is that you can test and compare your performance against different connection set-ups like cable or dial-up to see how it affects your page load time.

Optimizing page speed is crucial in today’s digital environment when users expect what they’re searching for to appear straight away. Therefore businesses of all sizes need to take advantage of the available SEO tools and tactics in order to adapt and compete with their peers on the search engine results pages.

Mae-Lei King is an SEO Account Executive at global digital agency Croud, based in their Shrewsbury office.

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Facebook announced Tuesday that it will be removing thousands of outdated and infrequently used interest targets such as old movie and band names and other older cultural references.

The vast majority of advertisers won’t notice the removals, said Graham Mudd, VP of product marketing for ads at Facebook, in an interview Monday.

The interest targets will be deprecated across all Facebook Ads interfaces, including APIs.

Timing of the removals. The interest targets will no longer be available for new campaigns. For those advertisers who are using any of the targets that are being removed in their existing ad sets will be notified starting in August that the targets can no longer be used. The interest targets will be allowed to run for a few months or so (a specific date hasn’t been determined) before advertisers will be prompted to change their targets.

Why we should care. There may be some edge cases that this will affect (specific memorabilia, perhaps?) if these are rarely used targets, but as Mudd said, most advertisers likely won’t notice the removals. Clearing out the clutter of older interest targets makes sense from a maintenance perspective for Facebook. For advertisers, it could also make interest selection easier without having to wade through so many options.

Mudd said this is part of an effort — such as the new Business Manager redesign and News Feed ad aspect ratio changes — to make the platform easier and more consistent to use and that advertisers should expect to see continued focus on streamlining processes and features.

Google is synonymous with search, but there are many different ad types available to Google advertisers that don’t require keyword targeting at all.

In fact, Google Ads can be a particularly powerful tool for marketers who want to test different digital ad types without the complexity of managing multiple publishers. While Google isn’t quite a one-stop-shop for all digital advertising, it comes close.

So, if you want to expand your digital advertising strategy beyond keyword targeting, but aren’t ready to venture beyond Google, here are some tactics you can test from within your Google Ads account.

Display ads

Google’s display network (GDN) is comprised of over two million websites and reaches 90% of global internet users. Display ads come in a variety of flavors, but for the purpose of categorization, when I refer to display ads, I mean banners and text ads (as opposed to video ads) which run on websites such as blogs, YouTube and within apps.

Display ad placement examples—source: Google Ads

Google’s display network is vast and gives advertisers a lot of options when it comes to ad formats. These include:

• Animated and nonanimated image ads
• AMP HTML (mobile-optimized) ads
• HTML5 ads
• Responsive image ads
• Text ads
• Video ads (I’ll address these separately)

You can find a complete list of ad specifications here.

Display ads can be targeted in a variety of ways including (but not limited to) keywords. However, keep in mind that keyword targeting on display isn’t the same as keyword targeting on search.

Display advertising is based on context, so ads don’t appear based on a user’s search query, but show up passively beside content that is contextually relevant to an advertiser’s specified keywords. That’s why it’s helpful to use targeting criteria that focus on topics, interests, and demographics (in addition to or instead of keywords).

Image Source: Google Ads

Display ads can also be targeted by interest or affiliation targeting or by selecting specific websites (placements). Advertisers can select multiple targeting criteria to narrow down the volume of impressions and clicks or cherry-pick one or two types of targeting for broader reach campaigns more suitable for branding than response.

Example of topics available for Google Display targeting—Image source: Google Ads

Google’s display network offers the same basic versatility as a third-party programmatic display vendor such as Adroll or Sitescout. Since there’s no minimum spend requirement, advertisers can experiment with ad formats, different targeting criteria, and creative while reaching a large audience.

Video ads

Video ads are shown on YouTube and the GDN. Advertisers can choose from a variety of different ad types and formats when promoting videos on YouTube. These include the display, overlay, skippable video, non-skippable video, and bumper ads.

Image Source: Google Ads

YouTube reaches an astounding one billion users and ads can be targeted in a variety of ways from within the Google Ads platform. These include broader targeting criteria such as basic demographics and more detailed demographics (For example college students, homeowners, and others).

YouTube also supports interest targeting, affinity audiences (people who have a strong interest in related topics), life events, remarketing audiences, placements/channels, topics, keywords, and devices.

While keywords-targeting is available on YouTube, it’s not essential. Adding keywords to your YouTube targeting can reduce the volume of impressions, so it’s a tactic that should be monitored closely as it can often hobble a campaign (in terms of reach).

Shopping ads

Shopping campaigns rely on merchant product feeds rather than keywords for targeting. They’re currently the only ad type that incorporates images on Google’s search results pages.

Retailers can showcase key aspects of a given product in a shopping ad including a product photo, title, price, store name, product review, and more.

Shopping ads rely on Merchant Center product data to display in the search results. They’re dynamic, in that Google will show the ads most relevant to a user’s query based on details in the merchant feed (rather than keywords the merchant bids on). The three types of shopping ads available include:

• Product shopping ads—Created using the data in your merchant center feed. These ads appear at the top of Google’s search results or on the Shopping search results page on Google.

Example of Product Shopping Ads—Image source: Google Ads

• Local catalog ads—These ads use the feed data from local inventory ads on the GDN and drive traffic to local stores.
• Showcase shopping ads—These shopping ads allow merchants to group related products together and view them side by side in the search results (see the example below).

Example of a Showcase Shopping Ad—Image Source: Google Ads

Google Shopping campaigns are created within the Google Ads interface, but an important first step is for retailers to create a Google Merchant Center account then set up a product feed.

App promotion

Google has a specific campaign type for advertisers that want to promote app downloads and in-app purchases. App campaigns on use text assets from an app’s Google Play store listing, although some text is required to set up the ad.

App ads are eligible to run on Google Search, Google Play, YouTube, GDN, AdMob, and other publishers that host app ads. App ads feature an “Install” button that, when clicked, links to the store page for the given app.

Remarketing and audience targeting (Personalized advertising)

Remarketing and audience targeting aren’t isolated to a specific campaign type but can be applied across most campaigns. Note that some categories such as gambling and healthcare are prohibited from using Google’s personalized advertising features. Personalized advertising is worth mentioning as a separate targeting criterion (above and beyond keyword targeting) because it’s a powerful way for advertisers to connect with interested prospects.

Remarketing, in its simplest form, is a way to show ads on external websites or apps to people who have visited your website in the past. Advanced remarketing is more dynamic and personalized. It enables advertisers to show specific products or services in ads based on what users viewed on their website. Video remarketing shows ads on Google and the GDN to people who have interacted with videos on an advertiser’s YouTube channel.

Google also allows advertisers to upload customer data (e.g., customer list remarketing) taken from their internal customer contact information. These ads will only show when the user is logged into their Google account and can be a very effective way to reach interested consumers.

Audience targeting is a form of personalized advertising that allows advertisers to create audience lists that serve custom ads. Audience lists are set up in Google Ads as remarketing lists and assigned at the campaign level. Advertisers can also expand their reach with affinity targeting, which targets display, search, or video ads based on user interests, habits or intent (for example, what they’re actively searching for).

Details on different audience list types and setup information can be found here.

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Google revealed a number of Pixel 4 features Monday, including facial recognition and hands-free controls thanks to Google’s Soli project. In a blog post, Google detailed how Pixel 4 owners will be able to use Motion Sense to execute commands like skipping songs and snoozing alarms by waving their hand. The post implied that this is only the beginning of Motion Sense, and that we can expect to see updates to new Pixel releases in the future. It also described its new approach to facial recognition technology, data privacy and security.

Why we should care

We’ve all witnessed and experienced how new and emerging technologies influence consumer behavior; from liking posts on social networks to how we interact with brands across digital properties, the past decade has seen a tremendous shift in how technology drives consumers.

The Pixel 4’s Motion Sense feature uses a miniature radar located on the phone that will sense when its owner is nearby and be able to recognize hand gestures. If our customers are no longer touching their phones, how will they engage with our brands? We may be looking into a future where we’ll be optimizing mobile campaigns for hands-free touchpoints. 

As future versions of the Pixel are developed, Motion Sense evolves and other smartphone makers experiment with hands-free gestures, we can expect that the features will evolve to ensure digital advertisers’ and marketers’ messages will reach consumers in interactive ways that are beyond today’s functionalities.

More on the news

Google also shared updates on the Pixel 4’s face unlock and privacy and security features:

• Face unlock uses algorithms and sensors to recognize the phone’s owner, unlock and open it while the individual picks up their phone.
• Face unlock can also be used to transact secure payments and app authentication.
• The facial recognition technology is processed on the device using Pixel’s Titan M security chip and never leaves the phone to ensure it remains secure. It will never be saved or shared with other Google services.
• The Soli sensor data is also stored on the phone and never shared or saved with other Google services.

Link building is hard. Anyone who says otherwise has either not done much of it, or they’re trying to sell you a course.

To make it even harder, there are a million supposed link building hacks and tactics on the web – and most of them are pretty bad. A quick Google search will net you a treasure trove of stale email templates and tactics like link reclamation that either trick you into believing them because they rank well in search, or make you wonder why articles like that don’t have an expiration date.

When it comes down to brass tacks, there are really only two broad strategies for increasing your link building effectiveness, both of which come from a framework using BJ Fogg’s behavior model:

• Increase motivation (make them want to link to you more) or
• Decrease friction (make it easier for them to link to you)

Link building is a critical part of SEO, whether your website is small or large.

Here’s how you can use BJ Fogg’s framework to really improve your link building strategies – despite what your Google searches are telling you.

What is BJ Fogg’s behavior model?

BJ Fogg’s behavior model illustrates that three elements must converge at the exact same moment for a behavior to occur: “Motivation”, “Ability”, and a “Prompt”. When the desired behavior is not performed, one or more of these elements is missing.

Source: Behaviormodel.org

Each of these elements is comprised of subcomponents. For example, “Core Motivators” will shape the “Motivation” element, “Simplicity Factors” define the “Ability” element, and each of these will work together in the context of the “Prompt”.

“Motivation” and “Ability” share a compensatory relationship in that when one is high, the other can be low and still achieve the desired results. For example, if something is hard to do, success can still be achieved if the motivation is high enough.

When this model is applied to link building, your best chance at securing a quality link is to either increase someone’s motivation to link to you or decrease friction to make it easier to link to you.

Let’s dive in.

Method one: Increase motivation

If you’re trying to increase motivation, you need to figure out how to influence how much the blogger or publisher wants to give you a link. The main way to do that is to produce really amazing content. That’s really a pre-requisite, for any long term content program, you can’t cut corners on content quality.

Outside of that, though, there are several ways to increase the blogger’s motivation to give you a link to that amazing content:

1. Build reciprocity and play the long game

Creating strong relationships is a clear path to increasing motivation. Your strategic partners can be an “in” to new markets or audiences, and ideally, you’ll be able to offer the same benefit to them.

As marketing strategist Mark Lindquist of Mailshake notes, when forming strategic partnerships, it’s not just about building high-profile relationships – it’s about working with the right people.

“I’m not at all concerned about the social following of someone as an indication of whether or not they’re worth connecting with,” he says. “Figure out what your goals are, find the people who can help you accomplish those goals, and build relationships with them.”

Guest posting is a great way to start building these relationships, but it’s also important to go to meetups, get on calls, and generally build your network and help others out. A good rule is to offer something of value first before asking for something in return. It’s a long game, but it will ultimately result in a win-win for everyone involved.

2. Offer clear incentives

‘What’s in it for me?”

This is the ultimate question at the center of almost any transaction or conversation in marketing and business, and for good reason. Mercy and gratitude won’t get the job done. You need to push the self-interest button to spur action.

If someone is devoting time and resources to help you, they’ll want to know that it’s worth their efforts. What incentives can you offer?

If you have a large social following, use it as leverage in the deal. They can tap into your audience and essentially get free exposure if they’re willing to do the same for you.

3. Give them something truly helpful

If your content genuinely helps someone improve their own content, it’s a much easier sell than a stale pitch of “My content is slightly better than what you already link to”. Here’s what better content could look like:

New original research

At Hubspot, we did some original research with the goal of getting some links back to our forms product. We published a blog post with the findings, and it was pretty easy to pick up some links because the data was new and interesting to bloggers.

Source: ahrefs

Exclusive quotes and interviews

Working with influencers is a strategy that works for tons of companies like DataBox, BigCommerce, and Mailshake.

For example, Smart Blogger uses round-up pieces to boost social shares and connect with influencers. They reached out to bloggers asking for their best tips on how to promote a blog, and the final article became one of their most successful posts at that time with more than 4,000 shares.

New images and graphs

Infographics and images can become outdated just as easily as blog text. As new research and information become available, images and infographics should be adjusted to reflect it.

I think the infographic link building tactic is sometimes overdone, but it can still work if you do it right. It’s best when you’re summarizing new data or complex information in a simple and interesting way. A great example is Pique Tea’s guide to intermittent fasting (a complex subject):

Source: blog.piquetea.com

SEO Smarty’s case study shows how they shared an infographic at scale using MyBlogGuest to get it in front of potential publishers (they earned 10 links from this method, by the way).

Or, you could do this the old-fashioned way by posting your infographic to your own blog, sharing seed content on social media, and reaching out to potential publications that could use it.

Anything that genuinely improves their content, ask yourself – “How can I improve tons of people’s content by creating something new?”

What questions do you have while reading content that goes unanswered? Could something you’ve written help to clarify?

LawnStarter does this well with their original research and data analysis pieces. For example, their blog post on the beneficial insects for your lawn includes backlinks to reputable sources for more information without distracting from the overall content.

Method two: Decrease friction

The other link building method is to lower the friction or the inherent effort it takes someone to give you a link. Your goal should be to make things as easy as possible for the person on the other side.

1. Make your outreach emails as clear as possible

Good email outreach means that the person on the other end of your email shouldn’t have to figure out what you’re trying to say. If they don’t understand your request, they probably won’t respond to it.

Keep it simple and professional, but don’t be afraid to infuse a little personality, either:

Image Source

There’s no need for mystery or ulterior motives. Ask for what you want, and tell them why you’re asking for it.

2. Deliver your quote or link fully formatted and ready to go

Give publishers as little work to do as possible. This not only makes it easy for them to do what you want, but it also ensures the quality of the final results. Your link or quote looks just as you want it to, the anchor text is spot-on, and you can reach back out with a genuine “Thank you”.

Other sources you can tap into are HARO or even Slack groups where people are actively looking for quotes. This is a super low-friction way to get links – for you and the publisher – because the barrier to entry is low.

3. Provide free content by guest posting

Guest posting remains one of the most effective, low-friction ways to earn backlinks. If your post is good, the publisher has zero work to do other than hit “Publish”.

If you can write a good guest post, you’re giving someone content for free, which is a win-win. Many publishers have a dedicated contributor program, but even if you don’t see one on their website, they still may accept guest posts with a good pitch.

Also, don’t forget to reduce friction in your own process. Use a cold email tool like Mailshake and a good CRM like HubSpot to automate and track all of your efforts, and remove much of the guesswork on outreach and follow-up.

BJ Fogg’s behavior model has been applied to a myriad of practical use cases, but its potency for effective link building is hard to ignore. Increasing someone else’s motivation and decreasing friction might not help you earn every link you pursue, but it can help you win bigger and lose smaller the more you do it.

Alex Birkett is a Senior Growth Marketing Manager at HubSpot, where he focuses on freemium user growth. He can be found on Twitter @iamalexbirkett.

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Twitter generated $727 million in ad revenue during the second quarter of 2019, a 21% increase year-over-year. The company reports total ad engagements were up 20% year-over-year. The platform’s ad engagement growth rate has been in decline since this time last year when it saw an 81% lift in ad engagement growth.

Twitter’s U.S. ad revenue up 24%. Twitter CFO Ned Segal said the lift in Twitter’s advertising revenue was driven by strength in U.S. revenues, which rose 24% year-over-year to $455 million.

“Focusing on our most important ad products and delivering high performing ads will help advertisers launch something new and connect with what’s happening on Twitter,” said Segal. Twitter didn’t specify which products it was referring to, but in April 2018, Twitter reported video ads accounted for more than half of its quarterly revenue.

Ad engagement growth versus cost per engagement. Twitter’s total ad engagements for the quarter were up 20% year-over-year, but cost per engagement (CPE) remained flat.

Tracking the two data points over the past ten quarters shows that ad engagement growth rates have declined, while the “drops” in CPE are shrinking. Last quarter, Twitter reported CPEs fell 4% year-over-year and were flat this quarter compared to the previous year. This time last year, Twitter reported a 32% drop in CPE.

Twitter’s “monetized” DAU count. Twitter’s mDAUs reached 139 million during the second quarter of 2019 — an increase of five million from the first quarter of this year, and 17 million more than the second quarter of 2018.

In the U.S., mDAUs reached 29 million during the second quarter, which means U.S. users make up just over a fifth of Twitter’s total user base. This number grew by only a million since the first quarter of the year — and 3 million year over year.

Last quarter, Twitter announced it would no longer report monthly active users (MAUs) stats, sharing only on the new monetized daily active user (mDAU) metric it introduced in February. The move was in part to compensate for the slide in MAU numbers, which Twitter said resulted from its efforts to improve the health of the platform. Twitter defines its mDAUs as authenticated users it is able to show ads to who have accessed Twitter via the app or desktop application.

Why we should care. Twitter has put much of its focus during the past year cleaning up the platform and ridding timelines of malicious activity and spam in an effort to provide a safer environment for brands and advertisers. Many argue those efforts have gone far enough, but it appears to be making an impact on the adveritsing front.

CEO Jack Dorsey said the health of the platform remains the top priority for the company. “Our focus was on ensuring that our rules, and how we enforce them, are easy to understand. We also continued our work to proactively identify and address malicious behavior, resulting in an 18% drop in reports of spammy or suspicious behavior,” said Dorsey.

Amazon’s advertising business had it’s second $3 billion quarter in the second quarter of 2019. (Or close to it — Amazon advertising revenues make up the majority of an “Other” revenue category in its earnings reports.) The first was the holiday fourth quarter last year.

While $3 billion in an off-holiday, non-Prime Day quarter is a milestone, growth is coming back down to earth. Second-quarter ad revenue increased 37% from the previous year, the second-straight quarter of relatively mild growth compared to the triple-digits Amazon recorded in much of 2018.

Not surprisingly, Amazon’s biggest advertising market continues to be North America, the only market where several of the latest advertising tools are available. But, the company is eyeing international advertising growth with product expansions and measuring “around improving relevancy on each of those geographic websites,” said Dave Fildes, Amazon director of investor relations, on the earnings call.

On the Sizmek acquisition. Amazon acquired Sizmek’s ad server and dynamic creative optimization in June. The acquisition will enable advertisers to use Amazon’s data from searches and purchases to target audiences beyond its own properties. Sizmek continues to operate independently, but executives said they’re looking long-term at the investment.

“We’re invested in the long-term success of Sizmek. And again, Amazon advertising and Sizmek has many mutual customers, so we know how valued these prudent solutions are to the customer base,” said Fildes. “So we’re looking forward to working with that team and we’ll share more updates as we invent and create new opportunities to serve advertisers in the future.”

On video advertising. Amazon continues to focus on video content. In fact, Amazon’s marketing expenses rose 48% year-over-year in the second quarter, which was in part due to “more and more advertising as we roll out devices and Prime Video — new Prime Video content, in particular internationally,” said Brian Olsavsky.

That should mean more brand opportunities as Amazon makes more video supply available across its properties, including OTT video supply, the company said. That includes adding supply via Fire TV apps, IMDb TV, Amazon Publisher service integrations and simplifying inventory access for third-party apps, said Fildes.

Amazon’s video and display offerings across its owned properties and networks, can be targeted using Amazon data, and open up advertiser demand beyond Amazon vendors and sellers.

Invoca, an AI-powered call tracking platform, published their Call Tracking Study Guide in March of this year. The in-depth guide demystifies call tracking technology and reviews how call tracking tools help marketers connect digital campaign data to inbound customer phone calls.

Call tracking is a powerful way for marketers to understand exactly where phone calls are coming from with granularity that, for the most robust tools, can extend down to the keyword level. This data helps reveal what platforms, publishers, keywords, and channels drive high-intent customers to call and can help marketers create a more informed media allocation strategy. 

Content produced in collaboration with Invoca.

Call tracking 101: A brief introduction

Invoca uses a snippet of JavaScript code placed on your website to track calls. After the code snippet is placed on the landing page, it swaps out your standard business phone number with a trackable, dynamic phone number which is unique to each website visitor. 

The tag also captures various referrer elements such as utm source, medium, paid search keyword and Google click ID—this is what enables Invoca to connect user data to phone calls.

Example of dynamic tracking phone numbers on a landing page—source: Invoca

When the tracking number is called, the platform can also route the caller to the appropriate person or call center depending on what marketing content they are viewing, reducing time on hold and call transfers. Data is collected based on the specific call number which can include caller information, keyword, referrer type (e.g., banner ad, search ad, or social media ad) and referral source (e.g., Google, Facebook, etc.) which can also be used to inform the call center and create a highly personalized experience for the caller.

Example of referral data info in Invoca

Not all call tracking tools are created equal

There is a large selection of call tracking tools on the market that range from basic to advanced in terms of features and functionality. 

Basic tools provide limited data to marketers, but they ignore the larger customer journey and tend to focus on last-touch attribution (e.g., making it difficult or impossible to determine where the call came from).

Some metrics a basic tool might track include:

• Call volume
• Call time and duration
• Caller information
• Basic campaign attribution

These tools provide some sense of campaign performance, but fail to tell the full story that can be gleaned when connecting analytics platforms (e.g. Google Analytics) to call information. 

More advanced AI-powered call tracking tools like Invoca aim to bridge that gap, while also automating some marketing actions after the call takes place. 

Advanced capabilities that AI-powered call tracking tools provide include:

• Touchpoint attribution—Tie a call back to its source such e.g. paid search or social
• Data unification—Integrate with multiple online (and offline) sources such as CRM tools
• Data analysis—Use AI to analyze phone conversations and provide insight on call drivers, behaviors and outcomes
• Marketing integration—Push data to the marketing stack for automation, optimization, analysis and more

The end result—and key benefit—of implementing an advanced call tracking tool is to gain valuable insight about campaign performance and attribution. 

Call tracking 201: AI and machine learning 

Martech companies are increasingly powering their technology with AI-driven platforms. AI enables marketers to gain intelligence quickly and make better-informed decisions. This trend bridges multiple industries, as shown in the graphic below. 

Companies that utilize or provide AI technology—source: TOPBOTS

Invoca uses Signal AI to help measure and attribute online conversions by mining data from the phone conversations themselves, freeing up valuable time for marketers who no longer have to listen to every call.

Signal AI uses AI to detect intent and patterns in language to provide actionable insights and conversion data (sale made, appointment set, etc.) for marketers. This is accomplished through a series of steps that start with the recorded conversation, transcribing the call into text which can then be analyzed by an algorithm, identifying key patterns, phrases, and actions, and pushing these insights to your marketing stack. Here’s a visual of what that looks like. Note that Invoca does not save call transcripts and is HIPAA and PCI compliant, an important distinction for marketers concerned with data privacy.

Image source: Invoca

Signal AI uses machine learning, an application of AI, which gives machines access to the data so that they can learn from it. AI works in conjunction with machine learning to provide actionable and accessible data to marketers—but marketers still need to review this data and make decisions based on their own observations and conclusions.

Invoca offers two versions of Signal AI to their call tracking clients. Pre-trained AI uses industry-based predictive models that have been “pre-trained” using thousands of hours of call data.

Custom AI is more appropriate for certain businesses, such as those with high volumes of calls or sophisticated data needs. This more complex option takes longer to create and implement, however, it can help certain businesses predict call outcomes with a higher degree of accuracy.

Debunking some common assumptions 

Skeptics may think that humans can classify calls more efficiently and accurately than AI, but the truth is the opposite. AI learns over time and it never gets tired, so it’s an effective and accurate way to classify calls without bias. Here are some other call tracking myths, debunked:

• It’s hard to set up AI-based call tracking—Pre-trained AI models take the guesswork out of setup for certain industries such as insurance and can identify the most common outcomes (e.g., product purchased).
• All AI-based call tracking is the same—False! Invoca’s Signal AI uses predictive analytics (rather than just transcription) and continues to learn. It also provides performance scoring for easy reference.
• Only big companies can afford AI-based call tracking—Wrong again. Invoca is tag-based and easy to implement. You don’t need a dedicated IT team or programmer to get up and running.

Clear strategy and clean data

The true power of AI-based call tracking is, in a word, attribution. It’s the ability to unify call data across multiple sources and attribute it to all consumer touchpoints.

Invoca does this by collecting data from multiple sources: campaign and website data, first-party data (e.g., pulled from your CRM), third-party demographic data, call data such as length, time and location of call, and conversational data (derived from speech analysis).

Once all the available data is unified, Invoca’s technology determines the value of the call by analyzing the spoken conversations within the calls. Invoca’s AI synthesizes various word patterns (e.g., “I’m almost ready to buy, but I’m waiting for XYZ to happen”) and then classifies them into useful datasets.

Signal AI helps predict the type of call (e.g., sales, service, complaint) which allows marketers to optimize media placements, ad content, and more. This level of analysis can also help inform the call experience itself by identifying issues that may frustrate callers.

Connecting call data to campaign data can help in other ways too. For example, marketers can use call information for ad suppression, making sure customers don’t see offers for something they’ve already purchased or retargeting ads to people who called but didn’t make a purchase.

Tying it all together

One of the most powerful features of the more robust, high-end call-tracking tools like Invoca is the ability for them to integrate with existing marketing platforms like Google Analytics, Adobe Experience Cloud, and Salesforce. 

This gives marketers a clear picture of where their customers are at every step of the journey. It closes the attribution loop, allowing you to demonstrate what’s working from an ROI standpoint, a metric that’s key when it comes time for approval and budget allocation.

When considering implementing a tool like Invoca, the bottom line is always the top priority—will we make money with this martech investment?

Invoca customers have seen up to 60% increase in conversions when implementing the tool (without any additional media spend), an important consideration when factoring in ROI.

The Invoca Call Tracking Guide covers all this including what questions to ask vendors when considering a new tool and what to consider when shopping for a call tracking solution.

To learn more about call tracking technology from functionality to  implementation and how call tracking can help with campaign optimization and attribution, download Invoca’s whitepaper, “The Call Tracking Study Guide for Marketers.”

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