CMOs and their marketing organizations face a Sisyphean task in managing their ever-expanding martech stack. As these ecosystems grow bloated and more complex, challenges related to integration, utilization and ROI compound, becoming significant blockers to productivity.

In the first part of this two-part guide, we’ll explore these challenges and introduce a powerful solution for your consideration: the Pareto principle, also known as the 80/20 rule. Understanding this principle and how it applies to martech management will better equip you to identify the tools and strategies driving your marketing success.

The insights below will help you evaluate the current martech stack and identify the 20% of tools that generate 80% of your results, setting the stage for optimizing your martech operations.

Navigating the challenges of the martech maze

As a CMO wrestling with your martech stack, you’re likely encountering several key issues:

Data integration and insight generation: Many marketing organizations struggle to create a cohesive ecosystem where martech tools effectively share data. This lack of integration hampers the development of a unified customer view, making it challenging to gather and extract actionable insights.

Underutilization of existing tools: Marketers use only 33% of their martech stack’s capabilities, down from 58% in 2020, according to Gartner’s 2023 Marketing Technology Survey. This underutilization often arises from inadequate training and poor purchasing decisions.

ROI and cost concerns: Justifying the significant investment in martech is challenging, especially when existing tools are underutilized. Poor adoption and lack of use lead to poor ROI, causing further investment or adoption hesitation.

Adapting to emerging technologies: Keeping pace with rapidly evolving technologies like AI and predictive analytics is an ongoing challenge. CMOs need to balance staying current with innovations while maintaining efficiency with existing systems.

Skills gap in marketing teams: Many CMOs express difficulty finding and training staff who can effectively implement and manage complex martech solutions. This creates a noticeable skills gap within marketing organizations.

Addressing these challenges requires a strategic approach, improving integration, enhancing team capabilities, managing costs and staying current with technological advancements. This is where the Pareto principle can become a powerful strategic tool for you and your team.

Dig deeper: Unlock marketing efficiency: The essential guide to martech stack optimization

Understanding the Pareto principle

Vilfredo Pareto, born in Paris in 1848, was an Italian engineer, economist and sociologist. Pareto began his career as a civil engineer before moving into economics and sociology.

His observations of wealth distribution in Italy led to the 80/20 rule, stating that 80% of effects come from 20% of causes. This principle, known as the Pareto distribution, has been widely recognized and applied beyond economics to various fields, including business management, quality control and software engineering.

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

It can be a game changer when it comes to marketing technology stacks. You can optimize your marketing technology stacks and resource allocation by focusing on the 20% of tools, strategies or efforts that generate 80% of the results. This targeted approach enhances efficiency, reduces costs and improves overall outcomes, demonstrating the principle’s transformative potential in strategic decision-making.

Applying the Pareto principle to martech management

To apply the 80/20 rule to your martech stack, start with a comprehensive audit of your existing martech tools and their impact:

Inventory assessment: Catalog all tools and platforms currently in use.

Usage analysis: Determine how frequently and by whom each tool is used. Pull user logs for each tool. If it’s not used weekly, flag it.

Performance metrics: Evaluate each tool’s effectiveness based on key performance indicators (KPIs) such as lead generation, conversion rates and customer engagement. (Your mileage may vary, so make sure you use KPIs that are right for your business.)

Cost-benefit analysis: Assess each tool’s cost relative to its contribution to overall marketing goals. Calculate each tool’s ROI: (Revenue Generated – Total Cost) / Total Cost. Then, rank them.

User feedback: Survey your team. Ask questions like: “If you could only keep 5 tools, which would they be?”

Integration assessment: Map how your tools connect. Isolated tools are red flags.

After the audit, pinpoint the 20% of tools driving 80% of the value. Look for tools that:

Drive multiple KPIs: For example, a CRM that improves lead quality, shortens sales cycles and boosts customer retention.

Have high user adoption: Tools consistently used by >80% of their intended users.

Provide unique, critical data: This tool might offer exclusive audience insights you can’t get elsewhere.

Scale effortlessly: Tools that maintain or improve ROI as your company grows.

Align closely with strategic objectives: Ensure the tools support broader business goals.

Integrate seamlessly: Tools that work well with your stack’s other high-value tools/platforms.

By identifying and focusing on these high-impact tools, you’ll be well-positioned to optimize your martech stack using the 80/20 rule. In Part 2, we’ll explore specific strategies for implementing this approach and maximizing the efficiency of your marketing technology investments.

Dig deeper: Aligning martech with your business strategy: Your blueprint for success

The post How to leverage the 80/20 rule for martech efficiency and ROI appeared first on MarTech.

Today, many people see generative AI like ChatGPT, Gemini, and others as indispensable tools that streamline their day-to-day workflows and enhance their productivity.

However, with the proliferation of AI assistants comes an uptick in AI-generated content. AI content detectors can help you prioritize content quality and originality.

These tools can help you discern whether a piece of content was written by a human or AI – a task that’s becoming increasingly difficult – and this can help detect plagiarism, and ensure content is original, unique, and high-quality.

In this article, we’ll look at some of the top AI content checkers available in 2024. Let’s dive in.

The 6 Best AI Content Checkers
1. GPTZero

Launched in 2022, GPTZero was “the first public open AI detector,” according to its website – and it’s a leading choice among the tools out there today.

GPTZero’s advanced detection model comprises seven different components, including an internet text search to identify whether the content already exists in internet archives, a burstiness analysis to see whether the style and tone reflect that of human writing, end-to-end deep learning, and more.

Its Deep Scan feature gives you a detailed report highlighting sentences likely created by AI and tells you why that is, and GPTZero also offers a user-friendly Detection Dashboard as a source of truth for all your reports.

The tool is straightforward, and the company works with partners and researchers from institutions like Princeton, Penn State, and OpenAI to provide top-tier research and benchmarking.

Cost:

The Basic plan is available for free. It includes up to 10,000 words per month.
The Essential plan starts at $10 per month, with up to 150,000 words, plagiarism detection, and advanced writing feedback.
The Premium plan starts at $16 per month and includes up to 300,000 words, everything in the Essential tier, as well as Deep Scan, AI detection in multiple languages, and downloadable reports.

2. Originality.ai

Originality.ai is designed to detect AI-generated content across various language models, including ChatGPT, GPT-4o, Gemini Pro, Claude 3, Llama 3, and others. It bills itself as the “most accurate AI detector,” and targets publishers, agencies, and writers – but not students.

The latter is relevant because, the company says, by leaving academia, research, and other historical text out of its scope, it’s able to better train its model to hone in on published content across the internet, print, etc.

Originality.ai works across multiple languages and offers a free Chrome extension and API integration. It also has a team that works around the clock, testing out new strategies to create AI content that tools can’t detect. Once it finds one, it trains the tool to sniff it out.

The tool is straightforward; users can just paste content directly into Originality.ai, or upload from a file or even a URL. It will then give you a report that flags AI-detected portions as well as the overall originality of the text. You get three free scans initially, with a 300-word limit.

Cost:

Pro membership starts at $12.45 per month and includes 2,000 credits, AI scans, shareable reports, plagiarism and readability scans, and more.
Enterprise membership starts at $179 per month and includes 15,000 credits per month, features in the Pro plan, as well as priority support, API, and a 365-day history of your scans.
Originality.ai also offers a “pay as you go” tier, which consists of a $30 one-time payment to access 3,000 credits and some of the more limited features listed above.

3. Copyleaks

While you’ve probably heard of Copyleaks as a plagiarism detection tool, what you might not know is that it also offers a comprehensive AI-checking solution.

The tool covers 30 languages and detects across AI models including ChatGPT, Gemini, and Claude – and it automatically updates when new language models are released.

According to Copyleaks, its AI detector “has over 99% overall accuracy and a 0.2% false positive rate, the lowest of any platform.”

It works by using its long history of data and learning to spot the pattern of human-generated writing – and thus, flag anything that doesn’t fit common patterns as potentially AI-generated.

Other notable features of Copyleaks’ AI content detector are the ability to detect AI-generated source code, spot content that might have been paraphrased by AI, as well as browser extension and API offerings.

Cost:

Users with a Copyleaks account can access a limited number of free scans daily.
Paid plans start at $7.99 per month for the AI Detector tool, including up to 1,200 credits, scanning in over 30 languages, two users, and API access.
You can also get access to an AI + Plagiarism Detection tier starting at $13.99 per month.

4. Winston AI

Another popular AI content detection tool, Winston AI calls itself “the most trusted AI detector,” and claims to be the only such tool with a 99.98% accuracy rate.

Winston AI is designed for users across the education, SEO, and writing industries, and it’s able to identify content generated by LLMs such as ChatGPT, GPT-4, Google Gemini, Claude, and more.

Using Winston AI is easy; paste or upload your documents into the tool, and it will scan the text (including text from scanned pictures or handwriting) and provide a printable report with your results.

Like other tools in this list, Winston AI offers multilingual support, high-grade security, and can also spot content that’s been paraphrased using tools like Quillbot.

One unique feature of Winston AI is its “AI Prediction Map,” a color-coded visualization that highlights which parts of your content sound inauthentic and may be flagged by AI detectors.

Cost

Free 7-day trial includes 2,000 credits, AI content checking, AI image and deepfake detection, and more.
Paid plans start at $12 per month for 80,000 credits, with additional advanced features based on your membership tier.

5. TraceGPT

Looking for an extremely accurate AI content detector? Try TraceGPT by PlagiarismCheck.org.

It’s a user-friendly tool that allows you to upload files across a range of formats, including doc, docx, txt, odt, rtf, and pdf. Then, it leverages creativity/predictability ratios and other methods to scan your content for “AI-related breadcrumbs.”

Once it’s done, TraceGPT will provide results that show you what it has flagged as potential AI-generated text, tagging it as “likely” or “highly likely.”

As with many of the options here, TraceGPT offers support in several languages, as well as API and browser extension access. The tool claims to be beneficial for people in academia, SEO, and recruitment.

Cost

You can sign up to use TraceGPT and will be given limited free access.
Paid plans differ based on the type of membership; for businesses, they start at $69 for 1,000 pages, and for individuals, it starts at $5.99 for 20 pages. Paid plans also give you access to 24/7 support and a grammar checker.

6. Hive Moderation

Hive Moderation, a company that specializes in content moderation, offers an AI content detector with a unique differentiator. Unlike most of the other examples listed here, it is capable of checking for AI content across several media formats, including text, audio, and image.

Users can simply input their desired media, and Hive’s models will discern whether they believe them to be AI-generated. You’ll get immediate results with a holistic score and more detailed information, such as whether Hive thinks your image was created by Midjourney, DALL-E, or ChatGPT, for example.

Hive Moderation offers a Chrome extension for its AI detector, as well as several levels of customization so that customers can tweak their usage to fit their needs and industry.

Pricing:

You can download the Hive AI Chrome Extension for free, and its browser tool offers at least some free scans.
You’ll need to contact the Hive Moderation team for more extensive use of its tools.

What Is An AI Content Checker?

An AI content checker is a tool for detecting whether a piece of content or writing was generated by artificial intelligence.

Using machine learning algorithms and natural language processing, these tools can identify specific patterns and characteristics common in AI-generated content.

An important disclaimer: At this point in time, no AI content detector is perfect. While some are better than others, they all have limitations.

They can make mistakes, from falsely identifying human-written content as AI-generated or failing to spot AI-generated content.

However, they are useful tools for pressure-testing content to spot glaring errors and ensure that it is authentic and not a reproduction or plagiarism.

Why Use An AI Content Detector?

As AI systems become more widespread and sophisticated, it’ll only become harder to tell when AI has produced content – so tools like these could become more important.

Other reasons AI content checkers are beneficial include:

They can help you protect your reputation. Say you’re publishing content on a website or blog. You want to make sure your audience can trust that what they’re reading is authentic and original. AI content checkers can help you ensure just that.
They can ensure you avoid any plagiarism. Yes, generative AI is only getting better, but it’s still known to reproduce other people’s work without citation in the answers it generates. So, by using an AI content detector, you can steer clear of plagiarism and the many risks associated with it.
They can confirm that the content you’re working with is original. Producing unique content isn’t just an SEO best practice – it’s essential to maintaining integrity, whether you’re a business, a content creator, or an academic professional. AI content detectors can help here by weeding out anything that doesn’t meet that standard.

AI content detectors have various use cases, including at the draft stage, during editing, or during the final review of content. They can also be used for ongoing content audits.

AI detectors may produce false positives, so you should scrutinize their results if you’re using them to make a decision. However, false positives can also help identify human-written content that requires a little more work to stand out.

We recommend you use a variety of different tools, cross-check your results, and build trust with your writers. Always remember that these are not a replacement for human editing, fact-checking, or review.

They are merely there as a helping hand and an additional level of scrutiny.

In Summary

While we still have a long way to go before AI detection tools are perfect, they’re useful tools that can help you ensure your content is authentic and of the highest quality.

By making use of AI content checkers, you can maintain trust with your audience and ensure you stay one step ahead of the competition.

Hopefully, this list of the best solutions available today can help you get started. Choose the tool that best fits your resources and requirements, and start integrating AI detection into your content workflow today.

More resources: 

Featured Image: Sammby/Shutterstock

Responsive search ads are very flexible ads that automatically adapt to show the right message to the right customer. You enter multiple headlines and descriptions when creating the ad. Google’s machine learning systems will mix headlines and descriptions and test different combinations of the ads to learn which performs best over time. The most relevant message will be shown to the customer.

Responsive search ads are the default ad type in Google Ads Pay Per Click (PPC) search campaigns as of February 18, 2021. This change isn’t surprising, considering Google’s increased focus on automation in Google Ads.

Since responsive search ads adapt their content to show the most relevant message to match customer search terms, they help you reach more customers and may help to increase conversion rates and campaign performance. According to Google, advertisers who use responsive search ads in their ad groups can achieve an increase of up to 10% more clicks and conversions as compared to standard text ads.

But responsive search ads have many more benefits:

Here is an example of a responsive search ad from Google search results:

How to set up responsive search ads in your Google Ads PPC search campaign

Sign into your Google Ads PPC account and select Responsive Search Ad from the Ad menu:

Select Ads and extensions in the left menu

Click on the blue plus button on the top

Select Responsive Search Ad in the menu

Now you can enter the headlines and descriptions and the landing page for the responsive search ad:

Select a Search Campaign

Select an Ad Group

Enter the Final URL ( this is the landing page URL).

Enter the display paths for the Display URL (this is optional).

Enter at least 5 unique headlines. The minimum is 3 and the maximum is 15. The tool will suggest keywords from the ad group to include in the headlines.

Enter at least 2 unique descriptions. The minimum is 2 and the maximum is 4.

As you create the ad, an ad strength indicator will indicate the ad strength.

As you type the ad, you will see a preview of the Ad in different combinations in the preview panel.

Save the ad

Follow the best practices below to optimize responsive search ads for better performance.

5 best practices when using responsive search ads in your Google Ads PPC search campaigns

These tips will help you optimize your responsive search ads in your Google Ads search campaigns and increase clicks and conversions.

1. Add at least one responsive search ad per ad group with “good” or “excellent” ad strength

Google recommends adding at least one responsive search ad per ad group. Use the ad strength indicator to make sure the responsive search ad has a “good” or ”excellent” ad strength, as this improves the chances that the ad will show. Remember, the maximum number of enabled responsive search ads allowed per ad group is three.

It’s best to create very specific ad groups based on your products with at least three quality ads, as recommended by Google. This enables Google’s systems to optimize for performance and may result in more clicks.

2. Add several unique headlines and descriptions

The power of the flexible format of responsive search ads lies in having multiple ad combinations and keywords that can match customer search terms. This helps to increase search relevance and reach more customers.

When building your responsive search ads, add as many unique headlines as you can to increase possible ad combinations and improve campaign performance.

The headlines and descriptions in a responsive search ad can be shown in multiple combinations in any order. It’s therefore important to ensure that these assets are unique from each other and work well together when they are shown in different ad combinations.

When creating a responsive search ad, you can add up to fifteen headlines and four descriptions. The responsive search ad will show up to three headlines and two descriptions at a time. On smaller screens, like mobile devices, it may show with two headlines and one description.

Here are tips for adding headlines and descriptions:

1. Create at least 8-10 headlines so that there are more ad combinations to show. More ad combinations helps to increase ad relevance and improve ad group performance.

To increase the chances that the ad will show, enter at least five headlines that are unique from each other. Do not repeat the same phrases as that will restrict the number of ad combinations that are generated by the system.

You can use some headlines to focus on important product or service descriptions.

Include your popular keywords in at least two headlines to increase ad relevance. As you create the responsive search ad, the tool will recommend popular keywords in the ad group to include in headlines to improve ad performance.

Make sure that you DO NOT include keywords in three headlines so that more ad combinations are generated. Instead you can highlight benefits, special services, special hours, calls to action, shipping and return policies, special promotions, taglines, or ratings.

Try adding headlines of different lengths. Do not max out the characters in every headline. Google’s systems will test both long and short headlines.

There are 30 characters for each headline.

2. Include two descriptions that are unique. The maximum is four descriptions.

Descriptions should focus on describing product or service features that are not listed in the headlines, along with a call to action.

There are 90 characters for each description.

An example of creating a responsive search ad with headlines and descriptions is shown in the figure below.

3. Use popular content from your existing expanded text ads

Use headlines and descriptions from your existing expanded text ads in the ad group when writing your headlines and descriptions for the responsive search ads. This helps you get more ad combinations with keywords that have already been proven to be successful in your marketing campaign.

4. Pin headlines & descriptions to specific positions to control where they appear. Use sparingly.

Responsive search ads will show headlines and descriptions in any order by default. To control the positions of text in the ad, you can pin headlines and descriptions to certain positions in the ad. Pinning is a new concept introduced with responsive search ads.

According to Google, pinning is not recommended for most advertisers because it limits the number of ad combinations that can be matched to customer search terms and can impact ad performance.

Use the pinning feature sparingly. Pinning too many headlines and descriptions to fixed positions in the responsive search ad reduces the effectiveness of using this flexible ad format to serve multiple ad combinations.

1. If you have text that must appear in every ad, you should enter it in either Headline Position 1, Headline Position 2 or Description Position 1, and pin it there. This text will always show in the ad.

2. You can also pin headlines and descriptions that must always be included in the ad to specific positions in the ad. For example, disclaimers or special offers.

3. To pin an asset, hover to the right of any headline or description when setting up the Ad and click on the pin icon that appears. Then select the position where you want the headline or description to appear.

4. Pinning a headline or description to one position will show that asset in that position every time the ad is shown. For increased flexibility, it is recommended to pin 2 or 3 headlines or descriptions to each position. Any of the pinned headlines or descriptions can then be shown in the pinned position so that you still have different ad combinations available.

5. Click Save.

The image below shows a headline pinned in position 1 and a description pinned in position 2. The Ad will always show this headline and description in the pinned positions every time it runs.

5. Increase ad strength to improve performance

As you create a responsive search ad, you will see an ad strength indicator on the right with a strength estimate. The ad strength indicator helps you improve the quality and effectiveness of your ads to improve ad performance.

Improving ad strength from “Poor” to ‘Excellent’ can result in up to 9% more clicks and conversions, according to Google.

1. Ad strength measures the relevance, diversity and quality of the Ad content.

2. Some of the ad strength suggestions include

Adding more headlinesIncluding popular keywords in the headlinesMaking headlines more uniqueMaking descriptions more unique

3. Click on “View Ideas” to see suggestions provided by the tool to improve ad relevance and ad quality.

4. The ad strength ratings include “Excellent”, “Good”, “Average” , “Poor” and “No Ads”.

5. Try to get at least a “Good” rating by changing the content of headlines or descriptions or by adding popular keywords. If you have a lot of assets pinned to specific positions, try unpinning some of the assets to improve ad strength.

Are expanded text ads still supported?

Expanded text ads are still supported but they are no longer the default ad format in Google Ads paid search campaigns.

You can still run expanded text ads in your ad groups along with the responsive search ads. Google recommends having one responsive search ad along with two expanded text ads in an ad group to improve performance.

However, Google has removed the option to add a text ad directly from the Ads and extensions menu. When you add a new ad, the menu now lists only options to add a Responsive Search Ad, Call Ad, Responsive Display Ad and Ad variations.

You can still add an expanded text ad although you cannot add it directly from the Ads and extensions menu. Follow these steps,

In the Ads and extensions menu, click to select Responsive search ads.

This opens up the editing menu to create a responsive search ad.

Then click on “switch back to text ads” on the top to create a text ad.

The removal of expanded text ads from the Ad and extensions menu certainly suggests that Google may be planning to phase out expanded text ads in the future. However, they continue to be supported at this time.

Conclusion

In summary, responsive search ads continue the progression towards automation and machine learning in Google Ads. We have used responsive search ads in PPC search campaigns at our digital marketing agency, and have seen an increase in clicks and CTR as compared to expanded text ads.

You can improve the performance of your Google Ads PPC search campaigns by following these five best practices for responsive search ads:

Add at least one responsive search ad per ad group.

Add several unique headlines and descriptions.

Use popular content from your expanded text ads.

Pin some of the assets to control where they appear in the ad.

Increase ad strength to at least a “good” rating to improve ad performance.

Other best practices recommended by Google include:

Have other optimization tips? Share them with #MozBlog on Twitter or LinkedIn.

Does your consumer product have AI? Do yourself a favor and don’t tell anyone. 

A study of 1,000 people found products described as having AI were consistently less popular than those that weren’t.

“When AI is mentioned, it tends to lower emotional trust, which in turn decreases purchase intentions,” said lead author and Washington State University clinical assistant professor of marketing Mesut Cicek in a statement. “We found emotional trust plays a critical role in how consumers perceive AI-powered products.”

For example, researchers found people were far less likely to purchase a smart television when its description included “artificial intelligence.” A separate group was far more likely to buy it when the words were omitted from an identical description.

The effect was even greater with high-risk/big-ticket purchases like expensive electronics or medical devices. Researchers said this could be because consumers are more wary of monetary loss or danger to physical safety.

“Marketers should carefully consider how they present AI in their product descriptions or develop strategies to increase emotional trust,” said Cicek. “Emphasizing AI may not always be beneficial, particularly for high-risk products. Focus on describing the features or benefits and avoid the AI buzzwords.”

The study was published in the Journal of Hospitality Marketing & Management.

And now, here’s this week’s AI-powered martech news and releases:

Optimove has partnered with Captain Up and Gamanza Engage to create AI-driven gamification solutions. This allows for the integration of gamification features into Optimove’s marketing platform, enhancing customer engagement through real-time event synchronization and personalized interactions. It also supports comprehensive campaign measurement, enabling operators to evaluate the effectiveness of their gamification strategies.

OLIVER’s generative AI tool Slipstream lets users create complete creative briefs to get better results from their agency partner. It checks the initial brief — whether a formal document or a hurried email – for all the key components, such as budgets, timings, target audiences and objectives. The user can then add any missing items. Once that is done, Slipstream puts the brief into a template format and checks to see if it reflects the client’s priorities and business objectives — anything from the need to focus on sustainability or DEI to the brand’s tone of voice and distinctive brand assets.

Webgility’s Webgility AI Assistant is designed to assist small and medium-sized businesses (SMBs) automate their e-commerce workflows. This AI-powered chat assistant utilizes natural language processing to provide quick answers and perform tasks like posting orders to QuickBooks. The feature aims to streamline access to business analytics, helping users manage orders, refunds, and product information efficiently.

ShareThis’ new contextual targeting solution uses AI to analyze web page content for ad placements. It uses large language models and consumer behavior insights to enhance URL classification and contextual targeting without relying on cookies. This allows advertisers to improve the relevance and effectiveness of their ad placements.

Adobe’s Adobe Journey Optimizer (AJO) B2B Edition uses generative AI to create targeted buying groups and personalized customer journeys across various channels. It also assists in creating tailored content and enhances collaboration between sales and marketing teams.

Coveo and Optimizely are working to enhance AI-powered search capabilities across digital platforms. This collaboration focuses on providing personalized user experiences through Coveo’s generative answering solution and advanced search functionalities. The integration aims to improve content discoverability and streamline access to information, allowing businesses to deliver tailored experiences efficiently.

Dstillery integrated its audience solutions with the AI-powered curation platform Onetag. This allows brands and agencies using the Onetag Smart Curation platform to access Dstillery’s pre-built models through private marketplaces. These models utilize ID-free technology, which predicts the value of an ad impression without identifying the user, offering a privacy-safe solution for advertisers.

Consumr.ai’s Audience in Motion helps brands predict audience movements using deterministic data. This data-driven approach provides real-time intelligence, aiding strategic planning while complying with GDPR and CCPA. The platform offers quick implementation and delivers detailed insights into consumer behavior, enabling brands to make informed decisions.

Marketeam.ai’s Maya is an AI Brand Analyst designed to analyze real-time data on brand and market trends. It generates marketing opportunities and plans while working with other AI agents to enhance performance across various channels, providing a comprehensive solution for marketing analysis and strategy.

PMG’s marketing platform Alli added two AI features to improve campaign planning and creative insights. The Audience Planner allows precise audience targeting by integrating first-party and walled garden data, while Creative Insights analyzes ad performance across channels. 

Wondercraft has unveiled the world’s first AI “Ad Studio,” which simplifies audio ad production for creative teams. This platform allows users to produce and iterate studio-quality audio ads quickly by typing, streamlining the creative process for agencies and brands. 

The post AI-powered martech news and releases: August 8 appeared first on MarTech.

In 2009, by issuing a call to arms to “make the web faster”, Google set out on a mission to try and persuade website owners to make their sites load more quickly.

In order to entice website owners into actually caring about this, in 2010 Google announced that site speed would become a factor in its desktop (non-mobile) search engine ranking algorithms. This meant that sites that loaded quickly would have an SEO advantage over other websites.

Six years later, in 2015, Google announced that the number of searches performed on mobile exceeded those performed on desktop computers. That percentage continues to increase. The latest published statistic says that, as of 2019, 61% of searches performed on Google were from mobile devices.

Mobile’s now-dominant role in search led Google to develop its “Accelerated Mobile Pages” (AMP) project. This initiative is aimed at encouraging website owners to create what is essentially another mobile theme, on top of their responsive mobile theme, that complies with a very strict set of development and performance guidelines.

Although many site owners and SEOs complain about having to tend to page speed and AMP on top of the other 200+ ranking factors that already give them headaches, page speed is indeed a worthy effort for site owners to focus on. In 2017, Google conducted a study where the results very much justified their focus on making the web faster. They found that “As page load time goes from one second to 10 seconds, the probability of a mobile site visitor bouncing increases 123%.”

In July of 2018, page speed became a ranking factor for mobile searches, and today Google will incorporate even more speed-related factors (called Core Web Vitals) in its ranking algorithms.

With the average human attention span decreasing all the time, and our reliance on our mobile devices growing consistently, there’s no question that page speed is, and will continue to be, an incredibly important thing for website owners to tend to.

How to optimize a website for speed
Think like a race car driver

Winning the page speed race requires the same things as winning a car race. To win a race in a car, you make sure that your vehicle is as lightweight as possible, as powerful as possible, and you navigate the racetrack as efficiently as possible.

I’ll use this analogy to try to make page speed optimization techniques a bit more understandable.

Make it lightweight

These days, websites are more beautiful and functional than ever before — but that also means they are bigger than ever. Most modern websites are the equivalent of a party bus or a limo. They’re super fancy, loaded with all sorts of amenities, and therefore HEAVY and SLOW. In the search engine “racetrack,” you will not win with a party bus or a limo. You’ll look cool, but you’ll lose.

Image source: A GTMetrix test results page

To win the page speed race, you need a proper racing vehicle, which is lightweight. Race cars don’t have radios, cupholders, glove boxes, or really anything at all that isn’t absolutely necessary. Similarly, your website shouldn’t be loaded up with elaborate animations, video backgrounds, enormous images, fancy widgets, excessive plugins, or anything else at all that isn’t absolutely necessary.

In addition to decluttering your site of unnecessary fanciness and excessive plugins, you can also shed website weight by:

Reducing the number of third-party scripts (code snippets that send or receive data from other websites)

Switching to a lighter-weight (less code-heavy) theme and reducing the number of fonts used

Implementing AMP

Optimizing images

Compressing and minifying code

Performing regular database optimizations

On an open-source content management system like WordPress, speed plugins are available that can make a lot of these tasks much easier. WP Rocket and Imagify are two WordPress plugins that can be used together to significantly lighten your website’s weight via image optimization, compression, minification, and a variety of other page speed best practices.

Give it more power

You wouldn’t put a golf cart engine in a race car, so why would you put your website on a dirt-cheap, shared hosting plan? You may find it painful to pay more than a few dollars per month on hosting if you’ve been on one of those plans for a long time, but again, golf cart versus race car engine: do you want to win this race or not?

Traditional shared hosting plans cram tens of thousands of websites onto a single server. This leaves each individual site starved for computing power.

If you want to race in the big leagues, it’s time to get a grown-up hosting plan. For WordPress sites, managed hosting companies such as WP Engine and Flywheel utilize servers that are powerful and specifically tuned to serve up WordPress sites faster.

If managed WordPress hosting isn’t your thing, or if you don’t have a WordPress site, upgrading to a VPS (Virtual Private Server) will result in your website having way more computing resources available to it. You’ll also have more control over your own hosting environment, allowing you to “tune-up your engine” with things like the latest versions of PHP, MySQL, Varnish caching, and other modern web server technologies. You’ll no longer be at the mercy of your shared hosting company’s greed as they stuff more and more websites onto your already-taxed server.

In short, putting your website on a well-tuned hosting environment can be like putting a supercharger on your race car.

Drive it better

Last, but certainly not least, a lightweight and powerful race car can only go so fast without a trained driver who knows how to navigate the course efficiently.

The “navigate the course” part of this analogy refers to the process of a web browser loading a webpage. Each element of a website is another twist or turn for the browser to navigate as it travels through the code and processes the output of the page.

I’ll switch analogies momentarily to try to explain this more clearly. When remodeling a house, you paint the rooms first before redoing the floors. If you redid the floors first and then painted the rooms, the new floors would get paint on them and you’d have to go back and tend to the floors again later.

When a browser loads a webpage, it goes through a process called (coincidentally) “painting.” Each page is “painted” as the browser receives bits of data from the webpage’s source code. This painting process can either be executed efficiently (i.e. painting walls before refinishing floors), or it can be done in a more chaotic out-of-order fashion that requires several trips back to the beginning of the process to redo or fix or add something that could’ve/should’ve been done earlier in the process.

Image source: WebPageTest.org Test Result (Filmstrip View)

Here’s where things can get technical, but it’s important to do whatever you can to help your site drive the “track” more efficiently.

Caching is a concept that every website should have in place to make loading a webpage easier on the browser. It already takes long enough for a browser to process all of a page’s source code and paint it out visually to the user, so you might as well have that source code ready to go on the server. By default, without caching, that’s not the case.

Without caching, the website’s CMS and the server can still be working on generating the webpage’s source code while the browser is waiting to paint the page. This can cause the browser to have to pause and wait for more code to come from the server. With caching, the source code of a page is pre-compiled on the server so that it’s totally ready to be sent to the browser in full in one shot. Think of it like a photocopier having plenty of copies of a document already produced and ready to be handed out, instead of making a copy on demand each time someone asks for one.

Various types and levels of caching can be achieved through plugins, your hosting company, and/or via a CDN (Content Delivery Network). CDNs not only provide caching, but they also host copies of the pre-generated website code on a variety of servers across the world, reducing the impact of physical distance between the server and the user on the load time. (And yes, the internet is actually made up of physical servers that have to talk to each other over physical distances. The web is not actually a “cloud” in that sense.)

Getting back to our race car analogy, utilizing caching and a CDN equals a much faster trip around the racetrack.

Those are two of the basic building blocks of efficient page painting, but there are even more techniques that can be employed as well. On WordPress, the following can be implemented via a plugin or plugins (again, WP Rocket and Imagify are a particularly good combo for achieving a lot of this):

Asynchronous and/or deferred loading of scripts. This is basically a fancy way of referring to loading multiple things at the same time or waiting until later to load things that aren’t needed right away.

Preloading and prefetching. Basically, retrieving data about links in advance instead of waiting for the user to click on them.

Lazy loading. Ironic term being that this concept exists for page speed purposes, but by default, most browsers load ALL images on a page, even those that are out of sight until a user scrolls down to them. Implementing lazy loading means telling the browser to be lazy and wait on loading those out-of-sight images until the user actually scrolls there.

Serving images in next-gen formats. New image formats such as WebP can be loaded much faster by browsers than the old-fashioned JPEG and PNG formats. But it’s important to note that not all browsers can support these new formats just yet — so be sure to use a plugin that can serve up the next-gen versions to browsers that support them, but provide the old versions to browsers that don’t. WP Rocket, when paired with Imagify, can achieve this.

Image source: WP Rocket plugin settings

Optimize for Core Web Vitals

Lastly, optimizing for the new Core Web Vital metrics (Largest Contentful Paint, First Input Delay, and Cumulative Layout Shift) can make for a much more efficient trip around the racetrack as well.

Image source

These are pretty technical concepts, but here’s a quick overview to get you familiar with what they mean:

Largest Contentful Paint (LCP) refers to the painting of the largest element on the page. Google’s PageSpeed Insights tool will tell you which element is considered to be the LCP element of a page. A lot of times this is a hero image or large slider area, but it varies from page to page, so run the tool to identify the LCP in your page and then think about what you can do to make that particular element load faster.

First Input Delay (FID) is the delay between the user’s first action and the browser’s ability to respond to it. An example of an FID issue would be a button that is visible to a user sooner than it becomes clickable. The delay would be caused by the click functionality loading notably later than the button itself.

Cumulative Layout Shift (CLS) is a set of three big words that refer to one simple concept. You know when you’re loading up a webpage on your phone and you go to click on something or read something but then it hops up or down because something else loaded above it or below it? That movement is CLS, it’s majorly annoying, and it’s a byproduct of inefficient page painting.

In conclusion, race car > golf cart

Page speed optimization is certainly complex and confusing, but it’s an essential component to achieve better rankings. As a website owner, you’re in this race whether you like it or not — so you might as well do what you can to make your website a race car instead of a golf cart!

Retail media networks (RMNs) are a fast-growing space in advertising — up 16.3% last year. Retailers are adding channels and providing better measurement and execution for advertisers. And agencies are answering their clients’ calls to include RMNs in the mix. 

While brands are increasing their spend, there are still growing pains around the lack of standardization. Without the ability to compare apples to apples from one RMN to another, brands and agencies are left with more number-crunching and guessing. However, the opportunity to reach high-intent customers within a retailer’s network is too powerful to pass up.

So what’s the current state of the RMN-advertiser relationship? That was the focus of an IAB roundtable this week featuring agency and RMN representatives.

IAB introduced media measurement guidelines in September 2023 so RMNs and adtech partners could begin to help brands and agencies connect the dots. If it’s easier for advertisers to execute and measure campaigns across multiple RMNs, they’ll increase their overall spend, the theory goes.

“We were very cognizant that adoption [of measurement guidelines] would take 12 to 24 months,” said Jeffrey Bustos, VP, measurement addressability data at IAB. “I think from all the conversations with retailers, the momentum and their investment in moving toward standardization is still very strong.”

While standardization remains a goal rather than a reality, the increasing opportunities within individual RMNs as they expand offsite and in-store offerings make them something advertisers must consider.

CVS Media Exchange’s focus on shopping experience

“When you look at retail and consumer spending, a lot of that still happens in a store format,” said Praveen Menon, head of analytics and business intelligence for CVS Media Exchange (CMX). “Someone like CVS, who has 9,000 stores, [attracts shoppers] coming into these stores with a lot of attention and urgency, with a clear consumer need they’re looking to fulfill.”

CVS Media Exchange can measure the connection between when loyalty members search in the CVS app or online and when they purchase in-store through the loyalty program.

“Over 50% of our loyalty members, when they browse something online, they come to our store within 48 hours,” said Menon. “For us, the in-store experience is a key unlock.”

CVS plans to build better shopping and ad experiences through in-store screens and other touchpoints. The retailer has 1,700 screens in its stores and plans to add more this year.

Dig deeper: Why we care about RMNs

Data collaboration for offsite measurement needs

At some level, all RMNs serve the function of a data collaboration. The retailer uses customer data in a privacy-safe way to help outside parties serve timely, relevant messages. This collaborative environment extends to offsite channels beyond an RMN’s owned digital and in-store properties.

For instance, CVS partnered with visual discovery platform Pinterest and adtech company LiveRamp on a clean room initiative that helps CVS measure the effectiveness of offsite ads on Pinterest that lead to CVS purchases by loyalty members.

“What data clean rooms allows us to do is to provide advertisers and agencies with precise, attributed and meaningful performance insights for campaigns they run with CMX, especially on offsite channels where we have limited ad exposure data,” said Menon. “This really allows us to report back about performance with a high degree of accuracy.”

He added: “On some other platforms, where they don’t share some of those ad exposures or don’t collaborate via clean rooms, measurement is more of a black-box solution. So for us, as we think about our innovative offerings, we want every channel that brands invest in through CMX to be measurable.”

Advertisers and agencies push for standards

This collaborative environment might one day lead to multiple RMNs adopting the same measurement standards. That’s at least the intention with the IAB guidelines. Agencies are seeing great RMN interest from clients. Agencies and brands have influence, through the budget they spend, to support RMNs that are standardized.

“We have to put our money where our solutions are,” said Evan Hovorka, VP of product innovation, Albertsons Media Collective. “That might require some brands forcing the next dollar to go to an RMN that supports some of these adopted standards.”

“What’s really interesting is that our [clients] are so excited to adapt and test and learn, because they’ve seen the success of retail media,” said Kavita Cariapa, SVP, head of commerce activation at dentsu. “And luckily there’s actually a good framework being built out with partners like CVS and Albertson’s. There’s a groundwork built on tech partnerships, collaboration.”

“Outside of its adoption rates, there are a couple of [IAB member RMNs] that have done fantastic jobs,” said Riyaad Edoo, executive director of commerce at EssenceMediacom. “Accountability is really what holds progress back. If my investment (on behalf of a brand client) isn’t going to directly reflect what my asks are, then those asks are empty. But that might not be the right conversation. In most instances, we can survive on some amount of measurement inconsistency and not be happy about it. We do have advanced data analytics teams working tirelessly to sort of weather these anomalies.”

“One of our biggest wins that we present to our brands is, baseline, how to inform a channel investment,” said Cariapa. “There’s always questions on how and when and where to invest. How do they invest in a retailer as they expand their opportunities?

Dentsu reports how clients are growing market share with campaigns and how specific channels perform, so brands aren’t just tracking impressions but results, Cariapa said.

Less than halfway through IAB’s two-year estimated timeframe for guideline adoption, it looks like better RMN measurement is likely, as advertisers and agencies continue to invest in this growing ecosystem.

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

The post Retail media networks and advertisers going from guesswork to growth appeared first on MarTech.

Breadcrumbs are a navigational feature for your website, and they can greatly impact SEO and user experience.

Many websites still don’t implement breadcrumbs, which is a huge mistake. Not only do breadcrumbs impact SEO, but they are also pretty easy to implement.

Here’s what you need to know about breadcrumbs, how they impact SEO, and common mistakes to avoid.

What Are Breadcrumbs In SEO?

Breadcrumbs are automated internal links that allow users to track their location on a website and their distance from the homepage.

You’ll usually find them at the top of a website or just under the navigation bar.

Just like internal links, they help keep users on a website and help them find the information they are looking for. If they feel disoriented, they can use breadcrumbs links to go one level up and continue their journey on the website rather than clicking a browser’s back button.

Here’s an example of breadcrumbs from eBay’s website:

It shows exactly what categories I clicked on to land on the page I am viewing.

The breadcrumbs make it easy to backtrack to a previous page if I need to.

4 Common Types Of Breadcrumbs

Not all breadcrumbs are created equal!

There are four main types of breadcrumbs, each with their own purpose.

Before adding breadcrumbs to your site, determine which type will be the best fit for user experience.

1. Hierarchy-Based Breadcrumbs (a.k.a., Location-Based Breadcrumbs)

The most common type of breadcrumbs that tell users where they are in the site structure and how to get back to the homepage.

For example: Home > California > San Francisco

2. Attribute-Based Breadcrumbs

These breadcrumbs are commonly used on ecommerce sites to show what attributes the user has clicked.

For example: Home > Shoes > Hiking > Womens

Please note how smartly eBay handles breadcrumbs for attributes when the trail is too long.

It shows the last three items following the home page and truncates previous ones under a three-dot menu; you can see all previous items in the breadcrumbs upon clicking.

3. Forward Or Look-Ahead Breadcrumbs

This type of breadcrumb not only shows the user’s current path within a website’s hierarchy but also provides a preview of the next steps they can take.

Here is an example from the Statista website, which illustrates how useful it can be by giving users a preview of other sections of the subsection.

4. History-Based Breadcrumbs

This type of breadcrumb is rarely used and shows users what other pages on the site they have visited, similar to a browser history.

For example, if you were searching for SEO news and read three different articles, the breadcrumbs might look like this: Home > SEO article 1 > SEO article 2 > Current page.

But I recommend avoiding this because it may confuse users. Users may navigate to the same destination through different journeys, which means you will show a different breadcrumb structure each time, confusing users.

Additionally, you can’t markup with schema such as breadcrumbs and benefit from rich results because of its random nature.

3 Benefits of Using Breadcrumbs

This all sounds great, you’re thinking.

But what will breadcrumbs actually do?

If you’re unsure breadcrumbs are worth the hassle (spoiler, they totally are!), then you’ll want to read the section below.

1. Breadcrumbs Improve UX

Breadcrumbs make it easier for users to navigate a website and encourage them to browse other sections.

For example, if you want to learn more about Nestle, you head to its site and end up on the Nestle company history page.

Using its breadcrumbs, you can easily navigate back to About Us, History, or even its homepage.

It’s a handy way to help users easily find what they are looking for – and hopefully draw them deeper into your website.

2. Keep People Onsite Longer

Bounce rate is not a ranking factor. But keeping users from bouncing can still help SEO as it helps users click and navigate through the website, an engagement signal that Google uses for ranking purposes.

Say, you are looking for a new pair of sneakers on Adidas’s website.

Using Adidas’s breadcrumbs, you can easily navigate back to the boots category and look for a different pair.

This is great for Adidas because it will likely keep you from returning to Google and landing on another shoe website.

That’s the power of the humble breadcrumb!

A case study on Moz shows what happened when it added breadcrumbs to a site and made several other changes.

Sessions drastically increased in just a few months.

Granted, they also added meta descriptions and eliminated a few other UX issues, but breadcrumbs also played a part.

3. Breadcrumbs Improve Internal Linking

Breadcrumbs are not just a navigational utility; they play a crucial role in enhancing a website’s internal linking structure. Google uses breadcrumbs to determine the relationship between different pages which are deeper in the site structure.

By implementing breadcrumbs’s structured data markup, you can help search engines understand the site’s architecture.

Read: Site Structure & Internal Linking in SEO: Why It’s Important

4. Rich Snippets In SERPs

As discussed, breadcrumbs make site navigation easier, but they do a lot more so as Google displays rich snippets in the search results.

But this doesn’t happen until you markup your breadcrumbs with structured data so Google can pick it up and surface it in search engine results pages (SERP).

Here is a JSON-LD structured data code example for a breadcrumb that matched the rich snippet from the screenshot:

Here is a breakdown of each attribute in the breadcrumb JSON-LD schema.

Please note that you can’t game Google by having structured data on the website without having an actual breadcrumb visible to users.

If Google detects such manipulations, violating Google’s guidelines, you may get a manual penalty. However, that doesn’t cause a drop in rankings, but your website will not be eligible for any kind of rich snippets in search results.

So, the golden rule is that every schema markup you have on the website has to exist on the page and be visible to users.

4 Common Mistakes When Using Breadcrumbs For SEO

Implementing breadcrumbs is a straightforward way to improve a site’s SEO and provide better UX.

However, sometimes, implementing breadcrumbs could cause more harm than good.

Here are a few breadcrumb mistakes you’ll want to avoid.

1. Don’t Go Too Big or Too Small – Aim For Just Right

Breadcrumbs should be easy to see but unobtrusive.

A slightly smaller font is fine, but too small text will be hard to see and hard to click on mobile devices.

Position them at the top of the page, beneath the hero image, or just above the H1 title so they are easy to find.

2. Don’t Just Repeat Your Navigation Bar

If the breadcrumbs just duplicate what is already in your navbar, they might not serve any additional purpose.

There’s no need to add more coding (and take up room!) if it doesn’t help.

3. Don’t Ditch Your Navigation Bar In Favor Of Breadcrumbs

While you don’t want to repeat navigation, you also don’t want to rely entirely on breadcrumbs.

They serve as a supplement, not a replacement for other navigational features.

4. Use The Right Type Of Breadcrumbs

Location breadcrumbs are the most common type, but they might not be the best choice for your site.

Don’t use location breadcrumbs if your site doesn’t use a nested structure where most pages fit under a few categories.

In that case, history-based breadcrumbs might be more beneficial.

How To Implement Breadcrumbs In WordPress

Breadcrumbs are an incredibly useful navigation element for both users and search engines — and they are easy to add to your site.

Here are a few ways to add these useful features to your site.

Use Yoast SEO: If you already use Yoast, adding breadcrumbs will only take a few steps. Simply log in and follow these steps to implement breadcrumbs.
WordPress Plugins: If you use WordPress, there are several plugins that can add breadcrumbs in a few steps. I like Breadcrumb NavXT because it is easy to implement and generates locational breadcrumbs that can be customized as needed.
WooCommerce Breadcrumb Plugin: If you have an ecommerce site that uses Woocommerce, consider using their breadcrumb plugin, which allows you to restyle the built-in WooCommerce breadcrumbs.

Finally, your site builder or WordPress theme might have a built-in breadcrumb feature.

Shopify, Wix, or Squarespace sites have built-in features you can enable on their settings page.

Breadcrumbs Are An Easy-to-Grasp Way To Navigate Your Website

Think of breadcrumbs as the butter to your bread. The Kermit to your Miss Piggy. The animal sauce to your In N’ Out burger.

You get the point.

Breadcrumbs are a simple change that can help your site stand out on the search results page.

Though they won’t guarantee a significant boost to SERPs, they are helpful to users and search engines alike.

As an added bonus, breadcrumbs are easy to implement using a plugin like Yoast.

In just a few clicks, you could make your site easier to navigate and maybe rank higher in SERPs.

More resources:

Featured Image: BestForBest/Shutterstock

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

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

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

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

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

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

What is conversion?

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

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

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

A quick recap

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Our problem

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

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

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

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

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

What we did to fix it

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

We decided to improve our site

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

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

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

We got to know our users

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

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

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

We improved site speed

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

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

We optimized images.

We managed our own caching.

We compressed our files.

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

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

We introduced more tracking

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

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

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

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

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

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

We looked into user behavior

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

Quantitative research (numbers and data-based research)

Qualitative research (people-based research)

We did a mixture of both.

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

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

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

For the qualitative research, we focused primarily on interviews.

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

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

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

What we learned

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

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

The results

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Some practical changes you can make to improve your website conversions

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Recommended tools

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

Google Optimize: run A/B tests

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

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

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

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

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

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

How to keep your conversion rates high

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

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

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

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

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

Conclusion

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

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

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

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

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

Google unveiled new features for Local Services Ads (LSA) this week. One automatically selects profile photos to display in advertisements, while the others give advertisers more control over their spending.

Profile photos

This update aims to increase ad engagement and potentially improve ad rankings for local service providers.

How it works:

Google will choose photos from advertisers’ LSA profiles based on their likelihood to boost engagement.

Photos won’t appear in every ad, depending on user queries and other factors.

Google’s recommendations:

Upload 3-5 high-quality images to your LSA profile.

Ensure photos are relevant to your work, original, and not copied or stolen.

What to watch. How this change affects ad performance and ranking for local service providers, especially those who haven’t previously focused on visual content in their profiles.

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Ad spending controls

The new ad budget features include the ability to set a maximum monthly ad spend limit for certain accounts. This gives advertisers more control over their spending, potentially preventing unexpected budget overruns. 

Key features:

Immediate effect upon setting.

Automatic campaign stoppage when limit is reached.

Monthly reset on the 1st of each month.

Flexible management – can be updated anytime.

How it works. Advertisers can toggle the account spend limit on or off, set a specific monthly limit, view last month’s spend and monitor current month’s spend and remaining budget through the Local Service Ads interface.

Dig deeper: Why marketers must combat the hidden threat of MFA sites

Yes, but. Due to reporting lag, there’s a possibility of exceeding the set limit, especially when:

Setting a limit for the first time.

Lowering an existing limit.

Advertisers are responsible for paying any excess charges if the limit is exceeded.

The catch. If the limit is exceeded, all ads will stop running until the next month.

The post Google rolls out new features for Local Service Ads appeared first on MarTech.

“Echo AI came onto our radar screen because we were looking for AI-driven consumer insight platforms that can help marketing, sales and customer service teams optimize and become more efficient. What we’ve seen are the traditional mediums through which marketing campaigns are pushed out — emails, websites, social media. What we haven’t seen as much is how you take these personalized interactions that have emerged, particularly with chatbots, and use that data to optimize your marketing campaigns and messaging. That’s what Echo AI is able to do.”

That was a brief introduction to Echo AI offered by Camille Manson of innovation advisory firm Silicon Foundry back in May.

“Listening to customers is pretty critical for any business,” Alex Kvamme, CEO of Echo AI, told us. “The paradox of success is that if you’re good at listening to customers you get more customers — and it’s harder to listen to them. You have thousands or millions of customers telling you exactly what they want and what’s happening in the market; the problem has been that it’s very hard to get at those insights.”

Solutions have included manual review of customer conversations and then pre-deep learning natural language processing models. “You could do sentiment and keyword tracking, but it was not very good, it was not configurable, it was surface level.” While it was possible to run search queries against transcripts, customers have many different ways of saying things. Also: “You can only search for what you know to search for.”

Improvements in deep learning technology and the development of generative AI have enabled a deeper dive. Audio files are easily transcribed, but: “You have this unstructured jumble of billions of words, being added to every day, and there was just no way to comprehensively get in there until the invention of LLMs that are unstructured word processing machines. It was the perfect problem for LLMs.” Echo AI, incidentally, is model-agnostic using a range of available models including OpenAI.

Customer acquisition company Centerfield had not so much a jumble but a mountain of unstructured words from calls to their call centers. Echo AI was able to shine a light on those conversations.

Supercharging customer acquisition

“In a nutshell, we supercharge customer acquisition for our clients,” explained Aniketh Parmar, EVP technology at Centerfield. “We do that using a wide variety of mechanisms especially around our technology platform called Dugout.” In other words, Centerfield acts as an extension of the marketing teams, typically at Fortune 500 companies. Also: “We don’t get paid until we acquire a customer,” said Parmar, which indicates some confidence in the platform’s capabilities.

How does Centerfield’s acquisition strategy work? First, there is a portfolio of more than a dozen digital brands like business.com and security.org that redirect traffic to Centerfield’s clients. The brands attract something like 170 million users throughout the year. Centerfield also drives significant traffic from search keywords to landing pages through partnerships with Google and Bing.

The majority of connections, however, come through Centerfield’s globally distrbuted call centers. “Using our technology platform we can track everything end-to-end, so we know what ad you clicked on or what you saw on the landing page; and when you make a phone call we know that you’re coming from so-and-so location. We use that information to find the best available agent to convert you as a customer.” The agent will have all the information available to them when taking the call.

After making the first sale, Centerfield hands off the customer to its client. This goes a step beyond lead generation; what the customer Centerfield hands off is more than a lead, it’s someone who has already converted.

Mining millions of phone calls

In the call center space, Centerfield has faced a number of challenges including improving the performance of agents. “It’s difficult to identify the best-performing agents if you try to do it manually,” said Parmar, “so we wanted to use some kind of technology. Prior to Echo, we weren’t doing this at scale; we were only doing this on certain clients and certain subsets of calls. We could not mine every single call. Today we’re mining pretty much every single call.”

The relationship with Echo AI began with a proof of concept exercise on a small number of calls and then scaled up. What kind of scale are we talking about? “Six or seven million calls [by the end of the year]. That’s the kind of volume we’re talking about here.”

It’s one thing to have millions of calls mined, another thing to ingest the results. “It’s a two-step journey,” Parmar explained. “First, they mine the calls; then you can put questions to the platform, like ‘Find the traits of agents that are really good at converting customers.’ The platform can identify themes and then report the information back to us. We can then ingest the information in our platform, Dugout, that has all the performance data.”

This is Centerfield’s first year using Echo AI. From the POC exercise they saw an improvement in conversions. Parmar did not yet have exact insights of the improvements seen as Echo AI has been scaled across the company.

Dig deeper: 5 simple ways to improve customer experience

The micro and the macro

We asked Kvamme to go into more detail about how insights from millions of phone calls can be reported in digestible form. Kvamme distinguishes between micro-insights and macro-insights. Specific conversations can reveal micro-insights like purchase intent — including for products or services that are not the main subject of the call — and intent to churn. Echo AI can detect and flag these insights and push them via APIs into the organizations other systems (CRM, for example) where they can surface and be acted on.

Macro-insights identify trends, opportunities and risks across the business. “We’re surfacing that in our application where you can view those trends over time; and you can take the high levels trend representing millions of conversations and dig, dig down into the singular conversations — the atoms that make the molecule.”

Does Echo AI’s technology serve channels other than this call center example? “Our vision is that every word that comes out of your customer should feed back to the business,” said Kvamme. “Conversations are the richest medium but you also have reviews, NPS surveys, social media — there are many ways your customers can communicate to you or about you. We are working on analyzing some of those channels.”

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