Ecommerce Management Advisors
Ecommerce Management Advisors
LinkedIn unveils research-backed creative principles to boost B2B ad performance, as 90% of CMOs seek bolder marketing approaches.
LinkedIn releases new content guidelines, prioritizing professional insights while penalizing promotional posts and engagement-bait tactics.
In what appears to be a development in OpenAI’s expansion, former Chrome engineering veteran Darin Fisher has joined the AI company.
This move adds fuel to earlier reports about OpenAI’s plans to develop a web browser to compete with Google Chrome.
Earlier reports from The Information indicated that OpenAI has been quietly assembling a team of former Google developers to work on a new browser project.
The company has reportedly been in discussions with various partners, including Conde Nast, Eventbrite, Redfin, and Priceline, about implementing specialized search features for travel, food, real estate, and retail websites.
According to an update to his LinkedIn profile, Fisher has recently joined OpenAI.
Screenshot from LinkedIn, November 2024.His arrival is noteworthy, given Fisher’s background in browser development.
His professional history includes contributions to Google Chrome, Mozilla Firefox, and Neeva, making him an asset for OpenAI’s browser ambitions.
You can learn more about Fisher and what he brought to the Chrome team in the video below:
This development comes at a critical time in the browser market.
Google Chrome dominates with approximately 65% of desktop and 68% of mobile users.
However, the market could shift following recent U.S. Department of Justice proposals suggesting Google should divest its Chrome browser business due to monopoly concerns.
While OpenAI’s browser project is reportedly in the early stages, the addition of experienced browser developers like Fisher suggests the company is serious about entering this space.
The potential browser is expected to feature deep integration with ChatGPT and AI-powered search capabilities, though a launch timeline remains unclear.
This move represents another step in OpenAI’s apparent strategy to expand beyond pure AI development into consumer-facing products.
Featured Image: JarTee/Shutterstock
SEO is a multifaceted discipline. It requires a solid strategy, connection to broader digital marketing (and business goals), and accountability.
While there are differing processes, approaches, and even opinions on how you should implement it, it is something that you can’t ignore or push off specific short-term tactics if you want to get to specific long-term results.
I’m against just blindly “doing” best practices or following a prescribed checklist in the absence of a strategy or documented plan.
Rather than giving you a specific checklist of things to do during the year, I’m unpacking activities categorized by daily, monthly, quarterly, and yearly.
I feel strongly that if you have a well-balanced approach to SEO that starts with a strategy and solid goals, then you can move into the ongoing campaign management or tactical implementation phase of moving through your year.
My goal is to unpack this cadence so that you will be able to factor it into your plan and see it through to ultimate return on investment (ROI) and success.
Staying up to date on industry news is a critical aspect of SEO that must be built into any maintenance or ongoing management plan.
This ranges from the mission-critical alerts and updates the search engines announce to keeping tabs on SEO best practices and breaking news from sources like Search Engine Journal.
AI news seems to be constantly disruptive, and we have to be mindful of how SEO is not just all about Google or concepts that we have applied in the past (if you’ve been in the game for a while).
Big shifts in the industry are hard to miss (whether they are about AI or not).
But smaller, more subtle changes can become magnified when you miss them or best practices become outdated.
Don’t fall behind or deploy outdated tactics!
Monitoring your key SEO performance metrics in real-time, or at least once per day, is especially necessary for brands and organizations that rely on ecommerce transactions or lead volume to feed a sales team.
Knowing how your website performs in search through top-level metrics is important for recognizing any red flags. These could include:
Being able to recognize problems as soon as they happen is key.
You need to be able to diagnose issues and reverse any negative trends before they impact your overall marketing and business goals.
By keeping tabs on actual performance, you can compare to benchmarks and baselines to make sure that you fully understand the cause and effect with your metrics and not have an issue happen for too long before you can intervene.
You can monitor less critical KPIs (any that don’t necessitate an immediate reaction) on a weekly basis.
A solid digital marketing plan – especially an SEO plan – or campaign must start with strategy (including goals), tactics, assets needed, how it will be measured, and documented steps to be accountable and actionable.
Without a plan, process, or defined approach, you can waste a lot of time chasing specific SEO aspects that might be low impact and low priority – or tactics absent of a strategy that are part of a “best practices” checklist, but not one that is specific to your business.
The daily process should include specific tasks, milestones, and achievable actions that work toward the bigger picture.
The tactics can include things done for the first time in a phased approach or action items more in a rinse-and-repeat methodology.
Regardless, the list of specific technical, on-page, and off-page action items should be defined for the year, broken out into months, and further into tactics and progress that can be made on a daily basis to stay on track.
SEO requires both big-picture thinking and the ability to tackle daily tasks and action items.
Beyond the daily or weekly KPI monitoring, it’s often important to use monthly cycles to more broadly report on performance.
The focus of monthly checkpoints allows for dedicated time to compare a larger sample size of data and see trends.
Monthly performance reporting should include year-over-year comparisons of the completed month plus any available year-to-date stats.
Find meaningful intervals to measure and be consistent. Looking at bigger ranges of time helps to see trends that are hard to decipher in small sample sizes.
Any stories of the what and why for deviations in goal, celebrations for exceeding goals, and metrics that warrant possible changes to the plan are critical to the surface and prioritized through a dashboard or snapshot report of the performance data.
This is a chance to evaluate the tactics and execution in the previous month against the plan.
Looking at the past helps shape the future.
When you combine the action items and tactics with the performance data, you should get an overall picture of the reality of what is driving SEO performance.
Monthly intervals are great for ensuring accountability for the completion of tasks.
Even when the year is planned out, things change in SEO, and performance isn’t always what we expect after doing something the first time.
Taking a monthly planning approach, adjustments can be made to the plan, such as doubling down on a specific tactic or adjusting the overall strategy to recalibrate.
By being agile enough to evaluate performance and tactics monthly, you can avoid overthinking things and reacting too swiftly, but also not let too much time pass and lose footing with trends toward goals.
Having a good balance of planned tactics and actions versus the need for agile methods to pivot when needed is often the best approach to staying current and proactive.
Assuming you have covered technical issues at the beginning of your SEO focus and are also watching for any that trigger red flags in daily and weekly monitoring, it is important to take a broader look through an audit each quarter.
This audit should include a review of reported issues in Google Search Console and Bing Webmaster Tools.
Plus, comparison to benchmarks and standards for site speed, mobile usability, validation of structured data, and the aspects that aren’t often looked at on a more frequent basis.
Without an audit process and even with frequent monitoring, things happen on websites.
A code update, database update, plugin/extension update, or publishing content can cause duplicate tags, duplicate content, or even missing on-page elements.
A quarterly audit of on-page issues that can be conducted using a wide range of free and subscription third-party tools is important.
There are tools that will even send alerts and factor into the daily process if something changes, like a meta description being wiped out.
Regardless, having a solid tools stack and process for quarterly evaluation and comparison to the previous audit is important to ensure that the results of the audit and any fixes needed are noted and made into the tactical plan.
Overall, the SEO plan likely includes some form of link building.
Whether that is through attracting links with engaging content or a more focused plan of research and outreach, it is likely a part of the ongoing tactics (or should be considered if it isn’t).
Investing time and effort into the tactics makes it important to have visibility of the overall link profile and progress.
This might be a performance metric tracked in the monthly reporting phase, but quarterly should be audited in a deeper sense.
Evaluating the quality of links, the number of links, the diversity of sources, the relevancy of linked content, comparisons to competitors, comparisons to benchmarks, and period-over-period comparisons are all important aspects to ensure that the plan is performing as intended in the area of backlinks.
Plus, if not caught through daily or monthly efforts, any spammy links or negative SEO attempts can be caught here and addressed through the disavow process, if applicable or if it makes sense for your situation.
Once local listings management is in maintenance mode, there won’t be a frequent need for major changes with NAP (name, address, phone) data or inconsistencies in listing data.
However, that doesn’t mean it won’t happen and can be “set it and forget it.”
An audit using third-party tools to ensure accuracy and consistency of data is strongly advised at least quarterly.
This audit can identify issues that can be addressed on a one-off basis as well as provide guidance on performance and any needed changes to the content, reviews, and other aspects of the listings themselves beyond the basic NAP data.
If any third-party data sources or listings were missed, Google Business Profile data could be overwritten with inaccurate listing info.
Even if nothing changes with your management of listings, data can change and needs to be monitored at a minimum.
When running annual plans for SEO – and even when not on annual agreements or evaluation cycles – taking an entire year of data and evaluating it is helpful to advise strategy and find measurable ROI calculations.
SEO is a long-term process that aims to achieve the most competitive positioning and visibility possible in search engines. It is a valuable investment of time to look at performance data over 12-month spans, compare it to previous periods, look at benchmarks, and celebrate successes.
Even if you don’t have annual budgets or agreements with outside partners/providers, taking an annual step back and looking at performance and the effort like an investment rather than an expense is important.
In addition to reviewing yearly performance data, you should also plan your goals, strategy, and tactics for the next year.
Even though the plan could change a week into maintenance, having a plan and setting a target are key to measuring progress.
Without a plan and using past learnings and a realistic view of the resources being invested in the coming year, there can be a gap between expectations and reality.
It is best to sort this out before getting months down the road.
To reiterate what I noted earlier, SEO isn’t about just following a basic checklist of best practices. It is getting harder and harder to be successful at.
I look at the changes based on AI, Google’s algorithms, and fragmentation in the search market share as an opportunity.
When we have clear goals defined for our strategy, build out the tactics needed to get there, have solid assets (websites, content, etc.), can measure it, and stick to it with a schedule that doesn’t get sidetracked by other priorities or hats we wear, we can get there.
Our annual plan or “checklist” is custom to us with a cadence of daily, monthly, quarterly, and yearly when it comes to things we do, so we can see SEO all the way through to ROI in both short-term and long-term applications.
More resources:
Featured Image: eamesBot/Shutterstock
Are you prepared for the SEO landscape of 2025?
From the role of AI in SEO and the rise of AI Overviews (AIO) to significant Google updates, 2024 introduced sweeping changes in search. Now, it’s time to brace for what’s next.
Join our upcoming webinar as we dive into exclusive survey data from industry-leading SEOs, digital marketers, content marketers, and more to uncover the priorities and challenges shaping the future of search in 2025.
To navigate SEO in 2025, understanding the evolving priorities and challenges is crucial.
In this data-packed session, we’ll cover:
This session will be led by Shannon Vize and Steven van Vessum from Conductor, who bring a wealth of SEO expertise. They’ll share strategies for resourcing and reporting to streamline your 2025 SEO plans and offer insights on tackling upcoming challenges.
This webinar is perfect for:
After the presentation, Shannon and Steven will host a live Q&A—the perfect opportunity for you to ask any of your burning questions and get expert advice for planning your SEO strategy in 2025.
2025 is set to be a transformative year for SEO. Register now to gain exclusive insights and position yourself for success in the search landscape.
Can’t attend live? Sign up anyway for the recording.
Prepare to lead in SEO in 2025.
Paid search advertising has many arms.
Marketers spend years crafting strategies to drive results through Google Ads, Microsoft Ads, and more.
Of these many strategies adopted by brands and agencies, in my experience over the last 15 years, one topic that sits across every paid search strategy is brand bidding.
Brand bidding, in its truest form, relates to targeting keywords that relate to your (or your clients) business.
For example:
Screenshot for search for [new balance], Google, November 2024The most common keyword marketers will include in their strategy is the company name. But depending on search demand, there may be additional keywords that are included.
Such as:
There is also an element of brand bidding focused on products/services that may not contain the company name.
Think Apple and the “iPhone” or Converse and the “Chuck Taylor.” These terms are most certainly brand keywords, just without the company name.
From a tactical standpoint, whether brands bid on their keywords or not is a decision made between the stakeholders involved.
However, since Google Ads was birthed in October 2000, this topic has been very controversial for several reasons.
The controversy is rooted in a question that many brands or agencies will likely have been asked or have asked themselves, “Why should we pay for traffic that we can get for free through organic?”
This is a completely justified perspective on brand bidding, and if brands could guarantee that the Google search engine results page (SERP) would serve a single organic result – and no competitor ads when a brand term is searched – it would make the decision for and against much more straightforward.
However, times have changed, as have Google Ads campaign types and the way in which the SERP is delivered and used by searchers.
Brand bidding should be treated on a case-by-case basis, considering as many situational factors as possible, such as:
It’s not always clear which path to take, but there are a host of reasons for and against.
Serving a branded text ad on the SERP alongside your organic listings provides an additional link for searchers to click through to your site.
Let’s say you rank position one organically for your company name, have the knowledge panel displaying your company information, a text ad serving sitelinks alongside your review rating, and your company telephone number. The real estate you are maximizing on the SERP will serve as an authority for your brand.
Being on the receiving end of competitor bidding is a common reason for marketers and agencies to activate their own brand campaigns.
Brands are free to bid on competitor company names and/or related keywords across Google, Bing, etc. This is a common strategy used by brands and agencies worldwide.
There are restrictions that forbid brands from including trademarked company names within ad copy, but outside of this, brands have free reign.
In my experience, there are a few reasons (among others) for why brands adopt this strategy:
The organic listing served for brand queries contains a customizable title tag and meta description.
However, Google’s guidelines state that it will only use this if it is accurate and will often rewrite these and serve organic sitelinks.
By serving a branded search ad, the advertiser is given complete control over the messaging.
This is useful in many scenarios:
Context aside, brand cost-per-click (CPC) is likely cheaper than non-brand (generic keywords) as there is less competition, and your quality score will be strong.
Each industry (market and vertical) will have a different scenario in terms of how much a branded click costs.
Take Nike, for example. Its brand terms will be incredibly competitive as resellers, marketplaces, and affiliates will serve ads on the company name. However, a small ecommerce store might not have anyone bidding on its brand name.
With the typically cheaper click costs, bidding on branded keywords can be seen as a cost-effective strategy, but all other factors must be considered – a key one being the impact on organic performance.
This refers to driving better results overall by bidding on branded keywords than you would without, and is a very hot topic in PPC.
As with almost all arguments for and against brand bidding, the incremental gains driven through this strategy differ by brand.
Among other methods, turn-off experiments are common practice.
This is where marketers pause brand bidding for a treatment group while maintaining visibility for the control group to observe the impact of bidding on branded keywords.
Studies have shown that turning off brand campaigns can result in lower overall performance versus having brand ads live.
Others have shown barely any impact overall, with organic picking up the sales or leads that would have been driven through ads.
What is the best way to find out? Give it a test.
Context plays a huge role (size of business, level of demand, market, etc.).
But aside from any incrementality testing – in a budgeting scenario at the very top level – spending money on brand terms that (to some degree) will be picked up through organic can be seen as an inefficient use of spend.
It’s not uncommon to see companies with huge levels of brand search demand cut their brand spend. eBay did this over a decade ago, and more businesses have followed suit since.
Freeing up this budget will impact brands with considerable online demand. For smaller brands with less search demand, it’s really a case of weighing up the savings and seeing how far this could go if it were to be reinvested into non-brand new customer acquisition.
If a searcher is looking for your company name and you have organic listings serving on Google, the chances are they know who your company is and will visit your company website (among other reasons).
By activating brand ads, the amount of traffic, sales/leads, and overall organic engagement will be impacted when the ad serves above the organic listing.
It really depends on the brand, team, goals, and key performance indicators (KPIs) in question to weigh up the impact of running brand ads on organic, and a good place to start is incrementality testing.
In most cases, new and existing customers should be targeted separately for brand search.
Take ASOS, for example. Its brand traffic will be a mix of new searchers, existing customers looking to shop, existing customers looking to log in and send returns, speak to customer service, and more.
By not accounting for this within your strategy, efficiencies could be missed, and the budget could be spent on driving users to take actions that are not aligned with KPIs.
Brand performance will almost always be stronger than traffic driven for searchers who are not aware of your brand.
Over the last 15 years, I’ve seen many accounts that blend together brand and non-brand performance in reporting, including shopping and Performance Max campaigns, which also serve brand queries.
In some cases, this is the lens that stakeholders want to see. But if a brand drives a large percentage of revenue/leads for a small percentage of spend, the overarching view of performance may look more preferable than it is from a new customer acquisition point of view.
Brands who sell through resellers/marketplaces can often have a competitive auction for brand terms.
Mutual agreements can be a way to put structure in place, agreeing to not bid directly on the company name with the freedom to bid on brand + terms (e.g., brand + product), for example.
However, these agreements can be difficult to manage as many parties can be involved (resellers with in-house teams, new agencies onboarded into resellers, etc.).
As a result, the auction can become competitive, which will, in turn, drive up click costs and lower efficiency.
PMax is a consolidated campaign type offered by Google and Microsoft. This fully automated campaign serves across multiple networks, one being Google search.
This campaign can (and will) serve branded queries. I’ve seen brands report strong PMax performance many times under the assumption that it’s non-brand when, in fact, a high percentage of sales/leads are driven through their own brand searches.
There are controls in place to remove brand from PMax (account-level negative keywords, campaign-level negative keywords added via Google Support, etc.). However, if you want control, I’d recommend creating a brand search campaign and removing brand from PMax.
This Google Ads keyword match type allows your ads to serve on searches related to the meaning of the keywords you’re bidding on.
With this, as your brand falls under this category, the chances of your ads entering auctions for brand queries despite your keyword not containing your company name are high.
As with PMax (but a little easier to implement), you can remove your brand terms from your broad match campaigns with the use of negative keywords.
Alternatively, you could target brand queries through broad match with a comprehensive negative keyword strategy to ensure you are only allocating budget to brand.
Let’s say your brand name contains a word + the product you sell, such as “123 designer handbags.”
When bidding on brand terms, you may see competitors in auction insights matching through broad and/or PMax for the term “designer handbags.”
This may impact your click costs, which can fluctuate over time depending on investment (e.g., brands increasing budgets across PMax during peak months).
Competitors may still bid on your brand terms directly, but others may pick these queries up through PMax or Broad, a key consideration for budgeting and planning.
There isn’t a right or wrong answer, and claims that there is will likely be rooted in personal experiences.
Knowing which path to take ultimately comes down to context, and this path will change over time.
For agencies managing multiple clients, each brand should be treated on a case-by-case basis, and historical context is certainly needed.
For in-house marketing teams, the same logic applies but you likely have fewer brands to make the decision for.
The arguments for and against are there to guide you in your strategic decision-making.
The best place to start is by listing all considerations and questions, such as “What is our organic positioning like for brand?”, “How many resellers do we have and what brand terms are they bidding on?”, and “Do we have the budget?”
From here, whether you currently bid on brand and want to test incrementality, or if you’re interested in running a short stint and haven’t used this strategy before, ensure reporting is robust and that you are always testing.
More resources:
Featured Image: Sammby/Shutterstock
The technology powering mobile airline boarding passes also enables push notifications for retail marketers.
Mobile wallet passes are digital representations of tickets, boarding passes, and cards for auto insurance, loyalty programs, coupons, and memberships.
Stored within mobile wallet applications such as Apple Wallet, Google Pay, or Samsung Pay, these passes allow consumers to access and use them directly from their smartphones, streamlining transactions, improving security, and avoiding physical alternatives.
Wallet passes also work for brick-and-mortar and ecommerce shops, with three key features: persistent storage, updates, and push notifications.
Consider an airline boarding pass.
Expired boarding passes from the author’s digital wallet.
Imagine similar steps applied to a retailer.
The store could include external links in either the loyalty card or the notification (depending on the mobile operating system), sending the shopper directly to a sales landing page to make a purchase.
In some cases, it could be a single-click checkout, where tapping the message link leads directly to the order confirmation page. Few other channels offer this level of conversion potential.
Notably, the mobile wallet pass reaches a shopper directly on her phone. It’s a potent channel during the holiday shopping season amid saturated email and advertising campaigns.
Digital coupon and loyalty cards can link directly to the checkout. These hypothetical examples are from the Apple Wallet documentation.
A do-it-yourself approach to wallet pass marketing is entirely possible. All major mobile operating systems have well-documented software development kits (SDKs) or application programming interfaces (APIs).
Yet one hardly needs to make the effort. Prominent mobile pass providers include Vibes, PassKit, and Airship. The Shopify app store has more than 70 options for wallet passes. Some providers offer 1,000 persistent loyalty card passes for less than $100 per month.
Still, shoppers need a reason to add a pass. The motivation might be a loyalty card with its promise of points and prizes or a recurring monthly coupon. Both likely appeal to shoppers more than downloading an app.
Clearly, however, wallet passes don’t make sense for every retailer. They likely fit merchants with:
Nonetheless, mobile wallet passes are a potential marketing channel for sellers online and off. The technology’s ability to persist on shoppers’ smartphones, provide real-time updates, and send push notifications directly to locked screens makes the passes especially valuable during high-competition periods such as the holidays.