Ecommerce Management Advisors
Ecommerce Management Advisors
Google Analytics adds new features to help merchants identify and fix hidden product listings, improving visibility on Google Shopping.
YouTube’s latest weekly update highlights new creator features, including expanding longer Shorts, launching images on Quiz posts for Android, and broader access to the Brand Connect tab in YouTube Studio.
YouTube has finished rolling out updates allowing Shorts videos ranging from 1 to 3 minutes to be displayed accordingly in the subscriptions tab, on channel pages, and in YouTube Studio.
These videos have been organized into the Shorts shelf on the subscriptions page and the Shorts tab on both the channel page and YouTube Studio.
Creators wishing their uploads to be classified as long-form videos can do so by uploading in a wider aspect ratio, such as 16:9.
YouTube is updating how you share and publish videos from other apps on Android and iOS.
When sharing a video to YouTube from another app, you will now have direct access to Shorts creation tools.
This allows you to trim the video, add details such as captions, set visibility and location, and enhance your video before publishing.
YouTube has announced an improvement following the launch of text-based Quiz posts.
You can now optionally add images to the multiple-choice answers in your quizzes.
This feature will initially be available on Android devices, but the image quizzes you create will be accessible to viewers on all devices where Community posts are available.
YouTube is launching two new tools designed to help you improve text input and generate images for posts.
The “Transform” tool allows you to rephrase and customize text while composing a post. The “DreamScreen” tool can help you generate new images based on a prompt.
Initially, these features will only be available in English and will support prompts in English.
YouTube’s self-service platform, Brand Connect, is now available to all eligible creators. You can find the Brand Connect tab under the “Earn” section in YouTube Studio.
This tab allows you to sign up and access Brand Connect features. The platform helps you manage accepted brand deals and provides a customizable Media Kit with audience insights.
YouTube is testing a new program called “Open Call” until December. This program allows advertisers to ask for custom ads from eligible creators.
Creators can review these requests and submit their content if they want. The goal of this pilot is to make it easier for brands and creators to work together on ad content.
YouTube is launching a new feature to help creators show where their content comes from and how authentic it is.
A label that says “Captured with a camera” will appear in the description box when a video is filmed using special technology.
This technology works with cameras that support C2PA version 2.1 or higher, allowing creators to verify their videos.
Many of these new features will be global, but some, like AI tools and BrandConnect, are region-specific.
Monitor your YouTube Studio dashboard and official messages for updates on features and rollout.
See YouTube’s full news update below:
Featured Image: Mamun_Sheikh/Shutterstock
Google is beginning a test that will change hotel search results for users in Germany, Belgium, and Estonia.
This test will remove features like the map and hotel listings, replacing them with regular blue links to hotel websites and comparison sites.
The experiment will only affect users in these three countries, whether searching locally or internationally.
It won’t impact users outside these countries or when searching for a specific hotel.
Google is testing these changes to follow new rules in Europe called the Digital Markets Act (DMA).
In the past year, Google has made over 20 updates. These updates include new sections and formats to make comparison sites for flights, hotels, and shopping more visible.
The results of these changes have been mixed.
Major travel aggregators and comparison sites have gained visibility. However, other businesses, like airlines, hotel operators, and small retailers, have seen a drop in free direct booking clicks by as much as 30%.
Google will run this test in Germany, Belgium, and Estonia to see how proposed changes affect user experience and website traffic.
Google is hesitant about this decision. The company maintains that reverting to a “ten blue links” format would disadvantage both users and businesses.
Gary Illyes, Analyst at Google, emphasized that the test is temporary and websites need not take any action during the experimental period.
The results of this test results could influence future decisions about how search engines operate in Europe and potentially shape regulations worldwide.
Google says normal search functionality will resume after the test concludes, although the timing of the conclusion is unclear.
Featured Image: Michael Derrer Fuchs/Shutterstock
Having a strong brand makes everything in SEO easier.
Brands have better user signals on their sites, better click-through rates in the SERPs, and get preferential treatment from Google.
Google’s algorithms elevate sites with strong brand signals and punish companies that are too aggressive about SEO without having “the engine” to back it up.
Image Credit: Lyna ™There is a common belief that SEO can’t do much about the brand, but that’s wrong. We often simply miss the tools.
Product marketing skills and insights can significantly improve the impact of organic traffic and support brand building in the process.
Both disciplines sit between product development and customer needs. Both work on content, audience understanding, and driving revenue – but from different angles.
Together, they can amplify each other. It’s an opportunity most companies miss, to their detriment.
One key lesson is to think long-term about brand impact. Focusing on the user’s value helps create a stronger brand connection, which pays off over time. It’s about building trust and loyalty that translates into sustained engagement and recognition. – Bar Wolf
Image Credit: Kevin IndigI spoke with five seasoned product marketing experts about their lessons from decades in the field to distill what SEO pros can learn from product marketing:
Product marketing and SEO are highly complementary. They can unify customer research and quantitative insights for better prioritization and impact measuring.
They can uplevel user experience with the right messaging. And they can improve the quality of traffic with clear differentiation.
It makes sense: The goal of product marketing is to help the product organization bring the product to market with market research, positioning and messaging, go-to-market strategy, customer education, and sales enablement.
While SEO pros research keywords and analyze search volumes, product marketers spend a lot of time talking to customers.
Traffic is great, but what makes people remember your product? – Blake Thorne
When product marketers and SEO teams collaborate early and often, they enable the audience to find relevant content that addresses their specific challenges and needs — making marketing efforts more efficient and effective. – Lauren Hobbs Decker
You will surely agree that customer insights are critical for any form of marketing.
In my work with high-performing tech companies, however, I often notice that marketing teams have no idea where to find customer research, and they don’t have open channels to existing customers.
The results of performance marketing, including paid and organic search, made it too attractive to focus on metrics.
The solution is to either collaborate with product marketing to learn from customer insights or get them yourself.
Product marketers get customer insights through:
They look for:
Good questions to ask:
Some of my favorite customer feedback tools:
Other opportunities for insights:
SEOs can use customer insights to:
Tip: AI tools can process large volumes of data from customer reviews, surveys, or social media to identify pain points, motivations, and trends faster than traditional methods.
I so often land on a website via SEO and can see a very strong SEO program at play, but I’m not left with any impression of what the company actually does.
For many SEOs, this moment might be “mission accomplished,” they’ve got their rankings and traffic.
This is where brand and product marketers can step in and work alongside SEOs to augment the experience on that page – what makes people remember the product? What makes people know the brand and have a positive sentiment even if the initial visit is short? – Blake Thorne
Since the DoJ lawsuit against Google and the ranking factor leak, we officially know that Google uses user signals to a high degree.
In my Memos, I often highlight the importance of a good user experience on top of high-quality content to impact user signals.
Differentiation can top it off by offering another lens for topic/keyword prioritization besides search volume and difficulty.
The deep market and customer understanding of product marketing helps SEO pros understand where a company stands out and where competition is tough.
Differentiation is how a company stands out with unique features and value.
In my guide to building a winning SEO strategy, I explain that an absolutely essential component of any strategy is strong differentiation:
Critical: the approach needs to be differentiated. You need to do things differently (competitive advantage or asymmetry). You cannot expect to do the same things as your competitors and beat them. That’s just a way to end up in attrition warfare and obsession with operational efficiency. Differentiation creates greater value, prices and margins.
For clear differentiation, you need to deeply understand three things: the market, alternatives, and customers.
Figure out what problems customers are trying to solve, the options at their disposal, and the impact that solving those problems has on their business/life. You can use interviews and review platforms like G2 or Trustpilot to source insights.
The way most SEOs measure “the market” is by looking at competitors’ ranking for the same keywords.
That is a good start – and valuable for product marketers – but it needs to go further. SEO pros should also factor in “perceived competitors” (i.e., What alternatives does the customer have in mind that product marketers can bring to the table?).
“Different is better than better.” – Dirk Schart
Good differentiation is very specific and makes it easy for customers to understand the value they get from your product.
There are three outcomes from differentiation work:
SEO pros should incorporate differentiation factors into content briefs to influence the tone, sub-topics, meta titles, headings, and CTAs on any page on the site.
In the YMYL/Health space that WebMD participates in, trust from consumers is paramount.
According to a recent Harris Poll study, 1 in 3 Americans don’t know whether the health information they read online and on social platforms is truthful or if the source is being paid to promote things, and ultimately they can’t determine what’s true and what’s false.
WebMD prides itself on editorial integrity – advertisers have zero influence on our editorial content, and all of our content is fact-checked by medical professionals for accuracy.
Moreover, our medical reviewers audit all of our content frequently to ensure that months/years after the content is published, it’s updated as necessary to stay accurate even as medical research & science evolve.
In part, these efforts contribute to WebMD being the most recognized and trusted name in online health – we’ve earned our trust over the past 25 years and have become a household name for quality health information. – Sol Masch
Obviously, driving traffic is not enough. It needs to be the right kind of traffic. Good positioning and messaging can make the difference because they can act as a lens for topic/keyword prioritization.
Messaging can elevate the user experience by showing the copy on landing pages on other types of content that highlight how and why the product is a good fit.
The goal of positioning is to define how a product is perceived by the market relative to its competitors. Who is it for? What problem(s) does it solve? How is it better? It’s high-level and strategic.
Messaging turns the company’s positioning into narratives and statements to use in copy, sales material, and advertising. It’s specific and operational.
For example:
A basic messaging and positioning framework is the Value Proposition Canvas:
The Jobs To Be Done is a good alternative for horizontal products that have many use cases (think: Notion).
These frameworks can literally be spreadsheets with a column for every factor. Don’t overcomplicate it or think you need a fancy tool to build messaging and positioning.
SEO pros can use positioning to identify core topics and keywords within them, and messaging to drive content angles (e.g., “how to do {use case} with {product}”).
Somehow we focused all our energies on rankings/traffic/audience building to create this demand channel, and not enough on the things we’d typically do in a demand channel: Share our brand, get our messaging out there, get people excited about what we do. In other words: actually advertise the product. – Blake Thorne
Product marketing and SEO complement each other by sharing insights like search volume or customer research and approaches like positioning or messaging.
But most companies stand in their own way by keeping their respective teams siloed. Shared metrics, i.e., goaling two teams by the same numbers, are the crowbar to break the silos up.
Three actionable and comprehensive metrics to share:
The metric mix reflects the whole “funnel” or user journey, can be influenced by both teams, and is actionable.
The benefit for companies that get this right is two teams that are more effective and impactful.
SEO teams have another way to not just drive more and better organic traffic, but to evaluate their impact from a brand perspective (customer sentiment).
Instead of stopping at traffic or obsessing over rankings that are less and less valuable, impact on customer sentiment and pipeline over refuge for a changing SEO landscape.
The question is how to convince leadership to give it a shot. Test into it. Try improving a few product landing pages together, whether you’re in SaaS or ecommerce, and measure the impact on shared metrics.
SEO and product marketing are not exempt from AI disruption. Maybe they have belonged together all along, but the AI tech shift offers an opportunity to run in a new formation and bring SEO and product marketing together.
Brand/product marketing focuses on aligning messaging with customer emotions, behavior and needs, while SEO focuses on visibility.
SEOs can elevate their impact by considering how the brand’s narrative fits into the customer journey – moving beyond keywords to a deeper connection with the audience. – Dirk Schart
Featured Image: Paulo Bobita/Search Engine Journal
This edited extract is from B2B Influencer Marketing by Nick Bennett ©2024 and is reproduced and adapted with permission from Kogan Page Ltd.
Just a few years ago, B2B influencer marketing was a niche concept, reserved for selective people. Well, those days are long gone!
Today, the landscape is buzzing with activity, as brands and creators alike embrace the power of collaboration to reach targeted audiences and achieve their goals.
But what does the future hold for this dynamic field? Buckle up because we’re about to embark on a journey into the crystal ball to see what trends are shaping the future of B2B influencer marketing.
Let’s peer into the future and explore some of the exciting trends that are likely to shape the B2B influencer marketing landscape.
Forget passive consumption – the future belongs to interactive content.
Imagine engaging your target audience with quizzes, polls, and assessments – or taking them on virtual tours and product demonstrations through VR and AR technology.
Interactive content promises a deeper level of engagement and knowledge retention, making it a powerful tool for B2B brands.
Collaboration in the B2B influencer marketing space is about to go beyond the traditional sponsored post.
Long-term partnerships will allow brands and creators to build trust and develop deeper relationships, resulting in more authentic and impactful campaigns.
Additionally, we’ll see the emergence of new collaborative formats, such as co-created content and exclusive access to influencer communities, fostering a more collaborative and mutually beneficial environment.
While Instagram and TikTok have long dominated the influencer marketing scene, LinkedIn is quietly emerging as a powerhouse platform for B2B brands.
With its professional audience and focus on business-related content, LinkedIn presents a perfect opportunity to connect with industry leaders, decision-makers, and potential partners.
Imagine collaborating with a renowned LinkedIn influencer to share your brand’s expertise and thought leadership, reaching a highly targeted audience of potential customers. Who wouldn’t want that?
Gone are the days of relying solely on human influencers. AI-powered bots are rising to the forefront, offering unparalleled opportunities for personalized engagement and content delivery.
Think of a virtual spokesperson, perfectly tailored to your brand voice and values, interacting with your audience in real-time and answering their questions with uncanny accuracy.
This new breed of influencers promises a future where brand messaging resonates with each individual, fostering deeper connections and amplifying your brand’s reach.
Consumers today are like nomadic tribes, constantly exploring the diverse landscapes of various social media platforms.
To reach them, we must become multi-platform cartographers, charting a course that encompasses the unique features of each digital territory.
We need to identify and collaborate with creators who hold sway over these ever-evolving communities, ensuring that your message reaches the right audience at the right time.
Historically, the realms of marketing and sales have remained distinct entities. However, in the dynamic world of B2B influencer marketing, they are converging, forging a collaborative spirit that benefits both brands and influencers alike.
Affiliate programs act as treasure maps, leading brands to new audiences and potential customers.
Influencers, in turn, become trusted guides on this journey, promoting your offerings and sharing the spoils of success.
Virtual and augmented reality are no longer just science fiction – they’re becoming integral parts of the B2B marketing landscape.
Imagine immersing your target audience in virtual product demos, taking them on guided tours of your facilities, or even hosting interactive workshops and training sessions.
VR and AR offer unparalleled opportunities to create immersive and engaging experiences that resonate deeply with your audience.
TikTok has transcended its initial hype, evolving into a powerful platform for B2B brands seeking to connect with younger audiences.
Its unique format of short, engaging videos offers a compelling opportunity to capture attention and deliver impactful messages in a quick and concise manner.
Imagine creating captivating narratives that unfold within seconds, leaving a lasting impression on potential customers and propelling your brand to the forefront of their minds.
As the B2B influencer marketing landscape matures, data-driven decision-making becomes increasingly crucial.
Predictive analytics will allow brands to anticipate audience behavior and tailor their campaigns accordingly, while big data will provide valuable insights for precise audience targeting and engagement strategies.
By leveraging data effectively, brands can optimize their influencer marketing efforts and ensure they are reaching the right people with the right message at the right time.
The B2B world is no longer a monochrome landscape. Consumers demand authenticity and representation, urging brands to embrace the richness of diversity and inclusion.
We must actively seek partnerships with creators from all walks of life, weaving a tapestry of perspectives and experiences into our marketing campaigns.
This not only ensures that your brand resonates with a wider audience but also fosters a sense of belonging and inclusivity within your community.
Gone are the days of one-size-fits-all influencers. Today, we see the rise of specialized influencers who possess in-depth knowledge and expertise in specific niches and industries.
These “micro-influencers” may have smaller follower bases compared to mainstream figures, but they offer unparalleled reach and engagement within their targeted audience.
By partnering with specialists, brands can ensure their message resonates deeply with the right individuals, maximizing the effectiveness of their campaigns.
While the core trends of B2B influencer marketing resonate across industries, each sector faces unique opportunities and challenges.
Let’s delve into the crystal ball and forecast some industry-specific trends poised to shape the future.
These days, the tech and SaaS industry is moving at lightning speed, and when it comes to B2B influencer marketing, it’s important to stay nimble and creative to keep up with the pace.
Imagine partnering with tech influencers who are early adopters of emerging technologies, showcasing your latest innovations through engaging demos and reviews.
This will help you reach a highly targeted audience and build brand awareness among tech enthusiasts and decision-makers.
B2B influencer marketing in healthcare faces stringent regulations and ethical considerations. Transparency, compliance, and building trust are paramount.
Imagine collaborating with healthcare professionals who are active on social media, sharing valuable educational content and addressing sensitive topics with accuracy and empathy.
This can help you raise awareness about your healthcare solutions and build trust among medical professionals and patients alike.
Challenges:
In the world of finance and B2B services, trust and authority are essential.
Imagine partnering with industry experts and thought leaders who can share their insights and expertise through webinars, blog posts, and social media content.
This can help you position yourself as a credible and reliable partner, attracting potential clients and expanding your reach within the industry.
These industry-specific trends offer just a glimpse into the exciting future of B2B influencer marketing.
By understanding the unique challenges and opportunities within each sector, brands can tailor their strategies and collaborate with the right influencers to achieve their goals.
The success of these campaigns extends beyond traditional metrics like clicks and impressions.
Creator-first strategies focus on deeper engagement, brand affinity, and, ultimately, driving business impact. Here are some key KPIs to consider:
By focusing on these KPIs, brands can gain valuable insights into the effectiveness of their creator-first campaigns and demonstrate the tangible impact they have on their business objectives.
To read the full book, SEJ readers have an exclusive 25% discount code and free shipping to the US and UK. Use promo code SEJ25 at koganpage.com here.
More resources:
Featured Image: Accogliente Design/Shutterstock
Automattic cloned WP Engine’s paid ACF Premium plugin and is distributing it for free. Many in the WordPress community disapprove of this action, expressing concerns that it undermines the plugin and theme ecosystem.
Advanced Custom Fields (ACF) is a WordPress plugin that’s popular with WordPress website developers because it enables them to create custom fields that WordPress publishers and authors can use.
Custom fields allows developers to take full control of the editing screens to add things like a form for building structured data specific for a kind of WordPress page like Schema.org markup for ecommerce, news, legal or medical context. A custom field can be used to give article authors a place to enter the author name or a featured quote.
Website developers and use ACF to enable authors to add author bios, featured quotes, or article metadata like publication date, modification data or links to sources. For example, a field for a featured quote can be used so that authors can input what the featured quote says and it’ll appear in the article using all the predefined styling. All the author needs to do is fill in the form and hit the submit button.
ACF was developed by a company named Delicious Brains which was acquired by WP Engine in 2022 which assumed responsibility for developing and updating the free and premium versions.
ACF is popular because it built trust and authoritativeness as a solid plugin through the use of the freemium WordPress business model. Plugin and theme developers use the freemium business model to offer a free version of their software and a premium version that offers additional functionality. Offering a highly functional and useful free version increases the popularity and goodwill of a plugin or theme with basic users and the more advanced users are able to try the functionality of the free version then choose the premium version for the additional features. It can take years to build that goodwill, trust and authoritativeness with users.
The developers of plugins like Yoast and Wordfence spend thousands of hours developing and promoting their free plugins, which are then installed on millions of websites. They put all that effort into the free versions to upsell their premium products.
In the context of WordPress plugins and themes, the term “forking” refers to the creation of an independent version of an existing WordPress plugin or theme using the source code of the original version to create a different version. Forking is made possible with open source licenses. All plugins and themes that are derivatives of WordPress must be developed with an open source license.
Forking of a theme or plugin sometimes happens when a developer abandons their project and an interested party decides to continue developing their version of the software, a “forked” version of the original.
Automattic locked ACF plugin out of the WordPress.org servers, preventing ACF customers from updating their versions of the plugin directly from WordPress.org servers, forcing WP Engine to create a workaround on October 3rd.
WP Engine announced:
“On October 3, we released new versions of our widely used plugins, featuring independent update capabilities and updates delivered directly from WP Engine.
While WP Engine and Flywheel customers are already protected by the WP Engine update system and don’t need to take any action, community members are encouraged to download these versions of our free, open-source plugins and updates directly from the ACF and NitroPack websites to ensure they receive updates directly from us.
If you’re running v6.3.2 or earlier of ACF, or have been forcibly switched to “Secure Custom Fields” without your consent, you can install ACF 6.3.8 directly from the ACF website, or follow these instructions to fix the issue.
These efforts support our customers and plugin users and seek to protect the community at large.”
On October 5th Automattic notified WP Engine of a vulnerability in the ACF plugin and announced it on a now deleted post on X (formerly Twitter).
On October 7th, WP Engine fixed the plugin vulnerability, as noted in their changelog.
But then, on October 12th, Automattic forked WP Engine’s ACF plugin, renaming it Secure Custom Forms (SCF) and replaced the ACF plugin in the official WordPress plugin respository with their fork, using the same URL formerly used by the ACF plugin. Matt Mullenweg posted an announcement on WordPress.org citing security concerns as the reason for forking ACF but later in the announcement also citing WP Engine’s lawsuit seeking relief from Mullenweg’s actions.
Mullenweg wrote:
“On behalf of the WordPress security team, I am announcing that we are invoking point 18 of the plugin directory guidelines and are forking Advanced Custom Fields (ACF) into a new plugin, Secure Custom Fields. SCF has been updated to remove commercial upsells and fix a security problem.
…This is a rare and unusual situation brought on by WP Engine’s legal attacks, we do not anticipate this happening for other plugins.”
Social media was buzzing over the weekend because it was noticed that a new version of ACF was published on WordPress.org using a new URL (/secure-custom-fields/), marked as a beta version. David McCan of WebTNG downloaded the plugin, took a look at the code and confirmed that the new version is a fork of the paid version of ACF. He notes that the WP Engine copyright information was removed, remarking that may be a problem. He also noted that the code that checks for whether the software is paid for and licensed has also been removed.
Viewing the code, he says:
“We go to the version for secure custom fields. You see the file name is still the same ACF dot PHP, But this one. The header information says secure custom fields. It says the author is wordpress.org. There is no copyright notice in here of WP engines code, which is probably a problem.
So by removing the license check and update from WP engine, this seems like a classic case of an old plugin which is now being hosted in the WordPress plugin directory. So I’m wondering if this is even a legal fork. I’m not an expert in software licensing law, but my understanding is you need to preserve the original copyright notices when you fork a plug in. It’s one of the requirements.”
Whether or not whether making the pro version of the plugin freely available for download is legal is something for the courts to decide. What Automattic may not have considered is that there is an impact to competitors like Meta Box Pro, who offer a similar functionality to ACF. Current users of Meta Box Pro may be incentivized to not renew their current license because they can now get similar premium features for free from WordPress.org.
Someone posted this concern in the private Dynamic WordPress group (posted here, group membership required to view), writing that they had purchased a lifetime license ($699) for Meta Box prior to Mullenweg’s dispute with WP Engine. They wrote that they feel like they made a mistake for purchasing a license for Meta Box, noting that they don’t agree with “stealing” ACF and expressed that this will cause Meta Box to lose users. A yearly subscription to Meta Box starts at $149/year.
One of the Facebook group members remarked that no, they didn’t make a bad decision by purchasing a license for Meta Box, saying that Matt Mullenweg was the one that made the poor decision. Another group member expressed that he regarded Mullenweg as an unreliable steward of the ACF fork and wouldn’t trust his fork, ACF, on any of the websites he develops.
Other developers agreed that SCF is not trustworthy enough for use on a live website, noting that many sites are having issues with the Secure Custom Fields. Someone else noted that this may end poorly for Meta Box within a year from now as SCF becomes more stable. Some members said they’re glad to have Meta Box and are glad to be uninvolved with the WordPress versus WP Engine drama.
The response from the WordPress community on Reddit was similarly disapproving.
Members of the WordPress subreddit expressed disapproval, nobody was celebrating Mullenweg’s move.
One member posted:
“It’s crazy because they literally are suing someone else for hosting nulled plugins, and that guy had his bank accounts frozen. They are doing the same thing now over at WordPress.”
Someone else shared:
“Oh wow, so this is actually Matt putting the premium/pro version of ACF with all of it’s features that are normally behind their paywall, up for people to download and use for free on wordpress.org while calling it Secure Custom Forms Pro or whatever, completely out of spite?
This is worse than I thought it was from just seeing the title of this thread, much worse.”
Another post that’s representative of how people feel about WordPress.org distributing a premium plugin for free:
“If he wanted to shoot WordPress in the other foot, this was the perfect move.”
Whether this move will impact ACF’s competitors and the greater premium WordPress ecosystem remains to be seen. One thing is certain: most people on social media appear to disapprove of Matt Mullenweg forking a premium WordPress plugin, and, legal or not, it’s perceived as crossing a line typically associated with software piracy.
Featured Image by Shutterstock/LoveHex
The Department of Justice (DOJ) and Google gave their final arguments on Monday in an antitrust case regarding Google’s digital advertising technology.
U.S. District Judge Leonie Brinkema is expected to make a decision by the end of the year.
The DOJ claims that Google has built and kept a monopoly in open-web display advertising through products like DoubleClick, Google Ads, and AdExchange.
They say Google holds about 91% of the market for publisher ad servers and 87% for advertiser ad networks.
The case against Google is supported by a 2009 email from former Google executive David Rosenblatt. He mentioned the company’s goal to “do to display what Google did to search.”
Prosecutors argue that this shows Google’s plan to control the digital advertising market.
Another important part of the trial is Google deleting internal chat messages. Google claims most of these were casual chats but admitted that some included business discussions.
Google is challenging the DOJ’s definition of the advertising market.
Google believes digital advertising has three separate markets, while the DOJ sees it as one two-sided market.
Google argues it competes with several platforms, including:
When considering these competitors, Google claims its market share is only about 10%. The company also states that this share is shrinking due to increased competition.
Additionally, Google points out that it has spent billions developing ad-matching technology. It argues that it shouldn’t have to share this competitive advantage with other companies.
If Judge Brinkema finds Google guilty of unfair business practices, the case will move to the next phase focused on solutions.
The DOJ and the states involved may try to make Google sell some parts of its ad tech business, earning tens of billions of dollars yearly.
This case is happening alongside another antitrust case targeting Google’s search business. In that case, Google might also have to sell its Chrome browser and face other penalties.
The case highlights tensions between Google and its customers:
The government claims Google’s dominance prevents fair revenue for publishers, stating the company takes up to 36% in commission.
Google argues its “take rate” is now 31% and falling and is lower than competitors’.
Judge Brinkema is expected to issue a written ruling on the case by the end of the year.
The outcome could set important precedents for how antitrust law applies to digital markets.
Featured Image: Ken Cook/Shutterstock
Bing continues to develop AI-powered search solutions. It provides the index for OpenAI’s SearchGPT, launched last month. In July, it created its own version of Google’s AI Overviews called “Generative Search.”
Last week, Bing published optimization guidelines for AI-powered search engines. The post advised marketers to focus on query intent while recognizing that keywords inform intent.
Here’s how to do that for today’s search engines.
The main takeaway from Bing’s guidelines aligns with traditional search engine optimization: put a searcher first. Satisfy the person behind a query and worry less about keyword matching or prominence.
Nonetheless, much of the guidelines address keyword research that, again, signals intent, starting with identifying a core term for a target audience. My recommendations for keyword research tools will help.
But don’t stop there. Once you’ve identified a target search query, extend the research to discover the critical supplement terms to confirm that intent and include them in the content.
The post suggested adopting “natural language processing” techniques. NLP helps machines interpret and understand humans. It also helps search engines understand the detailed intent behind each search query, far beyond broad conclusions such as “to purchase,” “to learn,” or “to navigate.”
NLP identifies micro intents unique to each search.
The guidelines offered an example query — “Best eco-friendly coffee maker” — and provide NLP-driven results:
In generative [AI] search systems, search results will showcase a variety of eco-friendly coffee machines and coffee makers available for purchase, highlighting their prices, features, and materials. They’ll feature brands that emphasize sustainable and recycled materials and provide links to articles and guides on sustainable brewing while offering more information on eco-friendly coffee machine options. As you can see, these systems are working to fulfill the intent of the user’s query as effectively as possible.
Understanding how to satisfy micro intents is essential to being surfaced in AI search results. When producing content, search optimizers should reverse engineer how AI platforms interpret each query.
Prompt ChatGPT or Gemini to identify and analyze higher-ranking competitors or those highlighted in AI Overviews (or Generative Search). For example, prompt ChatGPT or Gemini to analyze competitors’ content and explain how it serves searchers better.
You can also prompt ChatGPT or Gemini to analyze the detailed search intent of any query. Similarly, search Google and Bing for, respectively, AI Overviews and Generative Search that respond to a query.
Bing’s guidelines suggest including supplemental keywords on the page to reinforce the intent, but they don’t state how to find them.
Here are some pointers:
Read forum threads to analyze actual conversations. This Buzzsumo example answers the question, “How long do elephants live?” Click image to enlarge.
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.