This article was inspired by the amazing Purna Virji, who published an article last week about the habit problem in Agentic commerce , which you should read because I think she is right about the verification tax and how creating new habits is required for Agentic commerce to succeed. The article sparked a chain of thoughts and questions in my head. Yes also I’m aware in the picture above the chinese script reads Willow Sister! instead of saying hello… another danger of relying on ChatGPT without checking output.

I wondered about infrastructure, which I want to dive deeper into, the aspect of sparking joy which agentic commerce reduces and can agentic commerce give the same level of comfort or dopamine to shoppers?

There is also the further question does it impact high/low involvement decisions first?I forecast that the first area where agentic commerce might gain some traction is in routine purchases like finding the best price for recurring purchases like toilet paper or dishwasher tablets that can have significant variance in price linked to store promotions but traction is less likely with large purchases like a car or a house. But looking at what is shared on social media, it appears that people are testing AI agents to do more complex tasks like booking vacations or applying for hundreds of jobs.

But first things first. What is an AI agent and why should I care?

The short answer is AI agents are autonomous programs that can act on behalf of a user to complete complex multi-stage tasks. AI agents are likely to have the biggest impact on white-collar jobs and specifically young professionals but if companies don’t adapt to using AI in workflows they might be replaced.

Agentic Commerce or AI assisted retail is moving digital purchases from manual searching and comparisons into a complex purchase cycle that can find suitable products, negotiate the price and finalise a purchase without any human involvement. The topic of Agentic Commerce seems to be keeping the C-suite up at night and causing some panic among retailers and brands along with Infosec teams who have a whole new type of potential fraud happening within their systems. Also I see that people are already mixing up Agentic AI, AI Agents, GEO commerce, AI commerce and Agentic Agents so don’t stress if you are confused most people seem to be on this topic. At a recent DEPT Future Club event they shared a very cool perspective of a world in the near future where Agents will talk to each other. Your personal AI assistant will engage between brand and platform agents that would in a future state progress to autonomous agents with little or no human input.

Are infrastructure limitations on legacy systems lacking APIs holding back agentic growth?

APIs are not new but often they don’t run on all systems and are not always publically accessible. Also the web, while more advanced and dynamic than it was a few years ago, is still a fairly static environment. For Agentic commerce to progress, API’s have to be significantly improved to enable ai-driven automation with non-API enabled legacy systems. Headless CMS platforms like ContextStack may offer some of the API-first infrastructure that agentic bots will need to succeed but it still requires a lot of Human-in-the-loop (HITL) to ensure brand success. HITL can speed the learning and increase the accuracy of the model, correct errors, handle more complex topics and reduce risk profiles. This can be something as simple as ensuring all your content is correctly translated to local market requirements. Ensuring legitimate agentic bots have access to your API feed and bad actors (scammers/spammers) are blocked is an important part of HITL.

For Agentic commerce to succeed companies and brands need to ensure key legacy systems have at least a basic API feed for product information. While this seems like a elementary step it’s a huge leap forward in making the web more accessible to AI agents. It is key that brand teams ensure content is correctly localised/translated because this can increase not only conversion rates accuracy for agentic commerce but allow for increased cross-border trade.

Could infrastructure limitations on JS heavy framework like ReactJS hold back agentic growth?

Too many times I’ve been told by developers that Googlebot is smart enough to work it out… they build heavy ReactJS websites on £5k Macbook Pro devices with 1GB/s internet connections and don’t think about (life/systems/capacity?) outside the office walls. It’s not just Googlebot that struggles, (it can mostly) crawl JS heavy websites, most AI bots refuse to render JS as it is just too expensive for them. The outcome is AI bots taking the bare minimum bits of information from your website and moving on. Where this becomes more important for agentic commerce is that pages are queried often in real-time so (bots?) don’t have time to do post-crawl processing of JS to read the text on the page. This compounds the problem because the AI agent can incorrectly read the pricing information when many websites use dynamic signals that affect booking prices such as iOS vs Android users which may not be an easy fix for online marketplaces or retailers. Load time is another factor that AI agents might struggle to balance, I still find examples of pages taking more than 30 seconds to load which is not acceptable to either users or bots.

For success at least check that your content is visible to Googlebot and most popular AI bots if they don’t enable JavaScript. Furthermore, there is no reason any website should take more than a few seconds to load so get this fixed. For legacy platforms consider options like CloudFlare who are trying to address this with Markdown for Agents that can reduce token usage by 80% as newer AI bots and LLMs that struggle to understand your website content.

Can infrastructure limitations on agent-initiated transactions increases agentic commerce friction for adopters?

A number of the world’s leading payment providers and banks have spent the last decade increasing their fraud protection tools and 2FA features such as in-app approvals, sms or voice confirmation. Sure some AI agents could clone your voice, read your phone messages or even open the banking app for approval but this may break your terms of service with your bank or card provider.

An early safeguard with AI agents was to provide them with a virtual or pre-paid card but more and more platforms have stopped virtual cards from being used as they don’t support recurring payments, cannot do authorisation holds or can be used for fraud. NS is one of likely a growing number of transport providers that are being taken for a ride as commuters disable the virtual card before the fare is debited.

Mastercard still sees the HITL (human-in-the-loop) approval flow as key to prove intent to make the purchase. And how do you ensure the AI agent’s guardrails are correctly defined and you don’t accidentally end up with 10 x $10 pairs of jeans as they were marked down by 90% when you set it a budget of $100 or with the wrong size because you used the metric measuring system and the AI agent used imperial. AI agents have shown they are terrible at managing money so far so why would consumers trust them to do a better job?

The current rules that are in place for transactions need terms & conditions changed to allow for AI agents to legally act on your behalf. Some of these can be as simple as AI agents being having pre-agreed values put in place along with limits of frequency of purchases to prevent edge cases when they buy 100x the amount due to a typo. For Agentic commerce to flow smoothly current 2FA will need to be adapted but also guidelines what trusted payment gateways or websites the AI agent is allowed to use for purchases. Also I see that virtual credit cards are not the scalable solution for AI agents yet so maybe a use for blockchain to handle payment and authentication could work.

CloudFlare have a vested interest in making this work but it (what?) is important for large retailers, marketplaces, media houses, coupon & comparison websites and OTA (online travel agents) where content owners charge AI crawlers for access. Agentic commerce has a hidden and potentially massive cost to those feeding the beast. Websites were typically setup for users that viewed a single page at a time but one single user deploying an agentic agent can now potentially consume hundreds if not thousands of pages of content simultaneously. AI agents have the potential to cost data providers and content owners millions more in traffic costs and server upgrades to keep up with the demand.

Previously, many of these sites monetised these pageviews with ad impressions and often used affiliate models to monetize the product clicks, but with agentic commerce no ads are loaded (this saves AI platforms money) and any referral parameters or cookies dropped are discarded.

The question to be asking is who is making money running Agentic commerce is not going to be free or stay cheap forever so how are consumers and brands budgeting for AI agent costs?

More websites will likely go with block all bots and opt-in those trusted platforms who are not playing by the rules. Amazon who is leading the charge on AI has already blocked at least 47 AI crawlers and sued Perplexity to stop it’s AI agents shopping on behalf of its own customers. Larger media players and content owners might have enough weight to adjust the rules such as exclusive access or unique coupon codes for a handful of the largest AI agents. The pay-per-crawl micropayment option seems like a possible solution but this requires the AI agents to value the content enough to pay.

What about infrastructure limitations for 100% digital processes?

The current legal framework for a large number of higher priced items like cars or houses don’t have a standardised or consistent framework for a 100% digital process. For example, in Australia PEXA offers a digital e-conveyancing settle option for buying property. The conveyancing option for settling property transfers are more restrictive in Tasmania, Western Australia and Northern Territory. Banks still often require wet ink on paperwork (ie human signature) which can’t be done by an AI agent or online. A lot of legacy systems are not setup to work with AI agents due to security but also limited or non-existent API frameworks.

Ask yourself, how much of your existing customer journeys can be completely digital?

A huge amount of money needs to be invested in infrastructure to allow more to be done via APIs by banks. For consumers, the solution might be as simple as moving to a digital first bank that has the APIs already made available for agentic commerce to happen. There also needs to be legislative change to allow for agentic commerce to legally happen and companies would be required to change to open APIs.

More infrastructure limitations - AI doesn’t always have all the answers because the data wasn’t provided

My initial personal experience with Rufus on Amazon has been basic at best with many of the attempts resulting in answers that miss the mark and don’t assist with the purchase journey. My most recent test proved to be of limited value when asking what is the hose dimension of a particular Kärcher shop vac that I was looking at. There are two parts to this failure point

1. Kärcher hasn’t defined this information on the Amazon ASIN so Rufus has no reference point and doesn’t seek external data sources

2. I am a human and talk like one but should I have used the specific language of inner diameter, outer diameter, bore or hose sizing? My word use still seems to throw AI off at times.

One of Google’s case studies on the use of AI and GCP is with Home Depot so I tested the same question and found that it was able to correctly answer my question. But again what was missing from my shopping experience was the human element… the related follow-up prompts you might expect such as are you searching for compatible accessories or something else?

Why would the Amazon purchase have failed if I used AI? I was looking to ensure I bought the correctly sized extension hose for this specific model at the same time. So had I been using a platform specific agentic bot there is a chance that it would have failed in it’s journey as it could never know the answer of hose dimension required searching outside it’s own ecosystem.

There a few ways that business can start to ensure they are setup for success with AI chatbots and agentic commerce is making sure full product details are made available in a structured format AI agent can query. If you are using a platform specific agentic agent ensure that it can query trusted sources such as manufactures websites or approved PDF resources to feed the gaps in knowledge.

Agentic commerce may shift place of purchase away from preferred retail partners or locations

There is certainly a valid use case for agentic commerce to do the heavy lifting to find where to buy the product once they have made a decision. Trying to find out which store within X miles has your desired product in stock or on special is soul crushing at the best of times without a tool like an AI agent.

There are two examples of this, the first fictional example is one of your IKEA dining chairs broke and you need a new one urgently. You are based in Notting Hill so you have the option of 3 locations Wembley, Oxford Street and Hammersmith.

The upside is that IKEA is reasonably advanced when it comes to ecommerce in a lot of markets where they operate. They give you or the AI agent most of the information they need to check availability, also confirm store opening hours but also details of the package so you can make the decision that is, while awkward, could be transported on a London Bus or the Tube. But the question is, if all the information shown in the browser is accessible from an API your AI agent needs to access. Also a retailer may have a preference for this consumer buy from a specific store location due to stock availability or ease of restocking items or a preference for click & collect but agentic commerce may shift this power back to the consumer. There is also the added layer of complexity between franchise and company owned stores that AI agent’s could help navigate for consumers.

The second fictional example is your Sony Bravia 4K OLED TV breaks a couple of hours before your friends are due at your place to watch your team in the final. From a consumer perspective you just want to buy the same or a similar sized TV as quickly as possible and you don’t care where you buy it. An agentic commerce model may find that B&H is open now and has the best range and prices but your AI agent calculates with manufacturers rebates available only in store from Adorama you should probably look at their Samsung range in person. Most brands have a set of preferred retail partners but agentic commerce may shift that balance in favour of generating the sale. The AI agent does give consumers the potential to constantly find the best deal and for brands that massive marketing promotion with Best Buy is never seen by the consumer as their agent doesn’t view the onsite ads.

For brands it is essential to start to understand more about your real-time stock availability and be able to feed this information in a structured format back to AI agents. Ideally there could be logic based on the location of the consumer if disclosed but also the dimensions of the product, the urgency of the purchase and the accessibility of the location. There are also the details such as expected delivery windows, store opening hours and similar options so you don’t miss out on the sale. Another consideration is that offline and online promotions need to be more closely aligned and this information made available as AI agents aren’t going to visit a physical store anytime soon.

Attribution lacking…. Who gets the credit for the sale?

One of the biggest issues with many of the AI platforms is attribution is weak at best so it’s hard for business to invest in making their website platforms more accessible if they can’t prove what revenue is being driven. Ignoring AI agents for now if you look at your Google Analytics data you can see you got a referral visit from ChatGPT which is great but it doesn’t show you all the activity.

What is missing for attribution is

• the activity within ChatGPT that drove the click (prompt)

• the activity that occurred within ChatGPT before the click (other prompts)

• the activity from those people that didn’t click (saw negative story)

• the activity those who visited a competitor (clicked for a discount coupon)

I forecast that the largest AI agents will start to leave breadcrumbs for websites on their path to purchase because without it they are not delivering any value back to the creators of the content they utilised to guide the purchase.

For agentic commerce to succeed it needs to get significantly better at sharing data/insights with brands/content owners on what influenced the journey. But also guidance on when it was likely a successful transaction but it happened offline.

Do Agentic commerce purchases present a liability gap?

Yes, AI can’t be held accountable but most consumers are oblivious to this state of fact but when it goes wrong it’s the end user who initiated the AI agent that will be paying the bill. The legal industry is racing to play catch-up by trying to evolve existing laws covering contract law and consumer protection but there is no comprehensive global regulatory framework in place.

AI agents might not always disclose they are the ones doing the purchases but as agentic commerce evolves there will likely be some requirement for disclosure in the checkout process. Some retailer partners may start to cancel orders if they discover the purchase wasn’t made by a person but in fact by a third party. In January 2026, eBay updated its User Agreement to explicitly ban third-party “buy for me” AI agents from making purchases without permission, set to take effect from Feb 20th 2026.

Ensure at least your website terms & conditions are setup to handle when agentic commerce purchases don’t go as planned. Consumers may not be honest about who made the purchase if consumer law protections cover online purchases made by them and not a third party. Explore authorized partnerships with leading AI agent platforms such as what eBay did with OpenAI.

Will Agentic commerce take away the fun people enjoy with retail therapy?

Not everyone loves shopping online but after covid I feel a lot of people I know are much more comfortable buying online. I understand the idea of retail therapy can be some people’s version of hell and being able to outsource that pain and stress to agentic commerce is at the top of their to do list. The question is will AI agents increase or decrease the amount of impulse spending that consumers will do over time? For basic necessity items, like the same brand socks or underwear that you purchased a few months earlier, your AI agent noticing a sale on the same items may be of interest to a number of people. But does this same agentic commerce allow for discovery of something new in the same way random discoveries that spark joy when exploring social media or walking through a Westfield Mall? If you asked the AI agent for a light grey jumper but it purchased PANTONE® 11-4201 Cloud Dancer would that be an unexpected delight?

Also how does the AI agent know which is the most suitable green? Tropical rainforest, amazon, deep jungle green, medium jungle green, and dark jungle green? Often platforms have branded names for colours which can make comparison shopping difficult at the best of times.

Can the power of AI be used for better discovery of something new? Can brands or retailers internal data be used to feed AI agents better related product options? Understand how much variance can be given for colours or textures for your products. Ensure product colours are mapped back to standard HEX or PANTONE® colours so at least AI agents have some chance to know that Green Earth & Verona Green are the same pigment with different names or Olive Green & Army Green are similar but may differ depending on the industry.

How much will Agentic commerce struggle with consumer centric language differences?

A human quirk but we often interchange what we call something depending on the context or your location. For example, GM, Opel, Holden, Vauxhall, Chevrolet are all the same brand sold under local names in different markets. had a great post on cultural context this week and highlighted that many people are still confused about localisation & translation.

The same goes for products such as travel system, pram, pushchair, stroller, buggy which can mean the same but can vary by region but also in some markets can vary by the age of the child it’s designed for.

Will all AI agents understand how different some of the regions Spanish words were across North America, Central and South America. Mexican consumers search terms seemed to be much more influenced by the U.S.A. than Spain. Will AI agents built for English work as well in Dutch?

Make sure regional or local nuances are mapped to your products and accessible via the API. If you operate globally ensure also local product SKU differences in name and packaging are also mapped.

Agentic commerce may fail to deliver the same neurochemical high initially but is open to manipulation later!

This might be a good thing financially for a lot of people that agentic commerce can reduce the hit of dopamine that has been compared to the same high as drugs. The surge in neurochemicals that create feelings of excitement and satisfaction driving consumers to continue shopping. This might also dramatically reduce the amount of impulse purchases but might also rapidly increase the amount of product returns.

Agentic commerce may become very addictive to consumers if they can manage to correctly balance the neurochemical process to feed the anticipation without allowing the user to reach the peak (purchase). There will be a need for platforms to consider the mental health and wellbeing of their customers if they start to prolong the purchase cycle to trigger as much dopamine as possible.

There needs to be some guardrails on agentic commerce to ensure it doesn’t create a whole new flood of compulsive buying from consumers.

Some Agentic examples are little more than smoke & mirrors or just meh….

Sure, there have been some amazing AI agent examples shared online mostly around attempting to improve booking travel which can often be a painful experience. But I see a lot of heavy AI push around features that aren’t really cutting edge and could have been done easily for the last several years but haven’t.

• allowing customers to reorder most recent purchases

• automatically applying coupons/promo codes

• ability to link your loyalty accounts

• chatbots

• drive-thru AI

What are the take away points from agentic commerce?

• Legacy systems lacking APIs are holding back AI commerce growth

• JS heavy frameworks like ReactJS are holding back AI growth

• Agent-initiated transactions increase agentic commerce friction for adopters

• Understanding who is making money from this agentic commerce experience

• Not everything can be done online or digitally at this point

• AI doesn’t always have all the answers because the data it relies on wasn’t provided

• Agentic commerce may shift place of purchase away from preferred retailers or locations

• AI? Who gets the credit for the sale?

• Agentic commerce purchases present a liability gap for companies and brands

• Agentic commerce may struggle with consumer centric language differences

• Agentic commerce may miss the fun people enjoy with retail therapy

• Agentic commerce may not deliver the same Neurochemical high as traditional online shopping

• Too many AI products are little more than smoke & mirrors

Remember that Agentic commerce may suffer from hallucinations if data isn’t made available. Also, research is showing that AI agents are ignoring an increasing number of human instructions and going as far as publishing/sharing confidential details of their human users such as passwords. The issue with AI agents is that early users are guinea pigs/crash test dummies with little oversight, monitoring or guardrails in place to protect the humans who are utilising them. Furthermore, most publishers, retailers and brands are not even close to being ready for the oncoming flood of AI agent traffic that breaks all existing monetisation, terms & service, fraud protection and attribution models. This article ignores all the potential security issues facing AI agents such as prompt injection that I might cover in a future post.

When AI goes rogue, their human operator should know that they are on the hook for it because there is a small disclosure which states something like AI responses may include mistakes which absolves the AI tool from any fault according to the AI tools.

I know AI agents may have a role in the future digital economy but too much is being pushed by the creators of these AI platforms who are benefiting without the involvement or alignment with the brands, retailers and content creators they need. AI agents have a duty of care to those using their service but also to the platforms they visit to complete their tasks.

I want to start off with the admission that I was initially critical when I attended meetups and events early in my career. I always found some things could be done better but I felt organisers either didn’t have the time, energy or aspiration to do more. I will also admit after a few years of co-organising such events that I underestimated the sheer weight on an organiser’s shoulders both mentally and financially. Running a meetup should never be underestimated but the personal growth you can achieve from it can be career changing.

I saw a number of things in how others were running events and meetings that I felt were causing friction among the SEO community who attended or planned to attend their next meetup or event:

• sponsors dominated the topics/discussions

• MLM folks tried to recruit people into their ‘scams’

• sales folks from software tools had free reign to promote

• recruiters were too busy trying to poach or sell their services

• venue locations were inflexible and not always suited to the events

• free/open bars often turned a good event into a negative experience for attendees

• not enough attention was focused on ensuring attendees were being respectful to other attendees and ‘offenders’ were not removed/banned asap

• information that was shared was incorrect/outdated

• speakers were treated like rockstars and decks presented weren’t always shared or photographs were discouraged

• meetup members were often spammers who spent time dropping links into comments or direct messages to other members and these people weren’t banned/removed

• not enough focus was on building a community by ensuring attendees felt comfortable mixing and connecting with others

What experience do I have in meetups?

For a more detailed background of why I started my own SEO meetups with some industry friends you can read this post on SER. With Andy and Joe we re-started the Brisbane based SEO meetups in December 2010 as a response to Sempo trying to grow it’s membership in Australia. We ran the first event on the 6th January 2011 at the Story Bridge Hotel. In 2011, I moved to Melbourne and started ‘Melbourne SEO’ with Chris, Mikey, Nik & Peter and soon Chris & Rick started Sydney SEO and quickly afterwards Woj & Luke started Adelaide SEO. At its peak we had 3500 members across Australia meeting every month usually on a Wednesday or Thursday. I did run a single European SEO event in Amsterdam in November 2013 with a handful of digital marketers but I didn’t have the energy to build up a new city at that point so now I just promote and attend others meetups.

What did we try and do better to change how we ran the SEO meetups?

When I gathered some other like minded folks in the search industry from my network but also from SEMPO we wanted to try something different and we weren’t afraid to fail. The other co-founders of SEO Meetups Australia had experienced similar pain points attending and running their own meetups over the years. But here’s what we did to improve an attendee’s experience in our founding principles:

• Focused on search engines (SEO + PPC) not email/social as there were already plenty of other meetups dedicated to these

• Encouraged members to connect and mix at events

• Vetted all meetup.com members and blocked/removed thousands of fake/mlm/bot accounts

• Limited the audience to marketers who were likely to attend

• Required a detailed survey for new members that limited our membership growth but allowed us to better vet member suitability

• Did not charge for the events and ran the events at a loss (mistake)

• Co-founders vetted any potential speakers to ensure alignment with our values and to enrich the experience for our members

• Quickly banned/blocked spammers & scammers from meetup.com

• Revoked membership from members who broke social etiquette or made other attendees uncomfortable

What did I learn from running the meetups?

Don’t get me wrong the many hours and late nights were some of the most fun I’ve had in the industry over the years. So many heated debates so many wonderful insights and learnings shared and many strong friendships built but these are the big takeaways of why I did it all for so many years.

• Running and attending the meetups made some amazing industry connections and great friends that I would not have likely found otherwise

• Created a strong ‘glue’ for the local industry to meet more regularly and build trust across different agency staff

• Running the meetups got expensive with the Meetup.com platform as costs continued to grow which discouraged others from doing something similar

• Some attendees hated name tags but it made mixing and networking easier and while I’m great with faces I’m often terrible with names

• Securing sponsors & swag was time consuming but attendees appreciated the support from the software tools

• Sponsoring the food & drinks was often out of pocket for organisers and depending on the amounts of attendees $100-200 wasn’t unusual

• Some attendees were ungrateful for the ‘free’ food & drink options and shared this in person and post event on the meetup.com event page they wouldn’t recommend going

• Finding a suitable venue every month was stressful and often required last minute changes for various reasons such as weddings, work events and around Christmas it was near impossible to get any space

• Virtual guests did work once in a while but it did put a lot of extra stress on the organisers and presenter but we did this a few times for international speakers

• Recording and sharing the presentations took too much effort and very few people watched the replay later.

• Being a few minutes late as an organiser often earnt a negative review and comment on the Meetup.com event page

• Not talking to every individual did sometimes would also result in a negative review

• We often spoke & organised the event to great personal stress which was too much at times so ensure you ask for help which is why don’t do it on your own

• Running a meetup needs amazing co-founders to support you, share the load and substitute you for last minute schedule clashes or holidays or fill in for last minute speaker changes

• Collaborating with other large events like SMX or Sydney SEO Conference ensured a far larger turnout at your events

• Building a community and growing connections is something to be proud of when you look back. For example, Melbourne SEO continues as SEO Collective and has run 151 events with 2,129 active members once a month on a Tuesday evening across several cities. If you are based in Australia you should certainly check out their events.

How has the meetup space changed over the years?

Since moving to The Netherlands in 2013 I’ve helped organise the informal #SEOSteak that mostly started as a Twitter joke with some great local and international visitors and noticed some changes. I’ve also spoken to a few folks running meetups over the past few months and it seems there are a few common trends going on. I want to frame this that most meetups are run for free and often at a loss by organisers

• venues often charge for meeting space

• venues often want pre-payment for events depending on expected number of attendees

• venues require a minimum spend amount from event no matter the size of the event

• venues noise/crowds vary so can’t guarantee experience is consistent every time

• different venues are needed for networking vs panel discussion vs presentations

• venue locations don’t suit all attendees due to noise, distance or venue type

• venues have more meetups trying to secure space for their events

• meetups are too often bumped from venue space for other events

• meetup attendance can’t be guaranteed and can vary significantly between events

• some events require a minimum number of attendees to RSVP or they will cancel/postpone the event

• more events are setting a cap on the number of attendees

• sponsors are less generous and expect more results/branding from sponsorship

• more events/meetups are charging to cover costs or just break even

What has changed in the meetup space over the years?

It’s not just covid that changed how meetups are attended and some of these things are out of control for organisers. Not all meetup attendees will share this feedback with organisers but often do with other attendees but maybe one reason that they never come to a future event which is difficult for organisers to know if they never mention it…. If you do attend a meetup or event please try and chat with the organiser first before burning them on the event review

• meetup attendees have a lot more choice on events, meetups and conferences

• meetup attendees can have unrealistic expectations of events food/drinks

• meetup attendees can have unrealistic expectations of venue facilities/location

• meetup attendees can have unrealistic expectations of presenters/panelists

• corporate/businesses have expanded into this space with more support/resources

• virtual meetups can be more flexible but attendance and engagement can be lower

• meetup attendees have meeting fatigue post-covid and don’t want attend as they are exhausted

• Often people might just want a smaller meetup event from time to time and may want to skip part of the event so share a rough itinerary ahead of time if possible

• I’ve seen success when organisers vary the type of meetup between panels, networking and presentations

What SEO meetups should you check out?

I found some amazing meetup organisers over the years such as the following and yes many have been left off this list which are more events/conferences such as #BrightonSEO or are a paid event like Friends of Search

• Internet Marketers of New York (IMNY)

• #SEOFOMO

• Digital Olympus

• SEO Collective Meetup in Australia

• Online Marketing Sydney

• TechSEO North

• SEO Camp’us Paris

• HiveMCR

• SearchLDN

• Amsterdam SEO

• SEO Brain

What is the future of meetups?

Meetups are an amazing part of the digital marketing industry but it’s a lot harder and more competitive than it used to be with hundreds of competing events happening each month. Remember that there is a time and financial cost for organisers, speakers and attendees to attend an event and these days people are spoilt for choice. I’ve mainly focused on the SEO meetups as that is where I have the most experience but some of these ideas have come from other organisers and some are from ideas I’ve tried or wanted to try…

• Relying on Meetup.com is flawed as it wants to charge both organisers and attendees for access to the platform

• EventBrite doesn’t have the same network effects and community as Meetup.com but is more cost effective for events

• Building an audience/platform outside Meetup.com/EventBrite is essential for sustainability and growth like SEOFomo are doing

• Be open to running virtual events between in-person events to keep the community active and engaged

• Ask for regular donations from members to support your events cost or meetup.com charges

• Be transparent about the content topics & most suitable audiences

• Charge a nominal amount for events to at least cover costs or break-even

• Expect more boutique/invite-only meetups

• Limit sponsors control of the event/speakers

• Tip from GreenSEO avoid wasteful swag like plastic pens, usb sticks and tote bags

• Never share email addresses of attendees with sponsors just take a photo of the winners business card if there is a prize draw

• Don’t be afraid to run less events, don’t break yourself setting unrealistic expectations of weekly or monthly meetups.

What did I miss?

I’m curious if I missed any particular topic or if you disagree with some of my points highlighted above, I’d love your input and perspective.

AI is not new it had been used within companies like Google for years such as Machine Learning used to help searchers correct their spelling since 2001. It was Google researchers that invented and open sourced the neural network design in 2017 with “Attention is all you need” but it was OpenAI that commercialized the research and introduced the first GPT model in 2018. If you ask ChatGPT you get a much more defensive answer on the history of the GPT model.

In the past AI was mostly invisible to marketers but has been heavily used by Google powering their Dynamic Search Ads & Responsive search ads since 2018. While Google had created the framework that allowed ChatGPT to exist it was OpenAI that made it consumer friendly and Google seemed to be left in the dust even after it tried to catchup with BERT, LaMDA, PaLM and now Gemini, consumers are obsessed with ChatGPT. AI was considered something too technical or geeky for most consumers but ChatGPT seemed to break down all those barriers with a friendly web interface.

There were also marketers like Christoph Cemper who were quick to jump on the bandwagon and build custom templates to make creation of content via ChatGPT even easier and more scalable such as AIPRM. No longer did someone need to spend hours creating prompts or hiring overpriced AI prompt creators to write a custom prompt (prompts are used to guide ChatGPT on expected output) you could crowdsource the perfect ready to use prompt with the click of a button and re-use the most suitable ones again. What makes ChatGPT interesting for it’s users is that it uses human friendly output and doesn’t require technical background to use it.

Microsoft was one of the early beneficiaries of ChatGPT integration due to it’s extensive funding of OpenAI which seems to have caught Google off-guard. What broke the model was that ChatGPT was initially free which broke the model as most AI/ML technologies were limited to researchers or enterprise businesses. But now fairly advanced content creation was in the hands of anyone with access to the web and no restrictions were put in place on what could be created.

One aspect still causing unsettling conversations was the way that OpenAI and several other GenAI models sourced the data to build it’s models by scraping copyright content. There is also the ethics and copyright/ownership aspects on the content output from these tools?

Still being asked is who should be compensated for the source of ChatGPTs inspiration for the content creation and are they entitled to any royalties for it’s continued use? Some other GenAI tools have slowly started to licensed material from publishers to improve the accuracy of the data into the platform but more publishers are opting to block GenAI crawlers and to this day most big legacy publishers are blocking OpenAI crawlers and several still have pending legal action for copyright infringement. Not to be forgotten about Stable Diffusion has been sued by Getty Images for using 12 million images to build it’s image generation model which was exposed when their watermark appeared on GenAI outputs.

Google has not had an easy run trying to catchup to ChatGPT/Bing as it’s first launch Bard AI wiped $100 billion off it’s share price and the newly renamed Gemini platform has been hastily embedded in organic search results causing some disruption for digital marketers and website owners. But what has caused more issues has been the flood of misinformation such as telling consumers to put glue on pizza or eat one rock a day there is not enough transparency on what is showing in the AI overviews on Google or Bing. While many of the AI overviews containing misinformation have been linked back to The Onion articles or troll posts on Reddit but has raised safety concerns about no oversight on the output of GenAI tools.

Companies were quick to start to ban ChatGPT after incidents such as Samsung employees accidentally leaking sensitive data into ChatGPT. Microsoft was quick to launch an enterprise friendly Private ChatGPT via Azure OpenAI that allowed data feed into the GenAI tool not be used to further train the public model. But while many corporations have banned ChatGPT Glassdoor’s survey in Jan 2023 showed 62% of professionals have used ChatGPT or similar AI tools. So it seems the cat is out of the bag but still too many companies don’t have responsible AI usage in place or have created Azure instances for staff to safely use ChatGPT for tasks. Microsoft Copilot has become the de facto standard enterprise answer to corporate ChatGPT usage but there are limitations to what it can do without custom development of new GenAI models.

There has been little information shared for website owners from Google on how users are interacting with GenAI results and there is no easy way refresh the data that Google is choosing to show to searchers. Microsoft Bing did some early efforts to show website owners the search performance of web & chat but never broke out chat as it's owner filter. So it’s kinda useless as you don’t know what % is purely web and what % is just GenAI results.

There is a slow rollout of Google Ads into the AI overviews but it’s not clear what metrics will be made available to advertisers. So Google is making it very hard for marketers and website owners to understand how AI overviews helps or hinders their business going forward.

There are a handful of tools such as ZipTie that are tracking the AI overviews visibility across several verticals that show the average is now around 16.48% but if you break that out by vertical it’s all over the shop

1. ecommerce 2.4%

2. beauty 1.2%

3. food 6.99%

4. health 57.94%

5. finance 23.08%

6. publishers 21.6%

7. automotive 10.6%

8. jobs 20.4%

9. real estate 2.9%

What seems to be clear is that top of the funnel need type terms such as “How to Rank #1 in Google” are the ones that are seeing more AI overviews but they are also the ones that typically have a lower commercial intent and less Google Ads showing anyway. So for a lot of businesses that don’t capture much top of the funnel traffic the AI overviews won’t have an impact on their website traffic anytime soon.

It feels that tech companies are forcing GenAI into their tools without satisfactory safeguards in place and trying to move as fast as they can without concern for impacts on customers or society. In an interview with Bloomberg, Klarna CEO and founder Sebastian Siemiatkowski said that he hasn't hired any new humans in a year amid the company's push to embrace AI which is more an effort to increase profits that make life better for their employees.

It feels that adding AI labels to any Saas platform feature makes it cool now but a lot of what people think is GenAI is actually just some smart ML algorithms. There is also questions of ownership and usage of client data that needs to be considered but I do foresee ChatGPT type technology becoming utilised more but there are a few factors that keep bouncing around in my head.

1. Yes it is allowing people to create more content faster & cheaper but is it better?

2. Is it allowing people to create content that no human writer would ever bother to create in the first place?

3. Is it a race to the bottom that GenAI creates content that is then crawled and feed back into the model which creates new content based on it’s own output? See below for some inspiration on what happens when you feed it back.

Google Trends Hot Searches in UA + RU

Thomas Steiner announced two new lenses showing you what is on peoples minds in Russia and The Ukraine. Some of the trends phrases in Ukraine are IBM, Paralympics, Liverpool West Ham, Demilitarization while in Russia it's VPN, Samsung, Coursera, Zara, Adobe, Coca-Cola most of which have suspended operations or product support in Russia.

Ukrainians looking for work

If you work in the digital space and looking to hire Ukrainians to support them for work, contracts or small gigs you can visit here

Digital vacancies for Ukrainians

If you have open roles suitable for Ukrainian digital folks you can list them here

Yandex may shutdown unable to pay debts

Yandex which previously had a market value for USD$17.4 billion and controlled around 60% of the search market in Russia has announced it might be unable to pay creditors due to financial market meltdowns. The $1.25 billion in convertible notes have a right to be paid in full + interest if Yandex shares are suspended from trading for more than 5 days. Yandex's parent company is based in The Netherlands but due to sanctions and Putin introducing capital controls the Russian subsidiaries can't help fund their parent company and won't be able to redeem the convertible notes.

Cannes Lions bans Russian entries and delegates

In a statement, the festival’s owner Ascential said: “Despite our desire to celebrate creativity from wherever it comes, we have made the decision not to accept submissions or delegations from Russian organizations into Cannes Lions or its associated awards programs.” Cannes organisers said it will welcome all Ukrainian delegates free of charge and honour full refunds on awards submissions for Ukraine agencies if requested. It will also make a “significant donation” to the charities working in the region.

JetOctopus donates 15% of subscriptions

Cloud based crawler and log analyzer for doing Technical SEO work is asking search folks using their tool to donate to an approved charity https://mkip.gov.ua/en/content/volonterski--organizacii.html and they will extend your JetOctopus subscription for double of that. Please send proof of your payment to support@jetoctopus.com. Apart from that, JetOctopus is transferring 15% from all the transactions till the moment of big victory of Ukraine! Signup here for a free trial and support Ukrainian companies.

Ahrefs extends subscriptions for donations

Tim Soulo announced last week that any Ahref customers can make a credit card payment to the National Bank of Ukraine https://bank.gov.ua/en/news/all/natsionalniy-bank-vidkriv-spetsrahunok-dlya-zboru-koshtiv-na-potrebi-armiyi and contact support@ahrefs.com with the receipt and a/c details and they will extend your subscription for double that donation.

Google stops in ads sales in Russia

Google said last Thursday that it had stopped selling online advertising in Russia. This ban that covers search, YouTube and outside publishing partners. This does not yet cover other Google services such as Google Analytics or Google Cloud but Google Keyword planner has also remove all Russian data at some point during today.

Facebook stops all ads in Russia

Facebook said it is halting all ads in the country, stopping state-controlled media from monetising their content and refusing to run any ads from Russian marketers which should reduce the amount of misinformation on the platform around the war. Russia earlier today blocked access to Facebook likely in retaliation for limiting their ability to fund misinformation.

Google shares what might have caused an organic traffic drop

Back in July 2021 Daniel Waisberg over at Google Search team shared a document that covers some of the common issues on why your traffic might have dropped and offered some guidance on how to review what needs to be fixed. It does however exclude what happens when PPC budgets are increased and your organic traffic is cannibalised.

Beginners guide to technical SEO

Nikki Halliwell kindly produced and shared a great overview of how to get started in technical SEO covering several key topics that you need to understand in order to become a better SEO.

Google posts a reminder that it’s still thinking about link spam

The post published on the 26th July by Duy Nguyen talks about best practices, affiliate links, sponsored and guest posts and how they are trying to improve their systems to fight link spam. The question is if any of the websites the article is focused on saw any impact of the link spam update.

Social Media

Twitter launches “it’s misleading” flag option

OnlyFans launches first app but No Nudity and it’s FREE

The web based service known for fitness instructors, cooking lessons and nudity has over 130 million active users each month but was always blocked from Google Play & Apple App Store partly due to it’s acceptance of nudity. The new app OFTV has over 800 videos including their own original series across the following categories: comedy, advice, music, vlogs, podcasts, cooking, wellness, sports, fitness and unlocked. OFTV will be available for iOS, Android, Roku, AndroidTV, Samsung Smart TV and Apple TV. You can watch the content here

Twitter testing downvote buttons on iOS

Back on the 21st July Twitter announced the test it was doing on iOS devices the down votes will not be shown but will be interesting if it can gain the same levels of adoption that Reddit has. Also how is Twitter manging and filtering out the impacts of bots on hiding comments that highlight the tweet contains misinformation?

Pinterest opens up to Arabic

Pinterest is expanding it’s platform to the 466 million people that speak Arabic as it seeks to grow it’s audience beyond English. According to Pinterest already 57% of Pinners are using languages other than English. The upside for Pinterest is they saw at +48% increase in the number of Pinners selecting Arabic as their language but also they see over 3.5 million searches in Arabic each day.

Quora offers monetisation support for creators

It is probably a few years too late with platforms such as Substack eating Quora’s lunch when it comes to monetisation for creators. The 2 new subscription products are Quora+ which costs $5/month or $50/year to access content behind their paywall. The other product that is basically a clone of Substack is creators can write posts on Spaces and Quora will take 5% of the subscription fee.

Twitter redesign messed up follow button

Most people are usually fairly split when it comes to redesigns no matter how minor but Uygar Kilic hit the nail on the head with his article on how and why they got the redesign wrong. When you see the his suggested change below it makes a lot of sense.

Pinterest to allow creators to make money from their content

The new Idea Pins allow creators to tag products and make their content shoppable, following on from what TikTok are doing and YouTube is still trying to get right. The video first feature shows how Pinterest is pivoting to capture the growth in video content being produced by creators and influencers. You can see how it works on this Olive+Brown pin which is a review of their Glossier Milky Jelly Cleanser with the “Shop it Here” button.

Facebook focuses on formal partnership with religious groups

Elizabeth Dias covers a very interesting topic over at NYTimes on how Facebook has been partnering with large religious groups such as Hillsong to explore how a church would look like on Facebook. It’s concerning that Facebook is moving into the religious space considering it’s useless attempts at countering misinformation and disinformation about the Coronavirus but also how it’s been a platform for spreading hate and violence targeting minority groups and how they are complicity in the violence in Myanmar.

Media + Tech

Amazon’s Ad business grows +87% YoY

In what was seen as a long bet to catch Google Ads appears to be finally paying off as in Q2 this year the revenue for the “other unit” that includes Advertising rose to $7.9 billion. Amazon Ads launched 40+ new features and improved the self-service capabilities over the last quarter that has certainly helped along with expanding their services offered in Europe, Australia, India, Saudi Arabia and Japan. Amazon had around 10% of the US ad market in 2020 and it’s likely to further expand it’s share in 2021.

Square buys Australian fintech Afterpay for US$29 billion

At the start of August 2021 there was a warning shot fired out from Squared to the fintech space that it was serious about improving it’s seller and Cash App ecosystems with the acquisition of Afterpay. Square has always been rumoured to be a takeover target but with this purchase it moves from a niche player into a global contender. Afterpay is promoted as the pioneer of the “buy now, pay later” platform with 16 million customers and 100,000 merchants globally.

Good-Loop helps brands unite programmatic + purpose

The 5 year old UK based startup Good-Loop which is a certified B Corporation allows views of video ads to donate 50% of the media spend to a charity when they watch the ad. They have also continued to innovate with their “green ad” tag that lets advertisers monitor but also offset the carbon cost of their campaigns, but also offers a carbon calculator for agencies and brands work out the likely footprint of their online campaigns. They have 21 staff spread across offices in Edinburgh and London with a roster of brands including Nike, PepsiCo and Nestlé.

50 new features coming to Alexa devices

In July Amazon announced that 900,000 Alexa developers had built over 130,000 Alexa skills and now more than 140,000 smart home devices can be controlled by Alexa. But the big news was the 50+ features being rolled out to the Alexa platform focused on several core areas

• Driving engagement and discovery

• New monetisation opportunities

• Entertaining and immersive experiences

• Customers at home & outside the home

• Smarter, more secure and manageable

• Improving developer productivity

• Interoperability of smart home devices via Matter

Omnicom looks to measure consumer attention to ads

SC Johnson is one of the first Omnicom Media Group advertisers to test if their ads are actually been seen by consumers. The attention metric is being measured by Australian media tech company Amplified Intelligence. “For us, using Amplified Intelligence is one way to value one impression over another, reducing waste in budgets and ultimately increasing return on investment,” says Chrissie Hanson, global Chief Strategy Officer.

P&G unveil first paper bottle for Lenor

On a macro level, as part of its ‘2030 Ambition’, P&G aims to reduce its use of virgin plastics by 50% by 2030. Its Fabric Care Europe division has additionally committed to a 30% absolute plastics reduction by 2025 and to design for 100% recyclability by 2022 - it says that it is well on track for both commitments. Meanwhile, the Home Care division is committed to using no virgin plastics by 2025. Paboco’s paper bottle technology is being backed by a group of leading consumer goods companies and industry experts of which P&G is now a part, including The Coca-Cola Company, Carlsberg Group, The Absolut Company, L’Oréal, BillerudKorsnäs, and ALPLA.

Taboola expands with ecom acquisition of Connexity for $800 million

You might not know the name Connexity but prior to it’s rebrand in September 2014 it was known as Shopzilla and had done a number of acquisitions over the years including SkimLinks & PriceGrabber. The Connexity platform has the reach of around 100 million unique shoppers per month which should be massively expanded with the Taboola network.

Cloudflare gives hints to crawlers to reduce energy usage

More than 1 in 6 websites globally use Cloudflare but nearly half of all the traffic on their global network is generated by automated systems. But 5% of these bots are good bots that are indexing the web for useful reasons including search engine crawlers like Googlebot. After studying good crawler behaviour for a year the team recognised a clear area of waste was excessive crawling where the page didn’t change since it was last crawled which is estimated to be around 53% wasted. Cloudflare know that sitemaps can provide a priority score and last modified for each URL but sitemaps don’t always exist and often break so the solution isn’t simple.

Ecommerce

YouTube follows the trend and launches live shopping feeds

Creators and brands have always struggled to drive ecommerce sales via YouTube as it’s often requiring links in the description or using the in-video cards. The experience was clunky compared to platforms like SnapChat or TikTok were doing so before Google lose the market completely they have started rolling out a pilot feature focused on shopping for products directly from YouTube. They have done a few tests over the last few months such as a during International Small Business Week.

How Walmart uses ML for product categorisation

Apurva Sinha a data scientist at Walmart wrote up a great post on medium on how their team is using data to do better classification of products into categories on Walmart.com using Multi-class classification models (CNN-LSTM). This benefits both the consumer experience, product discovery and also SEO in the longer term.

Security, Data + Privacy

Guntrader a UK based firearm sales platform was breached

Gareth Corfield over at The Register covered the news that Guntrader’s CRM database was breached and 111k users were shared online. The CRM powered both their marketplace but also their electronic gun shop registry. The categories of data in the stolen database are:

• First name & last name

• Police force that issued an RFD's certificate

• Phone & Fax numbers

• bcrypt-hashed passwords

• Postal addresses & postcode

• User's IP addresses

• Latitude and longitude data

Jobs + Careers

Senior Product Manager (SEO Tech) - Walmart - USA

As a Product Manager of SEO, you will play key role in working across engineering, marketing, retail and other product teams to enable Walmart to become the leader in driving organic search in omni retail. This individual should be able to make decisions that reflect a solid understanding of current SEO strategies and will work cross-functionally with merchant, marketing (SEO), customer experience and technology teams. Apply here directly

SEO Manager - Bugaboo - Amsterdam

Bugaboo is looking for an ambitious SEO Manager to drive the SEO strategy. Reporting into the Performance Director, this newly created role will manage site optimization, working closely with developers and external parties to produce a best in class site experience as well as maximize site visibility within SERP. Apply here directly

Product Marketing Manager Ecom - TikTok - Dubai

TikTok seeks a product marketing professional with a background in media to lead the go-to-market for eCommerce and retail solutions in METAP. Sitting as part of the Performance team in the Product Strategy & Operations organisation, the role involves close collaboration with both in-market sales and headquarter product teams in a high-growth environment. Apply here directly

Digital Manager - AstraZeneca - Singapore

Do you have expertise in, and passion for, Digital Innovation? Would you like to apply your expertise to impact the lives of patients in a company that follows the science and turns ideas into life changing medicines? Apply here directly

Digital Marketing Analytics & Insights - Deloitte - Singapore

This role sits within Deloitte Digital Southeast Asia. We create new growth by elevating the human experience—with connected ideas, technology, and talent, in a way that only Deloitte can. And we do this to shape a better future for every single one of us. As part of Advertisement Marketing and Commerce (AMC), you will work with our team to help clients with define, setup, and operate data-driven marketing analytics capabilities, driving growth for brands through insights. Apply here directly

SEO Lead - WorldRemit - London

We are looking for a SEO Lead to help drive our global SEO efforts across our key remittance countries including the US, UK, Australia, Canada, Spain, Germany and France. You will help shape, build and improve our SEO department to deliver our future growth aspirations. Apply here directly

Technical SEO Specialist - Cazoo - London

Reporting into the Technical Organic Performance manager, you will be helping to grow organic visibility across Cazoo assets within a team of Organic Performance professionals. You will be focused on website analysis, delivering insightful technical SEO commentary and work closely with product and engineering to implement best-in-class technical SEO across our properties. Apply here directly

Marketing - Product & Digital Director - Starbucks - London

Sitting on the UK Leadership Team and reporting to the Vice President and General Manager, the role will be responsible for the conception, execution and evaluation of world-class, integrated marketing and category plans. The successful candidate will also be responsible for local category ranging as well as end-to-end food strategy and innovation/product development. Apply here directly

Head of Marketing Science - Snap - Dubai

We are looking for a seasoned ad efficacy, measurement, analytics, and attribution leader to join us as a Head of Marketing Science, MENA. This is a crucial, highly cross-functional, and high-visibility role in one of Snap’s most exciting regions. As a Head of Marketing Science, MENA, you will be responsible for representing Snap measurement internally to regional leadership and business teams, and externally to our clients and the broader advertising industry. Apply here directly

Regional Search Specialist (SEO) - Canon - Dubai

Analyzes, reviews, and implements change to websites so they are optimized for search engines. This means maximizing the traffic to locally created landing pages by improving page rank within search engines across the Middle East, Africa & Turkey. Have in-depth knowledge of keyword research, understand SEO copywriting, and serve as a liaison between various departments. Apply here directly

JPAC Search Specialist - Apple - Singapore

We are looking for a Search Specialist to track and drive on-page Search Engine Optimization (SEO) and internal search activities and deliverables by partnering closely with the WW search and content teams at Apple, and to improve on the way we gather and utilize insights from search data. This is an excellent opportunity to implement SEO best practices combined with insights to increase the visibility of our customer support and learning environments on search engines. In this role, your ability to identify and share actionable insights across cross functional teams and regional teams, helps ensure execution aligns with strategy. Apply here directly

How to have fun with Emojis in search

While it is not a good idea to build your whole campaign around Emojis they do have a place for testing to see if you can stand out from the crowd in search but also in other marketing such as email and Google ads. Jon Henshaw has a good article on how you can look to get started with Emojis.

Software of Note?

AI model says lines Anthony Bourdain never said

In a sign of how fast technology is progressing around AI can be seen in an upcoming film about the life of Anthony Bourdain. Helen Rosner breaks down the ethical discussion of using AI software to have Bourdain quote something that was never recorded while he was alive. Where is the line on ethics if they wrote something but never spoke it?

Google Products

Google has added misleading “misinformation” content to their Google Docs abuse policies and enforcement guidelines. Part of the shift has been to battle the huge amount of fake information about Coronavirus store on Google Drive that Google has previously ignored. There is still a lot of questionable content and malware stored on Google Cloud but that looks to be ignored for now.

Social Media

The evolution of Instagram

Facebook is forcing users to start to use the app for more than just sharing photos as they seek to ramp up the monetisation of their audience. The push will come focused on Creators, Video, Shopping and Messaging… the shift towards video is not really surprising considering the rapid rise of TikTok over the last year or two… but shopping is more about attracting advertising budgets focused on ecommerce that have gone to YouTube, TikTok, Pinterest and Amazon.

Goodbye, Fleets we barely cared and won’t miss them

Twitter announced on Twitter and in a blog post that Fleets will be retired… the product was meant to motivate people to share their thoughts easily to encourage more people onto the platform. But it seems most people didn’t use them and those that did often used them to promote their tweets via screenshots so not really what Twitter had in mind…. The feature will sunset on the 3rd August 2021.

Media + Tech

Publicis Group buys CitrusAd

In an effort to capture ad revenue shifting into ecommerce and increase the value-add of Epsilon, Publicis Group has purchased Australian based CitrusAd. CitrusAd is interesting because it’s the platform half of the world’s largest 20 retailers use to power their native ads. The CitrusAd platform offers retailers sponsored products, banner advertising, branded landing pages (campaigns) and email campaigns. It’s very interesting that such a well placed adtech company hasn’t been snapped up by Google or Facebook earlier. Publicis is well placed to benefit with the integration of Epsilon Core ID and CitrusAds.

Chrome’s price tracking product gets closer

Android Police seek to uncover a bit more about new Chrome commits which shows more detail around the intention to bring shopping list features to Chrome on your phone. It also works closely with “Wall-e” that is their new price tracker built into Chrome. It’s also likely that Google Ads team will be looking to build a new shopping ads extension around this feature to allow advertisers to target consumers tracking prices on a particular SKU.

Search Atlas - Visualizing Divergent Search Results Across Geopolitical Borders

We wanted to thank Luke for the message highlighting Search Atlas as something cool which is happening in tech. The beta platform displays 3 sets of images or results from different countries for any search. You can see in the image below how complex the rules and logic is each time Google returns you a search result, but Search Atlas seeks so show you side by side how different the results are depending on your location.

Ecommerce

Facebook launches FB Pay for the USA only

Once again in another sign of how useless Facebook is as a global platform they have opened up Facebook Pay but only for US businesses. Inside the US you get the opportunity to access a signup form but outside the US you get a 404 error… Time and time again US companies seem to miss the mark when launching US centric products but most of the time not informing their audience it’s US only.

Security, Data + Privacy

CoronaCheck app leaks 60k peoples data & users can create fake certificates

RTL Nieuws has highlighted an issue at Testcoronanu that had an open database that allowed you to enter what kind of test you wanted (Antigen or PCR) but also when it was conducted and what was the result. This also issue a travel certificate from Testcoronanu with a signature from a doctor that you have tested negative but you could also adjust the test data from others from negative to positive or invalidate their past corona test. The database also allowed access to private data of over 60k people that used Testcoronanu that exposed full names, residential addresses, e-mail addresses, telephone numbers, social security numbers (BSNs), passport numbers but also private medical information such as whether you have been tested positive or negative.

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Google highlights rapidly evolving results in search

Google hasn’t always been the fastest to update their results for breaking news or emerging topics but they also claim that the first information published is not always the most reliable. But now Google will use AI to detect when a breaking topic is evolving and it’s still working to increase it’s index to cover the topic in more detail.

Social Media

TikTok bans Crypto influences trying to slow scams

TikTok seems to be leading the way on cracking down on questionable content that is commonly found on social media platforms. The platform is banning all financial branded content which include crypto, pyramid schemes, loans, get rich quick schemes, credit cards and more. Part of the push has been supported by UK’s Financial Conduct Authority that is trying to protect younger and more vulnerable viewers.

Media + Tech

Google building support for Covid-19 vaccination cards

As part of the process of re-opening the world a key step is vaccinations is digital vaccination and testing information. Google has updated their Passes API so you can now easily and securely store your vaccination and test results on your device. This is being launched in the USA first with the example cards below provided by Healthvana. Google has stated that they are not using this data for ad targeting at this point.

AirAsia building a super app

It seems AirAsia will be joining the market dominated by Grab + WeChat that are made up by dozens of mini programs that allow their users to run third-party applications within WeChat. Yandex Go operates in parts of Europe and Colombia’s Rappi is working to become Latam’s first super app operating across 200 cities in 9 countries. Rebecca Sentance has more details about the AirAsia plans over on Econsultancy but with 600 million passengers they certainly have a decent user base in SouthEast Asia to give it a go.

15 second views the new way for premium Twitter video ads

Twitter understands that people have short attention spans on their platform so it makes sense they optimised their Video ad product for a shorter time span of 15 seconds. At least based on Facebook data from 2017 it makes sense for advertisers to be buying the shorter video blocks but it also means Twitter can sell more video ads if they are shorter.

YouTube algorithm recommendations violate it’s own policies

Mozilla organisation has released their 10 month crowd sourced investigation into YouTube’s questionable recommendation algorithms using their browser extension RegretsReporter. The biggest highlight was that non-English speaking countries are far more likely to get suggested videos they find disturbing. YouTube obviously isn’t doing enough in this space as 71% of the videos volunteers submitted were being recommended by YouTube’s algorithm. Of the 9% of flagged videos that were actually removed it wasn’t before they managed to reach 160 million views.

Ecommerce

Shoppe launches loyalty program across Asia

Shoppe Mall Brand Memberships will be rolled out across 7 markets Singapore, Malaysia, Thailand, Taiwan, Indonesia, Vietnam and the Philippines that offers a new CRM and retention tool for brands. The platform allows for brands to offer simple loyalty programs to drive more sales and encourage repeat purchases on the Shoppe platform. Early tests by Danone in a soft launch showed a +15% in repeat buyers since launching in April 2021.

Security, Data + Privacy

Mercedes-Benz USA dealer website data leak

Back in June 11th 2021 a vendor advised Mercedes-Benz USA that PID of less than 1,000 customers and potential buyers had been made accessible on a cloud stage platform. The vendor reported that the personal information for these individuals (under 1000) is comprised mainly of self-reported credit scores as well as a very small number of driver license numbers, social security numbers, credit card information and dates of birth. The data was gathered by customers and interested buyers on both dealer and Mercedes-Benz websites between 1st Jan 2014 and 19th June 2017 and no internal Mercedes-Benz systems were compromised.

Omnicom Media Group prepares for post-cookie future

According to Digiday OMG have formally endorsed Unified ID 2.0 as their post cookie solution that will be most suited for their publisher and client partners and start the process of ensuring publishers adopt this new standard.

Google removes apps stealing Facebook login details

Dr Web’s analysts have noticed a group of Android Apps on Google Play that trick users into providing their Facebook logins and passwords. The apps are fully functional apps that have been installed almost 6 million times but most of them have now been removed. The apps prompt their users to login to Facebook to add functionality or remove ads and when the users do a JavaScript file is executed which passes your login details and the cookies from the authorised session to the criminals server.

Datorama SFTP files viewable by other customers

After investigation, Salesforce Security confirmed that the inadvertent exposure of customer file names was the result of a misconfiguration in the SFTP server used by Datorama customers since April 22, 2021. As a result of this misconfiguration, the names of files that you transferred via this SFTP server between April 22, 2021, and June 17, 2021, may have been viewable by other Datorama customers using the server.

The server contained files pertaining to advertising campaigns and we believe may have included the following data:

• Client names

• Advertising market (e.g., city, state, country)

• Campaign timeframes

• Medium (e.g., television, magazine, internet, etc.)

A this stage SalesForce have no evidence that your files were clicked on, viewed, or downloaded by another customer. On June 17, 2021, Salesforce Engineering deleted all remaining files from the SFTP server and ensured that all files would be uploaded to the Datorama server via private, customer-specific folders moving forward.

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In memory of Russ Jones

On the 24th June 2021 Russ Jones one of the smartest SEOs I know passed away in his sleep, if you want to learn a bit more about the man that encouraged other SEOs to be a better person you can visit Remembering Russ Jones.

Learning about SEO?

Regular Expressions (RegEx) in Google Search Console

Now that Google Search Console allows the use of RegEx it’s a perfect time for this post from JC Chouinard on using RegEx correctly. Be aware that of course Google doesn’t use the standard RegEx but a variation which is Re2 syntax because why stay consistent with other programming languages???

Google Search Central updates HTTPs status codes

Good news the top 20 status codes that Googlebot encounters when crawling the web have been updated over on the advanced SEO section. If you are working with developers and they keep asking you for Stack OverFlow links on status codes the good news is you can now provide some Google approved guidelines not a post from 10 years, 11 months ago just because it has 1.2 million views.

Googling stuff

Google gets NHS Coronavirus snippet wrong

Google UK users who type in search phrases such as “Do I need to self-isolate after contact tracing if I test negative?” are presented with a featured snippet answering the common question “Can I stop self-isolating if I test negative for Covid-19?”

The text of the answer, scraped from a gov.uk page, begins: “If your test is negative, you will no longer be required to self-isolate.” But that is not the complete answer and is the wrong advice, but that has now been fixed as you can see from the screenshot below.

Social Media

TikTok Jump is the mini-program to create interactive experiences

TikTok launched Jump which allows creators to quickly create more engaging and informative content on TikTok. The new feature allows creators to link within their videos to ensure the TikTok community have more dynamic experiences such as some of the early collaborators including Whisk that allow creators to natively link to the recipe shown in the video. The mini-programs seek to address the “last mile” which could be learning a new skill, making a reservation or learning more about the information discussed in the video. TikTok Jumps are meant to be easy for partners to build and deploy using HTML5 with minimal technical integration costs or worries.

AWS acquires encrypted message service Wickr

In an interesting push into securing more enterprise, military and government clicks Amazon’s AWS business has acquired Wickr. The communication platform is one of the few that has been vetted by the NSA which gives AWS some instant credibility in building a secure message platform for AWS clients.

Telegram launches group video calls

Telegram have rolled out a whole bunch of new features to bring them closer to WhatsApp + Zoom + Teams in a single update. Group video calls support up to 30 people but an unlimited amount of audio-only participants, but now you also have share your screen which makes it useful for companies using Telegram but also those looking to stream live game play. A welcome feature is noise suppression that Apple also launched in their recent iOS updates, but that wouldn’t be complete without tablet and desktop support that even WhatsApp struggles with…

Conversion Rate Optimisation

Turn page renderings into animated GIFs

Justin Briggs flagged a nice new tool to convert Chrome DevTools into animated GIFs to capture page rendering created by Serg Hospodarets. You can play with the tool here

Apple App Store will now allow product page optimisation

Flagged by Mortiz Daan it’s taken several years for Apple to finally catch-up with Google Play Store Experiments with their new custom product pages that allow developers to create additional versions of their standard App Store page. Apple will allow you to create new pages at any time independent of app updates but will need to be reviewed. You can now have up to 35 custom pages live at once with monitoring success of the page via App Analytics. You can measure impressions, downloads, conversion rates, retention rate and average proceeds in tests running up to 90 days.

Media + Tech

Android Apps coming to Windows 11 via Amazon Appstore

Microsoft & Amazon announced plans to bring the Amazon Appstore to Windows 11. With the upcoming release of Microsoft’s operating system, Windows customers will have access to Android apps on their Windows 11 devices, expanding the selection of apps for customers across multiple genres.

“Today we offer a broad selection of mobile apps in our Amazon Appstore, available across Fire TV, Fire Tablets, and Android devices that our customers use and enjoy every day,” said Palanidaran Chidambaram, Director of the Amazon Appstore and Cross-Screen Technology. “With this announcement, Amazon Appstore developers will now have the opportunity to make their Android apps available to hundreds of millions of Windows customers.”

Oculus virtual reality headsets to soon see Facebook ads

Under the banner of helping users find new favourites and “helping developers” soon you will see Facebook ads within Oculus. It will start with ads for Oculus content within their Oculus mobile app. But don’t worry Facebook is looking on more ways that advertisers can interact with customers… I mean people can interact with brands who are paying to be featured within your headset. Oculus have launched a page to help users manage what ads that they see on Oculus here.

Facebook engineers develop a way reverse-engineer deepfakes and discover their source

Xi Yin + Tal Hassner from Facebook AI research team published a blog post on how they are working to discover digital fingerprints that are left by each deepfake generation model. Part of the model can uncover the unique pattern each AI model creates when it generates a single deepfake image which can also uncover if the series of images used came from a single source. But they can now potentially uncover a coordinated disinformation or malicious campaign using deepfakes. Model parsing was developed in collaboration with Vishal Asnani and Xiaoming Liu from Michigan State University.

Ecommerce

Shopify to offer affiliate marketing publishers to their merchants

Shopify is starting to partner with publishers starting with BuzzFeed that allows their merchant products to show to their audience of 200 million readers. To enable this US merchants will need to add the BuzzFeed channel via the Shopify app store and BuzzFeed’s editors will then be able to discover your products and include them in relevant articles. The links can drive merchants more sales and BuzzFeed will receive a pre-agreed commission % after you have received the customers payment. There is no cost to merchants opting to use BuzzFeed as you only pay a commission when BuzzFeed makes you a sale.

Security, Data + Privacy

Taobao shopping service suffers a data breach over a billion data points

A Taobao affiliate created a crawler to extract usernames and phone numbers from Alibaba’s shopping platform Taobao. The activity happened over several months before Alibaba noticed and took action. It seems the data was only for affiliate marketing purposes and it wasn’t sold onto other parties, but 163.com that broke the story have now removed all references to it and now just return the 404 error page shown below.

Google delays the death of the cookie by 2 years

Google has confirmed that Chrome won’t start to phase out third-party cookies until mid-2023 and then will take until late 2023. The delay has come from the UK Competition and Markets Authority (CMA) as it’s efforts to phase out the use of third-party cookies and other functions from Chrome raised concerns with a formal investigation into the original proposal.

The launch now subject to engagement with the CMA is to launch the phase out support with two stages

• stage 1 - starts late 2022 lasting up to 9 months

• stage 2 - starting mid 2023 lasting 3 months

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GSC query analysis tool

Greg Bernhardt has released a new Python SEO app that allows anyone to label queries by intent, entities but also count keyword frequency. Part of the tool using Google Knowledge Graph which has an API that offers 100k free calls per day.

Software of Note?

Ojoy allows you to enlarge a low-resolution photo

Do you have a small low-resolution image you need to increase in size without reducing the quality. Using TensorFlow.js, UpScalerJS + Waifu2x proof of concept tool Ojoy can now enlarge images using machine learning without significant reducing in quality in your browser.

Social Media

QR codes and payment links arrive in FB Messenger

In a desperate attempt to try and stay relevant and slow the growth of super apps like WeChat Facebook has finally made some headway in enabling payments in it’s Messenger platform. The platform is only available in the US as that is the only market uses mobile payments, in the rest of the world we still use beads and shells as currency…. Once again it shows how unprepared Facebook is to compete with platforms like PayPal or WeChat when it comes to enabling mobile payments outside it’s safety net in the US. Facebook is several years behind a large number of apps on the payment front and the new feature doesn’t really set the world on fire. To further limit the potential audience size Facebook has decided users have to be 18+, have a debit card or PayPal account and currency must be set to USD.

Media + Tech

AVIF image format is 50% smaller than JPEG and 20% smaller than WebP

AVIF has been supported in Chrome since M85 was released July 2020 and is on it’s way to Firefox. AVIF is a new image format based in AV1 video codec it offers developers significant compression gains over older formats like JPEG & WebP but has the advantage of also offering progressive decoding. The example image size shown below has actually been reduced by 91% from the original size vs a 57% reduction for JPEG.

Google to prefetch websites built using signed exchanges

Signed Exchanges (SXGs), Google Search can now crawl, cache, and prefetch them when applicable. Pages are prefetched and stored on the user’s browser, ready to be loaded when the user clicks on the result, leading to near instant loading using Google’s fast cache servers around the world without any additional cost.

Ecommerce

What are the top 100 most search items on Amazon?

Semrush has finally rolled out the long anticipated Amazon keyword tool within Sellzone. But they have also created a bit of a link bait piece by showing for FREE what are the top 100 Amazon searches in the USA. Amazon doesn’t actually provide volume unless you are buying Amazon Ads on that keyword it just gives you sales rank so combined with Semrush search volume it could be a powerful tool for ecommerce teams.

Google is wooed by WooCommerce

Last week Google announced that the 4.4 million merchants using WooCommerce would no have the ability to integrate their product inventory across Google for free in just a few clicks. WooCommerce merchants can now upload their products to Google, create free listings and ad campaigns, and review Shopping performance metrics without having to leave WooCommerce.

Conversion Rate Optimisation

Victoria & Albert museum optimise Hugo for speed!

V&A development team decided after 11 years on their old tech stack it was time to move forward and while dynamic platforms were the growing choice for many they decided static pages were the way forward. Powered by Hugo and open sourced static site generator they could create 1.24 million static pages using a combination of markdown docs and using open sourced GO as the templating language. The results are something of an amazing 100% score in Google Lighthouse.

Security, Data + Privacy

McDonald’s hit by data breach!

On the 11th June McDonald’s confirmed to WJS that hackers had gained access to it’s systems in USA, South Korea and Taiwan. Some of the data breached involved business contact information for US franchisees and employees but also information about square footage of play areas and restaurant seating capacity. In South Korea and Taiwan the hackers accessed customer emails, phone numbers of delivery addresses but also employee information (name + contact details).

RockYou2021 is the largest leak with 8.4 billion entries!

Cybernews covered the news that a user posted a 100Gig file that contains 8.4 billion passwords that seem to be a consolidation of existing data leaks. The original post was 82 billion passwords but when de-duplicated it worked out to be 8,459,060,239 unique entries. This leak was 262 times larger than the original RockYou leak that happened 12 years earlier.

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Brave to launch privacy focused search engine

Brave the privacy focused browser has launched their own search engine Brave Search that seeks to catch the wave of privacy. Brave say their will also plan to offer API access which can be used to build other privacy first search engines in the future.

Google Products

Google breaks Android advertising IDs

Google is trying to catch up with Apple on the topic of user privacy by making it harder for Android apps to track users who have opted-out of receiving personalised ads. Once this happens later in 2021 Google will show developers a string of 00000 in place of the Advertising ID starting on Android 12. It will continue to expand to cover all apps that support Google Play in early 2022. If you are looking for best practice around unique identifiers including analytics tracking and fraud prevention it’s advised you read this developers guide.

Social Media

Will Cathcart + Mark Zuckerberg confirm new WhatsApp features

WhatsApp fan blog WABetaInfo recently had a chat with Will and Mark dropped by to add some more context of what features were coming to WhatsApp soon. Some of new features are:

• multi-device support in a few months

• view once for photos and video (like SnapChat?)

• disappearing mode

Media + Tech

Negotiating with ransomware hackers?

Rachel at the New Yorker has written a very in-depth overview of what is the driving force behind ransomware covering the game of cat & mouse between businesses and criminal syndicates.

Norton antivirus enables cryptocurrency mining

NortonLifeLock announced the launch of Norton™ Crypto which is to apparently allow customers to safely mine Ethereum cryptocurrency through it’s Norton™360 platform. The feature will be enabled for all Norton™360 customers over the next several weeks but will be interesting to see what Norton’s cut of the mining might be.

Norton say they are doing this to stop users downloading random mining software tools which skim money and might be a source for ransomware, which are actually reasonable reasons. But it will be interesting to see if Norton pool can gain enough traction to make it a decent pool for miners.

Ecommerce

L’Oréal Canada saw 90% lift in ecom during the 2020 pandemic

L'Oréal Canada opens an expanded distribution center located in Saint-Laurent as part of Project PROGRESS that continues to invest in better meeting the changing needs of their Canadian business. The new expansion offers +57% storage capacity than they had previously.

Pinduoduo passes Alibaba as top shopping platform

The fresh produce giant Pinduoduo actively promotes that it connects 12 million Chinese farmers to 824 million Chinese consumers, bringing affordable groceries to all. The largest agricultural platform in China and possibly the world is app only and has used discounts for group buys which encouraged users to recruit their friends. Last year Pinduoduo introduced next-day pickup service Duo Duo Grocery to help farmers sell more produce directly to their consumers.

Security, Data + Privacy

iOS will ramps up exposing app data sharing

Apple is expanding it’s privacy report to cover what trackers Safari has prevented from following you across the web to also include apps. The new App Privacy Report shows the past 7 days of data (photos, contacts) and sensor access (microphone, location, camera) but also all the app and website activity. It also shows the most frequently contacted domains so you can see where your apps are sending your data….

Amazon launches own identifier for the post cookie world

Max Willens over at Digiday explores some of the rumours surrounding Amazon’s new publisher provided ID. Unlike a number of other publishers that have tried Amazon has the unique advantage of both reach across hundreds of millions of visitors but also full visibility on their transactions. Will this be the killer feature that will finally push Amazon’s DSP into becoming part of the standard media buying package?

Irish pizza chain Apache Pizza flags data breach

The largest pizza chain with over 169 stores confirmed that there was a data vulnerability of it’s customer data. No word on how this was discovered, was their customer information being sold or was it part of a broader security issue linked to the storage or processing of data.

“It includes the names, addresses, contact email and phone number of customers, the pizzas they ordered, their encrypted (hashed) password if they have an Apache Pizza account, and in a small number of cases, their date of birth in connection with birthday orders,”

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Google Ads Performance Max campaigns expand

Performance Max was first mentioned back in October 2020 as a option to have an automated campaign that runs across all Google ad inventory(YouTube, Display, Search, Discover, Gmail, and Maps). It’s now been opened up for more advertisers globally to try it out and support for Performance Max will be also enabled for the insights page.

Google expands health sector clients

Melanie Evans over at the WSJ covered the new deal between Google and HCA Healthcare that operates around 2,000 locations across 21 US states. The deal focuses on storage of digital health records but also their engineers will develop new algorithms to improve efficiency, guide medical advice and better monitor patients. HCA has said PID won’t be shared with Google but the concerns are if patient information protections are able to cope with the new landscape.

Social Media

Twitter looking at add Super Followers stats

Another week another new feature spotted by Jane Wong, this time it’s the Super Followers stat that is part of the new Super Follow feature as Twitter expands new revenue channels for users.

Twitter Spaces launches in a web version

In an effort to stay ahead of Clubhouse, it seems Twitter might have dealt the killer blow with it’s product available on iOS & Android but now also the web version. New features coming include setting reminders for scheduled spaces, accessibility and better transcriptions.

Media + Tech

Shopify payment is expanding on Google with Shop Pay

Shopify are working with Google to catch Amazon Pay & PayPal with their deeper commerce collaboration to help merchants sell on Google faster and easier. Merchants that opt to enable the Buy on Google will be able to use Google’s native checkout flow and provide customers the ability to use Shop Pay with a conversion rate that is 1.72X higher than a typical checkout.

Ecommerce

Turkish express delivery service Getir launches in Amsterdam

Getir has announced they are expanding to Amsterdam after launching in London in January 2021, and looks like it might be giving Berlin based Gorillas a run for their VC money. Gorillas uses dark stores which operate as micro fulfilment centres to deliver around 2,000 essential goods at retail prices with an average delivery time of 10 minutes. I’ve seen Gorilla delivery drivers around Haarlem but wonder if Getir will be expanding across the Netherlands as aggressively? Getir offers delivery day or night within the Amsterdam ring road from a range of around 1,000 products. It will also be interesting to see how Albert Heijn respond as they launched AH Compact to counter Picnic’s growth.

Security, Data + Privacy

Japanese government hit by data breach linked to Fujitsu ProjectWEB

3 government agencies (Ministry of Land, Infrastructure, Transport, and Tourism) and Tokyo Narita Airport have had a data breach due to unauthorized access linked to ProjectWEB a SaaS-based information-sharing tool designed by Fujitsu Ltd. Some of the leaked information includes 76k email addresses of external parties and government officials, critical information from Narita Air Traffic Control. Fujitsu said several of their corporate clients had been compromised due to the misuse of the tool but no other unauthorised access has been detected yet.

Canada Post impacted by malware and 950k customers and 44 businesses were compromised

Canada Post was notified on the 19th March that one of their suppliers Commport Communications had been the victim of a malware attack. In November 2020 Commport Communications had been notified of a ransomware issue by Canada Post’s IT subsidiary investigated and closed the issue.

• The information is from July 2016 to March 2019

• The vast majority (97%) contained the name and address of the receiving customer

• The remainder (3%) contained an email address and/or phone number

Thousands of Dutch consumers were caught out by fake text message

A large number of customers were tricked into clicking the link in the SMS that encouraged them to click and install the fake DHL packet tracking app that contained malware.

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Common SPA crawling issues and how to fix them

Daniel Cartland from NOVOS has a nice post over on the deepcrawl blog focused on Single Page Applications (SPA) that make heavy use of JavaScript frameworks like ReactJS but often have a number of major SEO issues out of the box.

• Not every page has a unique URL because of the use of #fragments

• SPAs are often client-side rendered and slow to load

• JavaScript is still often required to crawl key parts

Social Media

Linkedin offers better way to address career gaps

Linkedin has finally started to move forward to make their platform more suitable for their members taking career breaks due to parenting or caretaker roles. Soon if you use one of the new job titles like “stay-at-home parent” and set your employment type to “self-employed” you no longer are forced to define a employer. Later Linkedin will add new employment gap fields such as “family care”, “sabbatical” or “parental leave” to ensure your career is correctly reported.

AI drives 100% of Pinterest growth

It’s beginning… AI is starting to put growth hackers out of a job as Pinterest uses neural networks to find images and ads that will capture consumers attention. Their new neural network process has drawn in an extra 480 million people to Pinterest in Q1 2021 which is up +30% over Q1 2020. It will be interesting how Pinterest will continue to grow while protecting their users privacy.

Google Products

Google dermatology assist tool

Google announced a new AI powered dermatology tool that is focused on identification of skin, nail and hair conditions based on images patients upload. Their AI has been trained to recognise 288 skin conditions based on 3 years of research using a data based on 65,000 diagnosed conditions and millions of images. The tool is based on previous work done on detecting lung cancer in CT scans or diabetic eye disease. The creation of the tool was driven by the almost 10 billion Google searches focused on skin, hair and nail issues.

Media + Tech

Who is making money in the online slander industry?

What is the best way to learn about something new? Well Aaron Krolik and Kashmir Hill decided to dive in the deep end and create a nasty post about Aaron and see where it goes. The rabbit warren they go down shows that at times the person creating these slander websites are linked or closely linked to the services offering to remove this slander for a fee.

Ford is getting in-car ads ready for drivers

Ford has had a patent it filed in Dec 21st 2016 recently approved that is a billboard interface for in-vehicle displays. The patent was invented by Perry MacNeille a Ford research engineer who semi-retired back in 2019 so there is no clear indication that this will appear in a Ford automobile anytime soon.

Security, Data + Privacy

Zero-day discovery allows attacker to bypass Apple’s protections

Jamf has published a detailed overview of the new zero-day attack targeting MacOS that allows a malicious app to execute without prompting the user for approval. XCSSET malware was revealed in August 2020 by Trend Micro which was focused on infecting Mac developers Xcode projects. Jamf covers the topic in more detail but the main points are it steals Safari browser cookies and then bypasses prompts to install a developer version of Safari. The end result is that the malware can take screenshots or record the screen without needing confirmation from the user.

Domino’s India Data breach

Rajshekhar Rajaharia highlighted a few days ago that the 13 terabytes of employee files and 180 million customer orders have been leaked in April 2021 but now the hackers have made a search engine to search any mobile number to see the person’s past GPS locations with date & time information.

Sensor Tower acquires Pathmatics

One of the leading app marketing insight platforms Sensor Tower have expanded their platforms data by acquiring digital intelligence platform Pathmatics. The benefit to Sensor Tower customers is they can now offer a lot of new insights including Social Media, YouTube, Display ads & digital TV coverage. The benefit will be a better industry view of where app installs are coming from and where are brands spending digital budgets.

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Jobs + Careers

Folksy - Head of Ecommerce + Operations - Folksy is a thriving ecommerce marketplace and craft community, used by hundreds of thousands of people every month. We’ve been established for more than a decade, supporting artists and makers all over the UK by offering them an online platform to sell their handmade work and connect with other like-minded people. We are small, lean team (just 5!), with rapid growth and exciting projects on our roadmap. Apply here directly

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What’s new in Search at Google I/O?

Google I/O starts tomorrow and these are some of the sessions that you might find valuable, at least so you have some blue sky ideas for 2022.

• AMA: Progressive Web Applications and Fugu

• Building a web application with Angular and Firebase

• Prepare to grow with tips for Firebase integrations with Ads

• AMA: Google's AI Map

• Technical SEO show and tell Meetup

• What’s new in Google Search?

• AMA: Web Vitals

Software of Note?

Scale your link building workflow

Marketing Signals have launched a private beta of their new SEO tool to help you collate data from ahefs, Moz, Majestic + Semrush into a single view. The tool was previously for SEO and a better link building workflow, but you can test it out now!

GDdash SEO Tool for Google Discover Optimisation

GDDash is a new beta tool which attempts to make sense of Google Discover algorithm using some AI for classification and insights on your AMP pages. I have applied for access to test it today so hopefully have something more to share soon.

Social Media

Twitter Blue launches tiered subscription service

One of our favourite developers Jane Manchun Wong has uncovered more details about the upcoming Twitter Blue features. Some of the new paid features include the following but also increases the overall revenue of Twitter and makes them less reliant on Twitter Ads.

• Undo tweets (similar to Gmail unsend NOT Outlook recall email)

• Collections (save and organise tweets)

• Tiered subscription model linked to features starting at $2.99/month

• Twitter just acquired Scroll (news subscription)

Media + Tech

Lossless Audio + Dolby Atmos coming to Apple Music

Apple today announced Apple Music is bringing industry-leading sound quality to subscribers with the addition of Spatial Audio with support for Dolby Atmos. Spatial Audio gives artists the opportunity to create immersive audio experiences for their fans with true multidimensional sound and clarity. This will be available for subscribers starting in June for no additional cost.

Ecommerce

Video SEO best practice for ecom

Aleyda Solis highlighted a recent post from Google Search Console team on best practice tips for ecommerce websites using YouTube. It covers a number of topics such as common uses of video and how to get the most out of Google Search + Discover. Alos you are also in luck there is a video on the topic also :)

Security, Data + Privacy

Facebook loses ability to send EU users data to USA

Facebook lost it’s appeal to block an EU privacy decision that will force them to stop sending EU users personal information to their US based servers. Sam Schechner from the WSJ covers the ruling in much more detail here as it has ramifications for Google, Apple and Twitter who all have European HQs based in Ireland.

Apple AirTags can sneak data out of air-gapped networks

Fabian Bräunlein from Positive Security covers how it’s possible to upload arbitrary data for a non-internet connected device using Find My BLE broadcasts to nearby Apple devices that can upload the data for you. This might be the biggest threat to the adoption of AirTags by corporations.

iPhone calendar spam is back

Thomas Reed over on Malwarebytes has covered the new surge of iCloud calendar spam that was last in the news in 2016.

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Jobs + Careers

Senior Manager, Audience Insight & Research - V&A - London

We are looking for a creative and dynamic audience insight professional to lead insight-driven audience development and decision making at the V&A.   In this role, you will get to shape future strategy and manage the development of an innovative programme of audience research, insights, and analytics to inform all aspects of the V&A’s audience offer from brand positioning to visitor forecasting, pricing strategy and marketing campaign development.  Apply directly here

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Behind the scenes of Google Search “Search off the record” podcast

This episode’s discussion was about a new search engine call Steve not Stephen or Steven that could things Google couldn’t. They also discuss how things like HTTPS could be considered a tie-breaker for websites and John Mueller confirms JavaScript is evil and Gary supports Pineapple on Pizza.

Validate your startup idea via SEO with Fabrizio

During his sabbatical after 4 years at Wise, Fabrizio has taken 30 days off to research and validate the potential of a business and what key challenges he has to face as the project gains traction.

Social Media

@JoinClubhouse takes over @clubhouse on twitter

Back on the 22nd Feb 2021 I made a call that the social media app ClubHouse would take over the @clubhouse account and domain clubhouse.com from a software collaboration tool, turns out I was right.

Clubhouse finally launches Android app but it’s too late

Also it’s only on Beta in the USA and it’s invite only so you will need to pre-register and wait… the longer you have to wait the more users that will get used to Twitter Spaces. It’s been a year since Clubhouse launched on iOS and it’s taken a year to start to roll out the Android version, but I’ve got no intention of using it as other social media apps like Twitter and LinkedIn roll out their version with a larger audience.

Facebook finally copies a useful Twitter feature

Facebook has always lead the way in copying other companies features and well today was not different. But atleast it was a Twitter feature that will hopefully slow the spread of fake news articles that the users hadn’t actually read before sharing it.

Scroll a better way to publish and read on Twitter

Twitter has acquired Scroll which has changed how websites are monetising their content and has the potential to bring in more revenue than traditional ads. Also it deals with the growing number of users running Ad Blockers (USA 26.4%) and offers a better experience for the web.

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Google Products

Hey Guys is the start of 36% of YouTube videos

It’s been the consistent greeting over the last 10 years but “Hey Guys” remains the #1 way vloggers greet their audience according to YouTube insights and accounts for 17% of introductions in the beauty video category.

YouTube legalized video stealing with YouTube Shorts

YouTube has thrown a hand grenade into creators with the auto-enabled Shorts permission across all their videos. The only option for channels is to manually uncheck this permission to “allow people to sample this content”.

YouTube offers brand extensions and browsable product images

YouTube is driving more ad features into YouTube as they seek to capture more ecommerce media spending that has traditionally ignored YouTube. The brand extensions conversions will be viewable in your Google Ads account. The browsable product images are probably going to eventually a huge impact on revenue for YouTube creators.

Media & Tech

Virtual clothing for social media influencers

An interesting new fashion brand DRESSX has launched e-clothing a completely virtual and sustainable fashion webshop. The business is setup to offer an alternative purchasing behaviour that often results in mass returns. It also opens up the opportunity for influencers to “wear” items that are out of stock or not yet available outside of tier 1 influencers.

The Ads Facebook won’t show you

The team over at Signal had a good effort to try and troll Facebook across it’s own Instagram ad platform but it seems Facebook had other ideas and disabled their account. The overall idea isn’t new but does highlight the massive amount of data has on it’s users that can be targeted by anyone with a Facebook account.

Conversion Rate Optimisation

21 tools to measure Core Web Vitals

Olga has done a great job of collating a list of 21 great tools but also has personally tested them all and offers some usage tips and instructions so you can get the most out of them. Drop by SEOSLY to see the full list

Ecommerce

Deliveroo Singapore offers your groceries in under 32 minutes

Deliveroo customers all across Singapore can now order more than 1,400 grocery items from 25 Cold Storage and 30 Giant stores, with an average delivery time under 32 minutes! It’s well overdue for these delivery companies to support more grocery chains around the world beyond the M&S launch in the UK in October 2020.

Security, Data & Privacy

200k people exposed for fake Amazon reviews

The SafetyDetectives found yet another open ElasticSearch database that contained 7GB of data of direct messages between Amazon vendors and customers willing to provide influenced reviews. The records show the fairly well known process of Amazon vendors sending a list of potential products that need a 5-star review, the customers then buy the product leave a 5-star review and send a link to their profile once the review is published and the money is repaid via PayPal.

Mental health startup Vastaamo data breach

The ransom demand went out to 30,000 people in Finland where Vastaamo ran a network of private mental-health providers in Finland. Vastaamo didn’t anonymize or encrypt any of the patent records it store. Patients had email addresses, social security numbers and patient notes written by their therapists. The patient database appeared earlier in January 2021 on atleast 11 anonymous file sharing services when pushed Vastaamo into liquidation and then bankruptcy. You can read the full story on Wired by William Ralston.

How Airbnb scaled metric consistency

Every corporate marketer knows that analytics is probably the most underinvested resource yet it produces the data & insight that you use to measure success or failure and base you business decisions on. Airbnb shared a fairly detailed overview of their analytics journey over the last 10 years and how Minerva has helped them scale their data which was essential during the Coronavirus pandemic.

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Jobs & Careers

Reach - SEO Specialist - London, UK - Reach Plc is looking for a talented SEO Specialist to work on specific SEO projects across the group. This role is key to continuing the growth in natural search traffic for Reach Plc. Working closely with the SEO team, data engineers, and the wider product team, the successful candidate will have experience auditing niche websites with thousands of pages, a strong understanding of SEO and experience using leading auditing tools. Experience in media/publishing would be an advantage. Apply here directly

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FREE Keyword mapping cheat sheet

Everyone’s favourite SEO Aleyda Solis has rolled out a nice blog post covering some great resources for better keyword mapping. As Aleyda points out keyword mapping for eCommerce, SaaS or location based services can be completely different so these templates are sure to help to speed things up.

How Google fought spam in 2020?

Google’s webspam team released a report to show all the effort that goes into the arms race against spammers with over 40 billion spammy pages found each day. Their team seems to be more heavily relying on AI after last year building their own spam-fighting AI that allowed them to reduce sites with auto-generated/scraped content by 80% over the last few years and detection of hacked websites improved by 50%.

What product reviews algorithm update can teach us about quality content

In a detailed breakdown Jono Alderson from Yoast digs into the April 2021 change to how Google views “reviews” for products and services. Yes it’s likely that this algorithm update won’t be the last one but maybe if we can focus on producing genuine and quality content Google will continue to train it’s AI to spot and de-index that which doesn’t live up to it’s expectations.

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Software of Note?

Twitter bookmarks meet Dewey

Twitter bookmarks are something of a mess and ask anyone on Twitter how they use them and you will get several different answers. So Yuriy starting building Dewey as the Global Build Weekend that seeks to make Twitter bookmark collections more useful and even exportable.

Social Media

Facebook pushes to create new revenue from Instagram

Mark Zuckerberg announced last week that they are working on increasing the functionality of Instagram with the launch of two new features creator shops & marketplace. Some tier 1 influencers like Kim Kardashian already have shops enabled but creator shops will allow more creators to monetise their audience. Marketplace is designed to match brands with creators which seems more focused on killing off influencer marketing platforms and agencies. To try and take a share of the revenue generated outside of Facebook there will also be an affiliate marketplace to allow creatures to take a % of sales for products mentioned in their content.

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Google Products

Google Play store to enforce stricter policies

In what seems should have been something done years ago, it seems finally Google has got embarrassed enough to actually start to clean up the Google Play store. But it will still be second half of 2021 before Google actually starts to enforce these new rules so until then it’s a free for all to confuse and trick consumers into downloading Android apps. The new guidelines focus on app meta data shown in the example below and Store listing preview assets.

YouTube tests timed comments

This week a new beta feature rolled out to allow viewers to view the comments timed to the exact time stamp you are watching in a video. It is unclear what is the use case for it but it could be to stop spoilers during content which often happens with comments that are too hard to avoid.

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Media & Tech

Netflix counts viewership after just 2 minutes

Previously Netflix required 75% of a show to be watched to count towards viewership but @BluthCapital flagged that this has now been lowered to just 2 minutes in their Q4 2019 shareholder letter.

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AI writing software review by SEObook

SEOBook reviewed Conversio.AI one of the growing number AI powered content creation platforms that appear to be launching almost weekly. His writer took a deep dive into the platform and tested the various types of content it can produce which should help you understand if this can save you time. The general insight is the content produced requires some editing and maybe it’s not idea for long-form writing on complex topics.

Amazon creates new ad units for Fire TV

Amazon is seeking to better monetise their 50 million Fire TV devices but also it’s Prime Video streaming service with new screensaver ads and sponsored content rows. The interest in Fire TV is being driven by brands looking to grow their exposure within Amazon but also drive uplifts in sales on Amazon.

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Conversion Rate Optimisation

PageSpeed Insights now includes screenshots

In a step forward to help find issues and share them Lighthose will now allow you to click the element to see it in context of the entire page. This should help make JIRA tickets a bit more detailed and hopefully fixing CWV much faster and easier.

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Ecommerce

MailChimp shifts into ecommerce

MailChimp is in the process of rolling out two new features Stores & Appointments which is a new service that starts with a free tier that makes it free to build and host but transaction and Stripe processing fees apply. MailChimp Stores are rolling out in beta now and will be available to all US and UK customers by May 18th 2021 and MailChimp Appointments will be available to all beginning April 28th 2021.

• Stores - online storefront to sell products and process orders

• Appoints - offer service bookings online & manage schedules

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Security, Data & Privacy

iOS 14.5 - The guide to new app-tracking controls

Joanna Stern has a detailed overview of how iOS 14.5 will help give power back to consumers with their new App Tracking Transparency feature. I would suggest you read the article in full here where she has an exclusive interview with Apple’s Craig Federighi on the privacy changes. It has a massive potential impact on how Facebook & Google monetise their consumers/audience. It’s also possible by forcing app developers to explicitly ask for permission to track users via IDFA Facebook have said their ad network revenue could drop by 50% according to the BBC.

Clickstudios asks to stop tweeting about data breach

In a very strange response to downplay the data breach Clickstudios have asked their customers to not post correspondence on social media. The data breach relates to their password management software Passwordstate which is used by 29,000 customers across Fortune 500, banking, government, banking, defence, aerospace and other key industries. The news of the Passwordstate supply chain attack came vis CSIS group who dubbed this malware “Moserpass”, you can follow Peter Kruse the founder of CSIS for more details.

Stopping dark patterns that are manipulating consumers

Greg Bensinger at the NYTimes takes a deep look into how platforms are pushing deeper into manipulating consumer via Dark Patterns. Some common ways websites manipulate consumers include multiple opt-out screens and the use of double negatives to confuse consumers. Greg highlights that a recent study shows around 10% of eCommerce websites use dark patterns to some extent.

Pulse Connect Secure hacked

Yet another supply chain cyberattack has caught up popular enterprise VPN provider Pulse Connect Secure. As Reuters reported Ivanti the software developer behind Pulse Secure plans to patch the problem by Monday 2nd May 2021 which is two weeks after it was first acknowledged. But the initial investigation has been happening with CISA & FBI over the last 2 months, it will be interesting how many other VPN providers might susceptible to the same exploit.

Paleohacks data leak exposes 70k members

vpnMentor found the content was stored on an openly accessible misconfigured S3 bucket on AWS and data spanned from 2015 and 2020 and included personally identifiable information that including full names, email addresses, IP address, login time stamps, home locations, dates of birth, bios, and also user profile pictures.

Vivaldi is to block annoying cookie pop-ups

Vivaldi continues it’s path to make the web enjoyable again with the new ability to block the super annoying cookie preference pop-ups on it’s Android & desktop browser. The new feature called “Cookie Crumbler” and is powered by two third-party block lists and yes it might break some websites so it’s not enabled by default. Ad Blockers can technically do the same thing but it’s designed to be more flexible on what cookie warnings are blocked while ensuring visitors don’t have unnecessary clicks.

DigitalOcean’s customer billing data breached

An email was sent out to around 1% of DigitalOcean users to explain that details from their billing profile had been accessed by an unauthorised user.

Jobs & Careers

Reddit - Country Manager, Australia

Reddit’s mission is “Bringing Community and Belonging to Everyone in the World” and we do this by bringing over 52 million people together each day (DAU) through their common interests, inviting them to share, vote, comment, and create across thousands of communities. Come for the cats, stay for the empathy. 

Our International team is growing and we are looking for a Country Manager to lead Australia. You would be responsible for setting the overall strategic direction of the country, by working cross-functionally with other teams across Reddit dedicated to your country.  Apply directly here

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PGA Tour creates $40 million bonus that includes Google search popularity

PGA has launched the Player Impact Program which will pay the top 10 players a bonus depending on their impact score. The highest ranked player will earn $8 million at the end of the season based on 6 factors.

1. FedEx Cup rank (no longer used as a metric to determine bonus payment)

2. Google Search popularity

3. Nielsen Brand Exposure (exposure player delivers sponsors via minutes featured on broadcasts)

4. Q-Rating (familiarity & appeal of their brand)

5. MVP Index (value of engagement player drives across social/digital)

6. Meltwater mentions (frequency player generates coverage across media)

While players have been aware of this system for several months now it’s interesting to see how the broader sporting industry will accept this concept.

Google Trends on a year in lockdown

Google is helping webmasters, SEO’s and marketers understand how our lives changed during the Coronavirus pandemic with their new daily data calendar.

Social Media

Pinterest + Shopify expand social commerce partnership

In a push to empower brands using Pinterest they have expanded their partnership with Shopify from just Canada and the USA to 27 new countries. But this also benefits 1.7 million Shopify merchants around the world that can push their products to Pinterest and make them shoppable Product pins. The partnership also enables the ability for Dynamic Retargeting for those that have already expressed interest in their products. Part of this shift towards social commerce growth on Pinterest has happened due to a 14x increase in catalogue feeds uploaded over the last 12 months opening up more products to Pinterest’s 450 million users.

Twitter is exploring tipping feature

Jane Manchun Wong has found a new fun hidden feature where Twitter is building a tip jar on user profiles. The new tip jar seems to support a number of payment platforms including Bandcamp, Cash App, Patreon, PayPal & Venmo which also nicely aligns with TwitterSpaces.

Premium rooms launch on Clubhouse

Powered by Rally.io API Jeremiah Owyang setup a private room only for $JOW coin holders which might create a bit more appetite for personal crypto coins. The general idea is that Rally’s API can connect to several other apps to create a gated content garden that could extend across multiple platforms.

Google Products

Google Ads auto applying recommendations

Google Ads is stepping up the efforts to continuously improve your campaigns with their opt-in feature that will apply customised recommendations to your account. If you are currently enrolled and you’d like to make changes or deactivate this feature, sign in to the Control Center.

The types of recommendations that are applied are: optimise your ads, tailor your bids, refine your keywords and address repairs/fixes. You can read more about how Google Ads is taking control of everything here

Google launches a used car showroom

Google has done a soft launch of their new local car directory that will obviously keep users within the Google ecosystem longer but will be interesting to see which auto marketplaces allow their inventory to be available. The platform is not available everywhere but you can try and visit it here

Google shuts down “questions & answers”

The feature launched as an alpha test in India back in 2019 but didn’t expand globally, but this does not impact the Google Question Hub feature that is slowly being rolled out in more markets. Ujesh Krishnan shared a screenshot of the email he received a few days ago from Google.

Media & Tech

Outbrain seeks $2 billion IPO

One of the webs most despised monetisation platforms Outbrain has announced that it’s submitted a draft registration to the SEC related to an IPO. The IPO valuation is based on revenues of around $1 billion and has occurred 3 months after the merger with Taboola was scuttled. Outbrain like Taboola promotes itself as a content discovery and native advertising platform but is mostly driving traffic to clickbait and questionable content as per the example below.

The Daily Mail sues Google!

The lawsuit filed in U.S District Court in New York also raised the topic that Google punishes publishers who do not submit. The main part of the law suit is that Google penalised The Daily Mail due to their use of ad tech tools and manipulates the search results based on how much publishers spend on advertising. The Daily Mail earns around 80% of it’s revenue from website ads so when the core algorithm update hit in June 2019 revenue at TDM dropped substantially.

Ecommerce

Mastercard buys Ekata digital identity firm for $850 million

In an effort to boost Mastercard’s verification services and prevent fraud they are acquiring Ekata which is used by financial firms, merchants and marketplaces across various industries. Ekata’s tools can be used to speed up manual approvals via it’s Pro Insight platform but also has a number of APIs to measure transaction risks, open accounts, onboard new merchants and undertake identity verifications. Ekata is trusted by over 2,000 companies globally including: Sage, Lyft, Postmates, AA, Checkout.com, Intuit, Equifax and THG.

Yandex launches Yango Deli grocery delivery service in Paris & London

Yango expanded and launched it’s grocery delivery service in Israel last year under Yango Deli but have already announced they will be opening soon in central Paris and London in Q3 2021. The Deli by Yango service manages to achieve delivery times of 10-15 via it’s owned and operated Dark Stores and it’s own app. Yandex.Lavka has been operating in Russian since 2019 with over 300 dark stores in operation processing around 2 million orders a month. Yandex CFO announced that they plan to invest around $500 million expanding and improving their e-commerce operations in 2021.

Chrome 90 brings price tracking to Android

To enable this feature you will need to visit chrome://flags/#enable-tab-grid-layout in Chrome, open the drop-down menu and tap to “enable price notifications”. News of this new feature appeared in Chromium Gerrit #2764707 and it will be interesting to see how aggressively Chrome allows the price tracker to operate such as only on tabs you have open or based on previous browsing history.

Security, Data & Privacy

Internal email shows how Facebook works to normalise security problems

Pieterjan Van Leemputten from DataNews has been sent an internal email from a communication officer at Facebook showing that Facebook is trying to frame the recent data leak as an industry problem. The constant message from Facebook is they are refusing to take any responsibility and they push their PR engine into overdrive.

Quandoo data leak across 117 restaurants

I was notified via email that my details from one of the few encounters with Quandoo had been leaked and forwarded via public Google Groups to the respective restaurants. While my credit card and passwords is safe my name, contact number and email address used for the booking is at risk. Quandoo stated that this only impacted 0.7% of their restaurant database so it could have been much worse.

EU proposes first law to regulate use of AI for hiring and policing

In a step forward for consumers and privacy advocates, the new bill would create an oversight for high-risk uses of AI. Proposal for a Regulation laying down harmonised rules on artificial intelligence (Artificial Intelligence Act) is the first ever legal framework on AI. Under the new proposed rules video games or spam filters won’t face issues but chatbots may have to disclose you are not chatting with a real person. Read more about it over on the WSJ

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Jobs & Careers

Washington Post - Editor, News Analytics - The Washington Post is looking for an editor to join the News Analytics team within the Audience department. The News Analytics team sets standards for how the reporters and editors in our newsroom use analytics and metrics. This includes creating a vision for which metrics matter and why, as well as creating tools and trainings to support our journalists.  This editor should have a clear point of view on which metrics editors and reporters can and should use to inform editorial strategy, and an enthusiasm for improving data fluency in the newsroom.  Apply here directly

Washington Post - Deputy Director, Social & Operations - The Post is seeking a dynamic newsroom leader for the newly created role of deputy director for Social and Operations. Working hand-in-hand with Director of Social and Operations Mark W. Smith, this is a key management position on our Audience team and an opportunity for a strategic leader to contribute across the newsroom.  Apply here directly

Under Armour - Lead, EMEA SEO - As the EMEA SEO Lead you are a passionate advocate of the Under Armour Brand and it's consumers as well as detail-oriented and organized, capable of handling multiple projects at once, capable of dealing with ambiguity and rapidly-changing priorities in our fast-paced environment. In this role you manage eCommerce Websites and the PWAs to maximize visibility in Organic search results in 10+ countries. You influence campaigns, copy, design & messaging to ensure SEO best practices are followed and in harmony with a growing, rapidly developing the SEO program for the region. Apply here directly

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Ultimate guide to indexing

On average, 16% of valuable, indexable pages on popular websites aren’t indexed…. yep that is right Google won’t likely ever index every page on your website but understanding how to help Googlebot crawl and index more pages on your website is key for success! Tomek Rudzki highlights that it can take up to 8 weeks to get content indexed along with several other great insights where webmasters and SEOs get it wrong.

Software of Note

How researchers are using SISTRIX search data

In a cool use of big data Goethe University in Frankfurt are using SISTRIX data to create new approaches to competitive analysis. The two examples shared are the US banking market with a focus on the submarkets of accounts and credit cards. You can also play with the interactive chart here but it’s interesting to see search data visualised at a industry level.

Social Media

Facebook microtargeting for both sides of politics

Several organisations such as NYU Ad Observator is using the insights available from the Facebook Ad Library to uncover how aggressively some brands are targeting different political view points such as ExxonMobil shown below. Read more about this topic from Jeremy B Merrill over on The Markup.

Reddit Talk designed for subreddits

Reddit Talk seems to be possibly a major opportunity for subreddits to gain a larger audience or a moderators nightmare if not done well. The Talk feature will be opt-in so subreddits should be able to opt-out of the feature if the mods wish but does seem like an interesting way to capture some more engagement from the millions of captive subreddit lurkers. If you want to give it a go you will need to signup for their waitlist…

Facebook doubles down on audio trend

During a Discord chat yesterday 18th April 2021, Mark Zuckerberg provided their product roadmap for the next 3-6 months focused on audio.

• Soundbites - short-form audio product or an audio version of TikTok

• Podcasts - podcast discovery tool because Facebook is so amazing at search

• Live audio - Like their live video yet another product that hasn’t considered moderation

Google Products

Google delays CWV algorithm update

Google has made the right decision to delay the page experience update from beyond May 2021 to a gradual roll-out starting Mid-June 2021 and taking until the end of August 2021 before it has a full impact. The gradual roll-out buys webmasters and SEOs more time to fix page experience issues but also means the gradual roll-out is going to be harder to track and analyse.

Media & Technology

Dynamic Exclusions lists are being rolled out for Google Ads

This change focuses on their Display and Video inventory only. Advertisers and agencies can create their own exclusion lists or use lists from trusted third parties, such as brand safety organizations and industry groups, which can be updated seamlessly. It’s a long overdue feature for advertisers to gain more control over where their ads are run, read the announcement in detail here

Facebook to kill the audience insight tool

From the 1st July 2021, access to Audience Insights won’t be available anymore but there has been questions raised over it’s accuracy for several years. Facebook is pushing marketers from audience insights to business suite insights… most of this seems driven by iOS14. While you can still use your audiences across Facebook’s business tools the reliability of the data will likely decline.

Facebook Analytics is being cancelled

Facebook Analytics was never really a decent product so the fact that it’s being shut down probably won’t be noticed by most marketers. There was already signs of data quality issues with messaging metrics reporting unavailable due to privacy rules in some regions. The platform will no longer be available after the 30th June 2021

Ecommerce

How Kimberly Clark looks at Data

Back in March 2021 Juliana Chu spoke at the Festival of Marketing on how Kimberley Clark has developed an agile approach to analytics using CRM and social listening to drives sales and increase consumer engagement. It’s an interesting insight into how a company can shift it’s focus to being data led and relying on digital consumer survey tools to get data quickly not waiting 2-3 weeks. Read the full article here

Conversion Rate Optimisation

Cumulative Layout Shift GIF Generator

Chris Johnson has updated his free tool to use the new maximum session window metrics for CLS. Leading up to the now delayed Core Web Vitals update in June 2021 it’s important that you continue to fix issues like this. Great news is that you can download it here free

Security, Data & Privacy

Dynamic URL Rewriting at the edge with Cloudflare

Cloudflare have continued their push to do things better at scale and now they are helping website owners deal with making ugly URLs eg Example.com/documentid=23234 into human friendly URLs eg Example.com/Cloudflare.

While this can be done with a few clicks in WordPress by enabling permalinks previously this task in monolith or enterprise systems often took developers months to change the URLs to a friendly URL. There was also always push back on how it was handled but also questions asked on what is the performance impact on the server. Announcing Cloudflare Transform Rules that allow you to easily do static or dynamic rewrites of URLs at scale without the development headache.

Vivaldi browser doesn’t support FLoC

Vivaldi browser based on Chromium browser engine has made a public stand against Google’s new data harvesting technology. The new tracking technology Google has developed to circumvent the death of third-party cookies is called FLoC (The Federated Learning of Cohorts). FLoC creates a cohort based on all your browsing habits which creates a profile within your browser but advertising companies no longer see a unique identifier just you as a dog owner are in FLoC 2332 or 21321. The big issue is that FLoC allows you to be tracked across the entire web not just the website where the advertiser was running ads and managed to add a cookie. Vivaldi has followed Brave that announced the previous day that they will disable FLoC API in their browser. The growing concern around FLoC is that it might not actually be legal under GDPR so it will be an interesting privacy battle as Chrome starts to roll it out.

WordPress that runs 41% of the world’s websites have also raised a proposal for FLoC to be labelled as a security issue and can block Chrome FLoC with just 4 lines of code on a website. It will be interesting to see how much traction Google can force on it’s audience as browsers Microsoft Edge & Mozilla have also said they are not joining FLoC and DuckDuckGo have released a browser extension to block FLoC.

Google mislead consumers about data collection

The Australian Federal Court has found that Google misled consumers about personal location data collected through Android mobile devices between January 2017 and December 2018, in a world-first enforcement action brought by the ACCC. The Court also found that Google’s conduct was liable to mislead the public. Read the full media release here

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Jobs & Careers

Jellyfish - SEO Director - You will have responsibility for a portfolio of prestigious clients and manage teams of SEO specialists, while effectively delivering advanced SEO strategies that meet/exceed client expectations and KPIs. It will be your responsibility to constantly re-evaluate and reimagine the organic search solutions provided to your clients - remaining competitive and aligned with the needs of an ever-changing digital landscape. Apply here directly
World of Warcraft - Franchise Director - As World of Warcraft Franchise Lead, you will be responsible for the marketing and performance of your franchise in the EMEA region, with the support of a small team. To succeed in this role, you will work under the US Headquarter guidance to analyse sales, market, and game trends to ensure the EMEA region is maximizing the franchise opportunity. You will provide Headquarters will input from EMEA gamers. Apply here directly
Lacoste - Head of Digital - Digital is one of the key strategic axis of Lacoste. We have built a Digital Factory composed of 80 people, from e-commerce, IT, marketing and data to bring our brand to the next level. The Digital Factory oversees Lacoste digital flagship, marketplaces, digital wholesale, digital in-store, logistics, customer service and media. We are looking for our next Head of Digital Flagship Europe to oversee Lacoste.com in our 13 European countries. As the Head of Digital Flagship Europe, you will be overseeing the strategy and performance of Lacoste.com, from budget definition to execution. With a team of 8 people, your objective is to deliver a strong performance and offering a premium experience to reflect the brand purpose of Lacoste. You will be reporting to the Global e-commerce Director. Apply here directly
Miro - Head of Growth - As the Head of Organic Growth, you’ll not only be responsible for our SEO efforts at scale but also develop and execute other organic channels and opportunities, contribute to Miro’s mission. You will align your strategies and your team initiatives with the broader company roadmap and goals, and prioritize them accordingly. You will build a world-class team of SEO professionals and Organic Growth hackers who can think outside the box and drive impactful results. You will report directly to the Head of Growth Marketing and will be part of the Growth Marketing senior leadership team. Apply here directly
WorldRemit - SEO Lead - We are looking for a SEO Lead to help drive our global SEO efforts across our key remittance countries including the US, UK, Australia, Canada, Spain, Germany and France. You will help shape, build and improve our SEO department to deliver our future growth aspirations. You will be accountable for directing and executing the SEO strategy with the goal of driving new customer account acquisition and revenue from new and existing remittance corridors. Apply here directly
The Body Shop - Global Head of Search Marketing - Reporting onto the Global Digital Marketing Director, you will be an inspirational coach and as part of the Performance Marketing Team you will lead and develop a team of 13 Paid Search and Organic Search Managers. With responsibility for managing all third-party relationships (search engines, feed providers and global agencies) you will be responsible for migrating paid search activities in house and be accountable for the successful deployment of all search marketing campaigns. You will in turn see opportunities to develop and grow capability in this team and across the globe and will encourage a culture of autonomy to make decisions and to propose and own solutions. Apply here directly

HubSpot - Senior Director of Product Marketing - As Senior Director of Product Marketing you will lead the team responsible for the positioning, messaging, and launch strategy for HubSpot’s individual products (“hubs”) and the entire CRM platform. This includes our  CRM, Marketing Hub, Sales Hub, Service Hub, and CMS Hub across versions from free to enterprise, as well as our ecosystem of integrations, apps and extensions. This is a highly cross-functional role in which you’ll get to work closely with each product general manager, the product team, marketing, sales, services and support globally. You’ll also work with HubSpot’s founders and executive team to bring the product message to main stages like HubSpot’s annual INBOUND event. Apply here directly

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Key moments in time during a website migration….

Chris Green has a simple and effective overview of when migrations can succeed or fail and has some examples of how it looks when a migration goes bad like Lush below. I’ve seen websites with tens of millions of visitors and hundreds of thousands of pages lose just a few % over the first few weeks of a migration… I’ve also seen websites lose up to 95% of traffic almost overnight when a migration plan wasn’t in place… and still several months later never recover the original traffic.

Google Image Recognition API with Python

RankSense shared a great thread on Twitter covering a tutorial from Jess Peck on how to use the Google Vision API to check images used at scale using a simple Python script running on Google Cloud.

Software of Note

New mini SEO tool for content creators

Tevfik launched a nice content creator tool powered by Google sheets that you can trial for free here the Content Brief Generator v0.2 likely has a lot more features coming soon. Below are 3 of the use cases he suggests you should try first…

• Which side keywords should I use in my content?

• What is the keyword density in competitors' titles?

• Which pages should I give internal links to?

  

Social Media

TikTok launches “Wellness Hub”

TikTok is making an effort for be a better social media platform by providing a way to find good inspirational content and dive deeper into wellness topics for better living.

Snapchat almost quadrupled brand’s ROAS

Dior stated that a recent Snapchat campaign for it’s Dior B27 sneakers was one of it’s most successful brand activations to date with 3.8x ROAS. But by promoting this AR experience in Snapchat’s AR Carousel saw returns spike up to 6.2x. The digital showroom with virtual try-ons generated more than 2.3 million views of their AR Lens.

Facebook launches yet another app Hotline

Facebook has rolled out a new app experiment Hotline that is something of a messy marriage between Clubhouse and Instagram live…. The evolution of Clubhouse is that presenters can enable their camera during the event and questions can be sourced via audio or text. There is certainly a number of social media apps experimenting with the audio chat rooms but the question is will this app stick around… will it’s features be blended into other Facebook apps or will it be just shut down when Facebook gets bored of it?

Google Products

Google Search Console now supports regex!

After years of SEOs asking for better ways to filter their query and page data it seems that Google engineers have finally had a chance to implement Regex. The new custom filter allows webmasters to use regular expressions in a single action. Previously you would have to run 3 different filters and try and combine the data knowing there is some duplication of data…. with regex you can now do this cleanly and at scale but read more about it on Google Search Central

Google product review algorithm update

Last week Google Search quality team rolled out a new update starting in English language markets to start to battle the mess that is online reviews. Google has provided a lot more questions for those creating content such as….

• Expert knowledge?

• Provide quantitative measurements

• Discuss the benefits and drawbacks

• What sets a product apart from its competitors

As someone who has left thousands of reviews over the years I would expect most consumer reviews would fail to satisfy this requirement and even professionally produced content would struggle to tick all the boxes.

Google updated Discover documentation

A number of SEOs like Kenichi Suzuki noticed that Google added a new quality guide to their Discover documentation focused on delivering a good user experience. The purpose is to filter out undesirable or confusing content that might include the following: job applications, petitions, forms, code repositories or satirical content without providing context.

Media & Technology

VanMoof integrated with Apple’s Find my App

In what is a bit of a PR success story for the Dutch cycling company you can more accurately track the location of your bike but can now also use the hundreds of millions of Apple devices to locate your VanMoof bike.

Ecommerce

Amazon is the target of SME anti-trust campaign

In the US merchants are forming a national coalition that will campaign for stricter anti-trust laws which focus on Amazon. The proposed laws are similar to what operates in India where an online marketplace can’t sell it’s own products in competition with other sellers. Read more of Ryan Tracy’s post on WSJ

Mercato raises $26M to help smaller grocers compete online

Mercato is raising more money via a Series A funding and is working to become the Shopify for groceries where stores get their own page to reach customers but also instantly gain access to Mercato’s 1 million customers. Their target market is the 40,000 independent grocery stores across the USA who may not always have the resources of launch their own store or be big enough to partner with a delivery service like Instacart. Mercato grew their sales +1300% during 2020 so it certainly shows there is finally appetite in the USA for ecommerce for grocery items.

Conversion Rate Optimisation

Cumulative Layout Shift Debugger (CLS)

Ex-Googler Fili Wiese launched a new free tool to help websites debug CLS issues where you can enter the URL and see a nice analysis of what is going wrong. This a free tool so there might be some delays in starting a test and seeing the output but it’s worth the wait… you can see a sample of the output below for my travel site.

These WordPress plugins are slowing down your site

Jonathan Sulo has a great article on a number of common WordPress plugins that are likely causing website performance issues. But it’s great because he lists what are some more suitable alternative plugins you should consider using instead of the ones he has reviewed that is impacting performance. A caveat that he makes clear is that all plugins will slow down your website but some better built ones the overall performance impact should be negligible for most folks. I checked his list and I’m using several of the plugins that he has flagged as being bad for performance…

Security, Data & Privacy

500 million LinkedIn users scraped data being sold online

Last week Cybernews broke the news that 500 million Linkedin users details were being sold with 2 million records shared as proof. LinkedIn advised “is actually an aggregation of data from a number of websites and companies.” so technically not a data breach as no private member data has yet been uncovered.

Some of the data available in the leak: LinkedIn IDs, full names, email, phone, gender, professional titles and more…. below is a sample of the raw data available.

52% of apps share your personal data with 3rd parties

pCloud did an analysis on which were the most invasion apps for consumers covering personal data captured and shared with third parties. They discovered 42% of your personal data every time you search for a video on YouTube is sent elsewhere while Instagram shares 79% of your data including browsing history followed by Facebook with 57%. The insight also highlighted several apps that are the safest based on sharing no data with 3rd parties which was Signal, Clubhouse, Netflix, Microsoft Teams, Google Classroom, Shazam, Etsy, Skype, Telegram, Boohoo, Amtrak, Zoom, Shop.

Hackers Hacked…

Thousands of Swarmshop customers have had their personal data leaked online according to Group-IB. Swamshop is a mid-level site for buyers and sellers of stolen card data and it’s their second successful breach over the last 12 months.

“The database was posted on a different underground forum and contained 12,344 records of the card shop admins, sellers and buyers including their nicknames, hashed passwords, contact details, history of activity and current balance,” explained Group-IB.

Read more of Phil' Muncaster’s article on Info Security.

Clubhouse user data not protected

In responding to claims 1.3 million profiles were hacked, Clubhouse clarified no that this was actually a feature that allowed anyone with the app or their API to extract all this public profile information. It’s more of common sense for platforms to have anti-scraping protection in place as it may become a privacy issue.

Jobs & Careers

Red Hat - Senior SEO Manager - As a Senior Manager, SEO, you will work closely with Red Hat associates globally as well as with external stakeholders, requiring the ability to think creatively and work collaboratively. You must have experience managing timelines and tight deadlines and have project management skills and the ability to mulit-task and problem solve, plus a can-do attitude and entrepreneurial spirit. Apply here directly

Bed, Bath & Beyond - Director of SEO - This individual will lead and grow the existing internal SEO team, directly oversee multiple external agency and freelance partnerships, manage tool/vendor relations, and have indirect leadership of a dedicated SEO product team. The role will be responsible for overseeing all aspects of the SEO program as it relates to content and technical strategy development and execution. Apply here directly

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How SEO works in 2020?

A simplified view of how Google’s algorithm works was recently presented at a search conference in Sydney by @bernardjhuang of Clearscope a SEO tool based in Austin, Texas. It’s obviously an external view of how Google works but it’s fairly easy to digest and you will never get it exactly right.

Software of note

Neeva the Google alternative built by ex-Googlers

Jon Henshaw took a bit of a deep dive into Neeva and how it is trying to be the better search engine than Google. While I support the idea of more market share being split out from Google’s current 95% stranglehold on search I do worry these search engines fragment the competition. Neeva seeks to differentiate itself from competitors moneisation strategies by offering a subscription fee and show no ads likely to be under US$10/month and the price will apparently decrease as more users onboard… sure it will just like Netflix is getting cheaper each year… yes you need to do onboarding to understand how it works… But most of us will just have to wait until late Quarter 2 during 2021 when it should launch beyond alpha.

Social Media

Catfishing via FaceApp

Over on Vice Koh Ewe has written up a great summary of the news that a popular female Japanese biker is actually a 50 year old man using FaceApp. Before the story was confirmed on national TV his twitter followers had started to raise some questions based on the photos shared… The question is how are influencers willing to go to win over an audience?

Can you sell brands a fake influencer profile propped up with fake fans?

SBS journalist Calliste Weitenberg created an alter-ego @thatcostalgirl in an effort to start to explore the influencer marketing industry. Mumbrella covered the topic in a rather brutal post that seemed to support The Right Fight which was the brand & talent marketplace that Calliste’s fake influencer profile managed to get listed on. The episode briefly touched on the influencer marketing industry and how easy it can be to fake it until you make it with brands more than willing to participate and fund and often ask influencers not to disclose it was sponsored content. You can watch the series “Like, Subscribe, Follow” on SBS on Demand but might need a VPN outside of Australia to view it.

Facebook offers censorship of comments

Facebook allows brands, celebrities, politicians and news outlets to control or prevent commenting on their posts. The feature started rolling out on Wednesday 31st March but may take upto 2 weeks to be rolled out to every page. The ability to censor comments does deal with a lot of the trolling, harassment and abuse community and social media managers have to review, respond and remove. But it also means pages with a large audience can turn into a broadcast channel that gives viewers no ability to object or support the post via comments. The change will save brands globally huge amounts of money that will no longer need comment moderation.

What do you need for the best headlines on social media?

BuzzSumo reviewed 100 million articles based on their average Facebook & Twitter engagement and what they found might surprise you. If you picked the top 5 or top 10 got the best engagement levels you would be right! Read more into what goes into a successful headline on BuzzSumo

Facebook to give users back some control of their newsfeeds…

In what is mostly a PR campaign by Facebook to try and show it’s trying to make the platform more about you again. Nick Clegg their PR spinmaster shared a post outlining how Facebook is becoming a better corporate citizen by rolling out new products called that further improves the previous See First control…. It also ends with a spin on how Facebook cannot just put more choices into people’s hands and how they are democratising free speech but he forgets about how Facebook been complicit in attacks on minorities in Myanmar or getting Trump elected.

Google Products

Baking with Google Cloud AI

It’s no Great British Bake-off but the question is what would Prue think and even if the recipe won a round how could it receive a Paul Hollywood handshake? But no matter Mars Wrigley has been experimenting with Google Cloud for new inspiration based on rapidly changing consumer trends? Would you eat a dessert created by AI?

Media

Why we should be data conscious not data driven!

Michael Hoole has an interesting perspective on how to ensure you are not drowning in data in your organisation. This is key in the media area that is generating massive amounts of data they don’t know what to do with yet. The key factor is that values matter if you are to get it right long term! Read it in full here

New display format and curated placement categories coming to Twitter

Twitter has been working on improving their advertising products and with Twitter Amplify and their pre-roll video ads they are working to improve the ROI for advertisers. They have also worked to make content pairing opportunities more dynamic such as “light-hearted content” for Amplify Pre-roll ads. These aren’t yet available in all markets but you can expect to see them covering more markets and new interesting curated categories appearing soon.

Ecommerce

Google tries and fails to create best for everything

Google Shopping team have been ramping up their content to drive more content around the product discovery stages of the consumer journey and when I read about it I assumed it was similar to what Amazon has done with Amazon Posts. But sadly even though Google has now rolled out even more with the “best things for everything” content, this product fails to provide even close to what Amazon offers consumers. It’s nothing more than a lost of what I have to assume are the top sellers on Google but it doesn’t offer any context or filtering. It seems to be a way to try and keep users within the Google ecosystem longer and not start their product discovery journey at Amazon but it fails hard.

Conversion Rate Optimisation

Why are your Core Web Vital scores higher at times?

Google engineer Phil Walton covered in a useful guide how you can collect additional debug information with your analytics to better identify and fix the issues. This guide is a bit more advanced but working with your developers you should be able to find some long hanging fruit to improve your CWV scores before May 2021.

Images your easiest page speed improvement!

Kristine Schachinger has published a fairly straight forward and actionable post on how you can focus on images and it will likely have the biggest impact to your website load times of 20-40%. Take some time to read it in full over on SEL

Security, Data & Privacy

IoT giant Ubiquiti all but confirms privacy breach

Mostly Ubiquiti has been used by DIY folks and developers who want to build their own systems without having to spend a large amount of money. Their IoT devices include WiFi routers, video recorders and security cameras and more… But things got weird over the last few moths when customers local networks connected to Ubiquiti’s cloud hosting. To make matters worse Ubiquiti couldn’t inform customers who was accessing their databases as they failed to log access requests. You can read more over on Brian’s Kerbs on Security blog.

iOS App store now rejecting apps fingerprinting

Nadir Garouche has spotted another interesting trend that apps using Adjust have been rejected because they are violating 5.1.2 which focuses on “Date use and sharing” which was done by various methods such as BatteryLevel has now been removed from Adjust.

(iii) Apps should not attempt to surreptitiously build a user profile based on collected data and may not attempt, facilitate, or encourage others to identify anonymous users or reconstruct user profiles based on data collected from Apple-provided APIs or any data that you say has been collected in an “anonymized,” “aggregated,” or otherwise non-identifiable way.

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Hreflang or Geotargeting?

John Mueller has made another attempt to clarify how SEOs should be using Hreflang or Geotargeting. Glenn Gabe summarised the discussion points:

• Geotargeting if you have content for multiple countries

• Hreflang if you have content in different languages

• Hreflang doesn’t impact rankings but geotargeting is a ranking factor

Software of note

Automatically submit URLs from WordPress to search engines

Fabrice Canel has submitted a request to integrate into the core functionality of WordPress to allow automatic push of new and updated URLs directly to search engines. Bing already has a URL submission API and in July 2020 released a WordPress plugin to simplify this process. Read more details of Fabrice’s proposal here

Social Media

Limitless voice chats in Telegram

Back in December 2020 Telegram introduced Voice Chats but now admins of channels & public groups can host voice chats for millions of listeners. Also they allowed admins to record these audio talks and publish for followers to consume the content later. There are also speaker and listener links similar to video conferencing software that way important guests can join right away and don’t need to remember to unmute. You can read more about some of the new Telegram features here.

Using Pinterest marketing to reach millions

Tad Chef has a great guide on how he has been using Pinterest since 2012 and now has an audience of over 2 million viewers per month. He highlighted some interesting points such as core group of followers is key but follower count if negligible, he has several other great points you should read here.

Slack invented email

David Peirce over on Protocol covered the news that Slack was going to allow any Slack user to direct message anyone else on Slack. The new feature Connect DMs works similar to old school messaging apps where an invite is sent via your work email address. One thing that was discussed extensively on social media around the news was how ignorant Slack was on how the new feature could be used to send abusive or harassing messages as the user had the ability to customise the invitation. The other concern is that Slack will become the spammy invitation dumpster fire that Linkedin has become.

Spotify & Linkedin are launching audio features

Spotify have managed to create radio and Linkedin are working on Live Audio Rooms to try and steal some thunder from ClubHouse. Alessandro found some code in the app and the screenshot below is not Linkedin’s UI and the image shown is Alessandro’s profile picture and just back fills with a generic John Smith name.

Emoji’s reactions are coming to Twitter

Twitter have been surveying their userbase on how they might prefer to respond using different sets of reaction emojis. It was only a matter of time before they copied something Facebook did…

Google Product

Google Maps to get over 100 AI powered improvements

The Google maps team has been busy ramping up the features powered by Google’s impressive AI technologies. One of the most useful features is the ability to navigate indoors with visual AR cues based on tens of billions of street view images in their database. I’m sure the Google Ads team is already exploring how they can monetise this such as “directions sponsored by X” You can learn about this and several of the other features on air quality, eco-friendly transport options and more here

YouTube tests product detection in video to allow buying

In the USA YouTube is testing a new feature where they will display a list of products they detect in some videos but also related products. The feature will appear in between recommended videos to any viewers scrolling below the video player.

Media

Procter & Gamble putting more money into Black creators and media

P&G is putting more resources into a expanded content & talent platform for Black creators. This is also part of their effort to diversify media and production dollars but have also partnered with Oprah to ensure they are honouring and respecting the black community in new ad campaigns. Read more on AdAge

OMG strikes deal to marry “brand love” into targeting

BERA measures brand equity and purpose scores for around 4,000 brands and now OMG agencies Hearts & Science, OMD and PHD gain access to this data from BERA. Additionally, Omni users will also have access to BERA’s Data Portal, a proprietary data stream that will be used to evaluate the impact of brand on in-store and offline sales through evaluation of KPIs that can be used to measure price elasticity. This agreement marks the first time that media agencies has been granted access to the BERA platform. Source BusinessWire

NewsGuard helps ad buyers choose sites that reflect company values

The new NewsGuard service, Responsible Advertising for News Segments (RANS), offers ad buyers both exclusion & inclusion capabilities. RANS will include the industry’s first inclusion list giving advertisers the option to include high-quality news and information news sites targeting the communities harmed by over-use of keyword blocklisting, including hundreds of websites serving Black, Asian, Hispanic, and LGBTQ+ communities. Read more about it on NewsGuard

Ecommerce

Google wants to be the Anti-Amazon

In July 2020 Google announced a partnership with Shopify in a move to try and slow the Amazon beast. Google has been trying to win over independent sellers who are quickly adapting to make full use of platforms like Shopify instead of relying on Amazon. Google’s share of direct ecom is estimated at $1 billion vs $295 billion passing through Amazon’s third-party marketplace. The silver lining for Google is Shopify powered websites captured around 9% of US online sales behind Amazon’s 37% so as Google tries to open up it’s ecosystem to more partners such as Wix last week maybe they can slow the growth of Amazon?

Albertsons looks to reinvent grocery shopping with Google

Vivek Sankaran the CEO of Albertsons sees 20% of sales coming from e-com which I feel is thinking too small considering the evolution of retail in Asia & Europe due to Coronvirus changing consumer behaviours faster. Another project over the last 12 months has been building a range of omnichannel solutions with Google to make more convenient and interactive shopping experiences for their customers. The partnership is working towards building the world’s most predictive grocer engine including integration of Google Search & Maps to make it easier for shoppers to find products and easier to pay with Google Pay. Albertsons has been trying a number of tactics such as a pilot using remote controlled delivery carts in Northern California provided by Tortoise as they work to disrupt and bring innovation faster to their growing e-com business. Following Amazon’s lead they are testing pickup lockers an a automated pickup kiosk at one of their Jewel-Osco stores.

Conversion Rate Optimisation

Google Core Web Vitals FAQs updated

Google has rolled out a March 2021 update to their original FAQ guide which have been organised into 3 sections:

• Metrics & Tooling

• Page Experience & Search

• AMP

They have collected a lot of the feedback and questions and provided some more specific guidance for those looking to improve their CWV leading up to the May 2021 update. Read the FAQ here

Security, Data & Privacy

Zimperium discovered a new Android spyware designed to look like system update and when the device is rooted apps like WhatsApp are vulnerable but should not be possible on more recent versions of Android.

20TB of data of more than 16 billion records leaked

WizCase found that online trading platform FBS has left an unsecured ElasticSearch server containing millions of confidential records (names, unencrypted passwords, email, passport numbers, IDs, credit card and financial transactions, loyalty data, login history)

Antivirus directly from Cloudflare

Cloudflare have been busy ramping up their Gateway product from a DNS filtering solution to a fully secure web capable of protecting users. The platform can also stop malware distribution and offers endpoint protection to prevent malicious files from being downloaded onto your employees devices. Learn more here

Jobs & Careers

Diageo - Amsterdam - Luxury Digital Commerce Manager

• Online channels are driving a greater percentage of luxury digital and physical sales than ever before, with 80% of luxury sales being influenced by online engagement. By 2023 14% of total revenue in luxury goods will be generated through online sales.

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Omnicom Media Group - London - Global Head of Paid Social

• Your aim is to ensure excellence of our paid social product across our global offices and drive additional revenues both in local markets and also via our International offices.

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