In January 2018 there were an estimated 1 billion voice searches. Furthermore, unlike other digital developments such as Google and Snapchat glasses, voice search won’t be a flash in the pan trend. Two-thirds (65%) of Amazon Echo or Google Home owners say they can’t imagine going back to the days before they had a smart speaker.

Today, voice search is an organic search environment, however, it is inevitable that voice search will become a paid-for advertising channel, based on a cost-per-click (CPC) model and it will significantly impact the search advertising industry.

Double trouble

Search marketing boils down to two things: input (the search query) and output (the search results). Voice search changes the input from written to spoken, which changes how companies collect, process, and respond to data. It also changes the output options.

Visual results

One mistake marketers often make is to think of voice search as ‘voice in – voice out’. While this is an obvious route, it’s not the only option.

More detailed information is better presented visually and finding the right information often requires multiple searches. When search platforms receive a voice search query there is an opportunity to refine the data processing methodology in a way that is more natural and allows the platform to collate multiple data points in order to answer your query.

Let’s say I have a smart speaker at home and I want to find a holiday. I can say to the speaker “find holidays in Greece next month”. The speaker can ask me more detailed questions about my requirements in order to gather more data and present me with better results. For example “how long do you want to go for”? “Do you want an all inclusive holiday?” “Do you have a budget in mind?” All of these questions are things that I would have naturally thought of myself if I was searching physically, but the beauty of voice search is that you can get to the granular details very quickly with the aid of built-in machine learning and artificial intelligence.

The holiday options can then be presented to me (and others) as text and links in an email. Voice input – visual output.

For advertisers, this presents an opportunity to refine bids as the query is refined, making their overall marketing more efficient. For example, the first query for ‘holidays in Greece’ is a generic term that will attract many brands, refining the query to ‘all inclusive holidays’ allows brands that do not offer all inclusive holidays to drop out of the competition, thus saving cost.

Audio results

Over the last decade, the number of paid-for ads appearing on search results pages has grown to the point that it’s not uncommon for above the fold real estate, on mobile and desktop devices, to be entirely advertising. This model will not work for voice search because the human brain can’t retain the information from multiple ads when that information is presented in audio format. The main role of voice search is to return the single most relevant answer, meaning that competition for airtime will be fierce, and expensive to win.

For brands with deep pockets (think Procter & Gamble, Moneysupermarket, Hotels.com etc.) this won’t be a problem. Smaller brands will struggle to enter the market and will struggle to justify the investment.

A big opportunity for smaller companies will be local queries in the retail and hospitality sectors because proximity matters. However, large companies will be a threat here too because an independent restaurant will have to compete with household names.

Another consideration is trust. Today, voice search users are not presented with adverts, only organic results and platforms will need to carefully manage the introduction of ads so as not to dilute consumers’ trust in the authenticity of the information presented to them.

Search publishers will have to think carefully about how they monetise voice search because as the number of typed queries declines, so could their revenues. Making up that lost revenue will be a challenge because there are fewer ads in voice search. Although the CPCs may well be higher than traditional CPCs, if the return on investment (ROI) isn’t there for brands, investment will wane and efforts will be focussed on organic voice search optimisation.

Search marketers will have to re-engineer the way they think about paid search as the world moves into a voice-dominated era. The priorities should be: think carefully about the queries in which you invest budget in; carefully monitor ROI trends, and make sure that your voice search strategy is integrated with other channels so as to offer a consistent user experience and maintain trust and engagement across all channels.

Voice search presents a plethora of opportunities for marketers and success will come to those who take a multi-device, multi-input/output approach. Brands and search platforms are going to have access to much more data than they do today and it is vital to adjust the way this data is analysed and turned into actions.

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Undeniably, voice search and chatbots are changing the way consumers interact with brands. The same technology is also transforming internal business communications and operations. Over 29% of organisations have either implemented one or more artificial intelligence (AI) powered chatbots or voice assistants for work-related tasks, or plan to do so in the year ahead.

Streamlining work

Media agencies are prime candidates that benefit from voice search and chatbot technology because much of the day-to-day work performed is laborious, repetitive and low value, such as reporting and relaying information to clients.

Today, effective marketing means reacting quickly to changes in performance to ensure that budget is being spent in the most profitable areas on a minute-by-minute basis. Unfortunately, all too often, reports are still created manually from multiple data sources and optimisation is still done manually by logging into various platforms.

Voice search and/or chatbot functionality within marketing technology speeds up the process of filtering through data to identify changes and trends. AI embedded in chatbots can enhance marketers’ queries and surface additional insights and optimisation suggestions within the technology platform.

Chatbots that are integrated with marketing platforms via an application programming interface (API) can be used to alert marketers to changes in performance, eliminating the need for continual performance monitoring. Because of the API integration, marketers can conduct optimisation activities via the chatbot. Add a voice component and action can be taken within seconds, resulting in a significantly more efficient marketing campaign optimisation.

Enhancing communication

Collaboration is at the heart of how media agencies operate, both internally and with clients because working as a team brings more ideas to the table and results in more creativity and better campaigns. One of the problems with being collaborative is that the more people involved with a project, the more lines of communication are required.

Moving away from email to technologies that centralise communication opens up an opportunity to empower teams to access information via a single line of communication with the technology itself. Voice search and chatbots enhance this further by offering assistance via AI. For example, communication can be centralised through Slack but an AI chatbot can act as an interface between clients and internal agency staff across all platforms, based on client preference e.g. email, Slack or Whatsapp.

This allows agencies to maintain teams with multiple experts, and the benefits this brings to clients, but by eliminating much of the time that is spent trying to convey and relay information, it creates time for those people to be strategic and creative and deliver high-value insight and creativity to the client.

Multimedia, cross-device

Voice search and chatbots are often thought of as separate things but the two can be intrinsically linked. When that link is established, the person and the technology are able to work together seamlessly no matter what time of day or location because the input device or medium does not have to match the output device or medium.

You could be about to leave the office to catch the train home and suddenly you have an idea that may explain changes in performance in one of your campaigns. Traditionally, you’d either stay late, take your laptop home and work on it later that evening, email yourself a reminder to do it tomorrow morning, or put a reminder in your calendar.

With voice search and chatbots, you can simply ask the technology to run the report you need and send it to your mobile device as an audio file so you can download it and listen to the results. If the chatbot is installed on your mobile device, you can then instruct it to pause the necessary campaigns and email the client to let them know.

Voice search and chatbots have the power to transform the way marketing professionals work but in order to do so, there will need to be a cultural shift in the way media agencies approach work. The need for sprawling meetings and lengthy conference calls will be reduced, which will free up time for more strategic, valuable work to be carried out. It’s a mainstay of day-to-day agency life and one that many believe provides value.

The post Combining Voice Search and Chatbots for Action-Orientated Marketing appeared first on PerformanceIN.

In the early 1990s, the first websites contained very basic information and functionality. As the number of consumers using the internet grew, so did the number of websites that populated the web. The growing number of websites gave rise to the need to create a searchable catalogue for consumers to find the information they sought, so along came the search engine and the need for search engine optimisation (SEO).

The founding principle of Google’s search engine algorithm was PageRank. The underlying assumption was that more important websites are likely to receive more links from other websites.

Myth 1 – Link building is dead

Recent changes to Google’s algorithm coupled with a misleading statement by Google’s webmaster trend analyst John Mueller that said link building can harm SEO efforts have led to many SEO professionals abandoning link building. However, link building isn’t dead, it’s bigger than ever.

The truth is, Google still values links, just not poor quality links, or links that are not clearly architected. This means that SEO’s need to think of link building as an outcome of other activities, such as PR and content marketing, not as a discrete tactic.

The key to good link building is to think about what you’re trying to achieve and the factors that the algorithm looks at. Broadly speaking, these are citations, website structure, and context.

Then when thinking about link building, consider how each element of the algorithm can help you achieve your goal. For example, for a new brand driving traffic to the website is key, previously, one of the best ways to achieve this would be to buy links. Today, maximising the volume of citations, (almost) regardless of whether you get a link is a better tactic to improve visibility in the search results.

Myth 2 – Keywords rule

Many websites have been built around the belief that you need to have a dedicated page for each keyword you want to rank for and that this page should be optimised for that keyword and that keyword only.

Keyword optimisation is one of the most important SEO tactics but it will only get you so far. In order to out-rank the competition, brands need to combine a number of creative strategies.

Today, search algorithms incorporate contextual and semantic understanding when evaluating web pages, so brands need to think of keywords in categories, not as single entities and build multiple pages that focus on the keywords within each category.

Another thing that impacts how the search engines think of your website semantically is the content you write that is featured elsewhere, e.g. PR, making it important to share your SEO keyword category strategy with all those involved in online content creation.

voice search is the biggest evolution to search in recent years and has made a huge impact on SEO. Voice searches are longer than web searches, hence why keyword categories become even more important as it would be impossible to build pages for every potential voice search. One of the best ways to get ahead in the voice search race is to gather data from other voice interactions, e.g. call centres and physical stores.

Myth 3 – Technical SEO is boring

The stereotypical SEO specialist is often depicted as a somewhat geeky, awkward person, often confined to a dark corner of the office, having little to do with other teams, all of which know very little about what the SEO person does other than that it involves computers and coding.

People who know a little bit about SEO think that SEO people update websites when Google changes the algorithm. However, there is so much more to technical SEO, and there are new developments outside of Google updates all the time.

As website architecture becomes more complex and content management systems evolve, SEO’s are developing many new ways to categorise content to improve SEO performance. Two examples would be hreflang tags and schema.org.

Hreflang tagging helps search engines understand the relationship between translated pages on international websites – how a piece of content in one language is matched to the same content in another language. Schema.org was founded by Google, Microsoft, Yahoo, and Yandex, however, Schema.org vocabularies are developed by an open community process. A shared vocabulary makes it easier for webmasters and developers to decide on what markup to use in an effort to better help search engines around the world understand the structure and relation of your content.

Optimising for the new searches in say app stores, LinkedIn or Facebook offers new avenues to explore. Google’s move away from its top ten search results page structure towards services like shopping, travel, and voice search means that SEO professionals will become holistic marketers and data curators while still operating in a technical way to ensure that these tactics are received positively by the algorithms.

The post Three SEO Myths You Need to Forget About appeared first on PerformanceIN.

In the UK, 44% of online traffic is now suspicious, attributed to so-called bot traffic. And this year alone, digital advertisers are predicted to waste £6 billion on this non-human traffic. On the face of it, these look to be pretty depressing statistics for those of us working in digital advertising. But is this really the case or is this just scaremongering?

Ok, so Solve Media, the company that produced the research behind these stats, has a vested interest in highlighting how bad things are as far as bot traffic is concerned. Its main product, Captcha, helps protect sites against non-human traffic. But it does bring an important issue to the fore – that bot traffic is out there and it’s a problem that is not going away.

Bot traffic is used to ‘visit’ sites, artificially inflate page-views and therefore enlarge the audience size of a particular website or network of sites. Larger audience figures means the publisher can sell more advertising inventory, but it can even go further than this. The Bots may “click” on the ads and even go on to complete on-site actions to inflate the perceived quality of the traffic. Click through rates and on-site conversions are typical proxies for campaign success and if a bot can deliver these it can hide the true value of the traffic.

Bots Inflate Costs

If left unaddressed bot traffic could have serious, long-lasting implications. It could undermine publishers, with advertisers losing trust in the inventory they are selling. Likewise, the wasted spend inflates performance costs. This in itself limits the amount of spend advertisers are willing to invest into display as a channel, minimising the return both the publisher and the advertiser can make from online display.

But here’s the important point – there are procedures you can put in place to protect your digital advertising budget and make sure that the money you are investing is not being gobbled up by bots. Although the risk exists, it is not something that should put you off looking to display as an extremely valuable and impactful marketing channel. Be aware of the risk and work with your partners to analyse its impact on your campaigns.

It is worth knowing that the problem differs from site to site – well known publishers typically have very low bot traffic as a percentage of their audience. When buying advertising, publishers will often be classed based on content quality and audience size. You can therefore buy advertising based on site Tiers, where Tier 1 and 2 sites have low bot risk. It may be more expensive, but the money you are investing is much less likely to be wasted on bots.

From there, the best approach to minimise risk is to use a mix of automated and manual checks to ensure you are buying actual eyeballs rather than automated impressions.

Tools can Help

There are tools available that have in-built protection systems that monitor for over 300 bots known to the IAB, which is a good starting point. The tools access this information through an ever-growing list that is paid for on a subscription basis.

Bot traffic also has certain characteristics that you can keep an eye out for, such as large amounts of impressions or clicks in a short space of time. If anything is suspicious you can remove the sites and can raise it directly with the publishers or ad exchanges. Again there are programmes that monitor for this kind of activity.

But you can’t leave it all to automated tools. It is absolutely worth having dedicated people monitoring performance day to day, while also working closely with ad exchange partners to weed out the bots.  

Unfortunately, you can’t remove all risk, but when you buy media on a performance basis that is kept under close scrutiny, underperforming areas should be quickly weeded out, so wasted budget should not be an issue. Ultimately, whether that under-performance is driven by poor targeting, poor creative or even non-human traffic a vigilant approach to media buying should ensure the impact is minimal.

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