That famous quote applies to the many marketers who default to last-click attribution, even with its well-documented failure to take the entire customer journey into consideration.

During ClickZ’s latest Masterclass on paid search optimization, in association with Fospha and Kenshoo, we surveyed 800 marketers on their greatest challenges. 36% cited maximizing return on their advertising spend, while an additional 24% consider “accurately attributing value to each marketing channel” to be their biggest struggle.

From this, it’s clear that marketers want to go beyond last-click and adopt a more effective attribution model. But faced with more channels, more data and more opportunities to experiment than ever before, they don’t always know how to go about implementing one.

Here are four takeaways from the webinar:

1. Understanding the problem

The fact that marketers struggle with measurement isn’t surprising, given how many different channels and devices go into the path to purchase. “Increasingly, expensive marketing decisions are based on more limited windows into the customer journey,” says Sam Carter, Sales and Marketing Director at multi-touch attribution specialist Fospha.

True marketing effectiveness requires integrating as much consumer data as possible to create a single user profile. A multi-touch attribution model assigns value to every touchpoint, eliminating the notion that the last thing someone clicked on is the catalyst for conversion. This often results in marketers having inaccurate perceptions of their best-performing keywords.

2. Starting small

To implement full-scale optimization overnight is an impossible task. Carter recommends starting with a few key foundational data sets, such as paid search cost data and revenue data from your Customer Relationship Management (CRM) platform.

“When the cost is tied to a visit or conversion, you’re able to shine a light on costly keywords that aren’t playing any role in conversions,” says Carter, adding that this method saved Procter & Gamble $140 million in a single quarter (without any reduction in growth rate).

3. Combining complementary platforms

Once you’re comfortable with your understanding of the role keywords play in each step of the customer journey, it’s helpful to take your data and “let it breathe” by utilizing another tool, such as a bid management platform that’s more focused on optimizing paid search campaigns.

Using technologies in tandem can help improve accuracy, something of significant importance to 64.5% of our webinar attendees.

“Kenshoo can take any attributed data source and create a bid policy that uses a custom calculation,” explains David Bowen, the platform’s director of client success. “Similar to the Stock Market, we use a system of machine learning to look at how all the keywords are working together and make predictions based on the outcome of a bid change.”

4. Dotting the I’s and crossing the T’s

According to Darral Wilson, Director of Solutions at Kenshoo, one of the most crucial elements of dynamic attribution is attention to detail. Is everything tagged? Do you unknowingly have duplicate keywords that are competing?

“If there are gaps in the data or if your search campaign isn’t structured properly, you won’t get as much from it as you possibly could,” he says.

Wrapping up

Your data is only as valuable as what you do with it. The last click may have been an instrumental element of a conversion—but not necessarily, and that common attribution model doesn’t paint a clear enough picture.

Understand why measurement is an issue and tackle it piecemeal. Eventually using powerful platforms together will then allow you to obtain the data and operationalize it, making the most of your keywords, improving your attribution and making your marketing more effective.

Content produced in partnership with Fospha and Kenshoo. Views expressed in this article do not necessarily reflect the opinions of Search Engine Watch.

And of course, SEO is what gets you there, taking into consideration more than 200 ranking signals, such as the quality of your content, backlinks, mobile optimization, and keywords.

While these traditional SEO tactics have dominated strategies since the formation of Google, customer reviews are another ranking signal hot on their heels, now making up 7% of Moz’s localized organic ranking factors. Reviews provide search marketers with a huge opportunity to go above and beyond. But how do they enhance SEO?

You could say that customer reviews piggyback on one of the most important ranking factors: the ‘freshness’ of your website content.

By providing your business with a continuous supply of fresh, unique user-generated content (UGC), webcrawlers know your site is active, driving your website listing higher, achieving Google organic stars, and increasing website conversions.

Content produced in association with Feefo.

Obtaining organic stars

But just having reviews isn’t enough. Ideally, your business should show Google organic stars, the recognizable rich snippets that help your website stand out in search listings. These stars have been proven to increase click-through rate (CTR) by up to 30%, according to Search Engine Land.

In order to achieve that seal of Google approval when hosting third-party reviews on your website, it must be marked-up appropriately with the correct schema: code that helps algorithms return more informative results about websites. There are three key types, focused on homepages, specific products and a business’ individual locations.

Coupled with the right schema, your reviews could also appear in Google’s Knowledge Panel the box that appears on the right of search results with relevant business information.

So even if you have reviews, you still won’t show those stars without the correct schema markup on your website.

Fighting fake reviews

Reviews may add credibility, but what if they’re fake? It’s not uncommon to see fraudulent review-writing services advertised, despite crackdowns (and lawsuits) against prolific offenders.

Consumers are practical; they know that nothing is truly perfect and are skeptical of products and services with uniformly positive feedback. Often believing five-star reviews may be too good to be true, people are more likely to be influenced by ratings between 4.2 and 4.5 out of 5, according to GetApp.

Invitation-only platforms negate the threat of fake reviews by only soliciting them from genuine customers who have purchased products from their clients, rather than leaving it open for anyone to leave a review. When people know that your reviews have all been left by genuine customers, the power of that relationship will help you build confidence and sales.

Reviews and revenue

Most people factor online reviews into their buying process. According to Fan and Fuel research from December 2016, 92% of consumers hesitate to make a purchase if a product doesn’t have any reviews. Similarly, BrightLocal found that 88% of consumers trust online reviews just as much as recommendations from people they know.

Word of mouth certainly holds weight, but seeing online reviews generally comes across as more varied and impartial, granting them equal value. Any way you look at it, people trust people.

That trust increases confidence, which often comes with more traffic and more more sales. Since HomeFuels Direct, an oil and gas company based in Northern England, started displaying organic stars on their website, sales have increased by 69% year-over-year.

And it’s not just positive reviews that help. Reviews are obviously powerful for SEO, but something many marketers don’t realize is that negative reviews can be just as beneficial in contributing to consumer trust.

Volume and variety counts for a lot. Displaying positive and negative reviews shows you have nothing to hide. The positive reviews speak for themselves, while those that are negative provide a great opportunity to show off your customer service skills.

Giving consumers a transparent view of the way you handle negative feedback can certainly endear your business to them. In a world where everything is getting more automated by the day, that personal touch really adds to your overall value.

To sum up

Consumers today have literally all the choice in the world, which makes the need for transparency to help your business stand out against competitors that much more important.

Collected and displayed correctly, and coupled with the correct schema, your business can use reviews as a fundamental SEO tactic and a means to show Google organic stars. Most importantly, reviews can be influential in building trust with your customers, reassuring them that they can buy through you, with confidence.

To further understand how verified feedback will help you obtain organic stars, improve CTR and increase sales, read Feefo’s report: Improve search engine performance with ratings and reviews.

Content produced in collaboration with Feefo. Views expressed in this article do not necessarily reflect the opinions of Search Engine Watch.

With that in mind, Facebook made four announcements at Cannes this week:

1. Creative Hub

With a simple interface and a guide to Facebook and Instagram ad formats, Creative Hub is designed to make it easy for users to sample different tools and features, and work together and experiment.

For instance, there’s a collaborative area for marketers to preview, evaluate and showcase their creative. There are also options to create and preview mocks on mobile, as well as create preview URLs to share with stakeholders.

Built with the guidance of several agencies such as Ogilvy & Mather, McCann and Droga5, Creative Hub is currently testing and should be available to Facebook advertisers in the next few months.

2. Upgrading Canvas

We’re sensing a pattern with Facebook, which initially announced its Canvas ads, immersive mobile experiences that load 10 times faster than typical mobile sites, in Cannes last year.

The product was launched globally in February and since then, people in more than 180 countries have spent about 52.5 million minutes – otherwise known as a century – viewing Canvas.

New updates will make it easier for marketers to design, create, share and learn from these ads. Canvas will have a new feed unit designed to increase engagement, while marketers will have more detailed metrics, such as clicks-per-component and dwell time (the average is about 31 seconds).

The option to create Canvases for organic page posts has already rolled out.

3. Adding Audience Insights API

Audience Insights API will give advertisers better insights into the audience they’re serving, using aggregated and anonymous demographics, psychographics, topic data and reports from Facebook IQ. Currently in beta, the feature is testing with brands like Mondelez and Anheuser-Busch InBev, and will be widely available early next year.

Mondelez used Audience Insights for Cadbury’s “Taste Like Joy Feels” campaign, analyzing people’s feelings toward chocolate at various times throughout the day. Brand recall was improved by 40 percent, according to Cadbury.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SNXcHNanCVw

 4. Improving slideshow ads

Another popular Facebook ad format is the slideshow, which allows businesses to create videos from static images. However, they load significantly faster than traditional videos, on account of using five times less data.

New features include the ability to create slideshow ads from mobile devices, audio and text overlay, and integration with Facebook’s Pages and Shutterstock photo libraries.

That focus on video isn’t to say photos aren’t doing well on Facebook. Instagram announced yesterday that its user base has doubled over the past two years.

The platform now has more than 500 million monthly active users around the world, 300 million of whom use the app on a daily basis.

This is an abbreviated post, as originally featured on our sister site ClickZ.

Personalization is an important skill for any marketer to master, but it’s also quite a difficult one. There are just so many different ways it can go wrong.

If your ads don’t have any personalized components, people perceive them as not being relevant enough, making them that much more likely to use an ad blocker (provided they’ve heard of ad blockers).

But on the flip side, it is possible to go overboard with personalization. If people perceive your brand to be like Big Brother, they’ll be just as turned off.

As with many things, the answer is somewhere in the middle. If you’re looking to personalize your ads, the most important thing to remember is that the root of that word is “person.”

The pitfalls of getting too computerized

Jan Jensen, chief marketing officer (CMO) of Cxense, points out that as marketing gets more complicated, the sophistication of automation technology makes it easier for advertisers to get away from the person.

“In this day and age, where we have more moving pieces, it’s very complex. Being able to know the challenges, pain points, grievances and profiles of your audience is 20 times more important than it was five years ago,” says Jensen. “Depending on what people do, the data we have, their interest and intent around the content they consume and the profile we have on them, we can predict what they want next.”

As a result, things can get a bit too automated. Marketers often create a journey for customers, automate it, and move onto the next thing. But in the process, they’re assuming too much. There should be a balance.

For instance, artificial intelligence (AI) lacks the human emotions to realize it’s doing something insensitive. A robot would serve someone tons of ads for diet products, whereas a person could see how doing that constantly could hurt the customer’s feelings.

Jensen believes this extends to all the brands who have been using chatbots as customer service tools.

“I think chatbots have their place somewhere extremely straightforward, but human beings aren’t very straightforward,” says Jensen. “I think they need to be much more aware of who you are; it needs to know more than that I’m a male and my name is Jan.”

… as well as too creepy

On the flip side, tech companies like Amazon and Facebook know far more about us than our names and gender. They may even know us better than some of our loved ones; does your mom know what you Google? (Ew, she does? Gross.)

But you have to be careful about showing your cards. If you let people know just how much you know about them, more than being simply freaked out, they can hurt your ROI. Richard Sharp, chief technology officer at Yieldify, points to a concept called psychological reactance that will be familiar to anyone who’s raised – or been – a teenager.

“If people feel their behavioral freedom is being restricted or manipulated, they will explicitly react against that in order to restore their freedom,” explains Sharp. “A lot of research shows that when people perceive creepiness online, it results in this feeling of, ‘You’re trying to manipulate me and force me to take this cause of action,’ which causes people to react against the brand, which decreases purchase intent by 5 percent.”

The way around that, according to Sharp, is to be very upfront about the value proposition. If an email from Bloomingdale’s is highly personalized, people may be a bit taken aback. But if the email has information about a sale at the nearest Bloomingdale’s location, they may perceive it differently.

“If you trigger a really well-designed campaign at the point when someone is about to leave the site or stop browsing, it catches people’s eyes and draws them back to the site,” adds Sharp. “It converts really well without interrupting the customer journey or annoying people.”

In order to keep the person and personalization, Sharp recommends user-centric research.

“A lot of marketers like looking at numbers and click-through rates and conversions and cost-per-acquisitions, which is a view that takes the human out,” he says. “Get some qualitative data to back up this quantitative data so the human side doesn’t get lost behind a wall of numbers.”

Justin Bieber has 22 million YouTube subscribers. Rihanna has 21 million. Katy Perry and Eminem, 18 million apiece. These four musicians are among the most famous people on the planet, and none of them has even half the following of Felix Kjellberg.

You know, PewDiePie. The Swedish video gamer who made $12 million last year, as the most-followed person on YouTube. Though PewDiePie largely stays away from marketing (though he has partnered with Mountain Dew in the past) the same can’t be said for many of his fellow social media stars-turned-actual stars.

Logan Paul, a Vine celebrity who has graced the cover of AdWeek, has worked with Verizon, Nike and Dunkin Donuts. Michelle Phan parlayed a YouTube channel about makeup tutorials into a line of cosmetics with L’Oréal. Influencer marketing has been huge for a while. How has it changed as it’s gotten bigger?

Vine declines as Instagram and Snapchat soar

Vine has traditionally been a big platform for social media influencers – Paul has nearly 4 billion loops – but its star is fading. Analyzing the Vine accounts with more than 15,000 followers, influencer marketing technology platform Markerly found that 52% of those users have left the platform. Paul hasn’t posted a new Vine since April.

“I don’t think there’s one specific reason why, but the content is way too short,” says Sarah Ware, founder and chief executive (CEO) of Markerly, who believes Vine became so popular because it was something of a novelty in 2012. “If Vine were to be released now, it probably wouldn’t be that popular because there are so many video platforms now. At the time, it was different, but it hasn’t been able to keep up that momentum.”

Ware doesn’t see the decline of Vine taking away from the popularity of influencer marketing. While the six-second videos were the go-to medium for many advertisers, the same influencers also have presences on other platforms with bigger, more engaged userbases. (Vine is currently ranked 135th in the App Store; Snapchat, Instagram, Facebook and YouTube are all in the top 10.)

In Ware’s opinion, Instagram is the ultimate platform for influencer marketing. According to a recent Comcast survey, it also now has more advertisers than Twitter. It’s got a young audience, but not so young that brands can’t reach the coveted millennial mom demographic there. In addition, Markerly sees a distinct correlation between Instagram posts and the brands’ site traffic.

“It’s the place to be for product placement,” says Ware. “If I sell couches and give one to an influencer, every time she posts a picture of her kid on the couch, she’s going to tag my brand.”

There’s also Snapchat, which is having its moment in the sun. But it’s still got some kinks, such as poor discoverability and the fact that many marketers haven’t quite figured out how to navigate it.

Will McDonough, head of brand at KICK, is a fan of turning his Snapchat over to influencers. KICK is all about soccer, and this strategy keeps the media destination from being too one-dimensional.

“It’s unique and it’s fun.” says McDonough. “We want to be that great connector. You like soccer and you also like fashion; there’s a lot of fashion in soccer. We try and find that little Venn diagram where soccer hits the rest of the world in pop culture.”

As influencer marketing grows, people are becoming more aware of it

Influencer marketing is such a big thing now that many brands have specific influencer strategies.

It’s also so common that McDonough likes to sometimes turn regular KICK fans into influencers, just to switch it up.

“What can we do that’s going to cut through the noise? Everybody’s got somebody taking over their handle,” he says. “What we try and do is, let’s get a fan to do it because that’s what KICK is about: the voice of the fans. We find cool fans who are good at telling stories and say, ‘Hey man, go to the match and show the audience.'”

Working with influencers has also become a much more costly strategy. That Adweek story reported that Logan Paul was paid $1,000 to promote a video game on Vine three years ago; now he can make six figures for brand work.

When it comes to advertising, “costly” is relative. A Super Bowl ad can cost $5 million – so $166,000 per second – but brands keep doing it because they’re in front of the largest TV audience possible.

For Ware, influencer marketing is worth it, if you go about it in a smart way – which many brands are savvy enough to do now. She said that it’s common for brands to contract influencers to do a certain number of posts over a period of time, though reach often determines the price.

“If you’re putting $25,000 toward Instagram, we’re giving you a total reach of 5 million people,” says Ware. “You can work with a couple of really large influencers, or a ton of smaller ones. You’re paying the same and you’re reaching the same. It’s just, how much content do you want created?

“If you’re able to repurpose that content, it’s really worth it,” she adds.

If these people fit naturally, they’ll help the brands get a lift because ultimately, people like them. But if the influencers are bright enough stars, they can still help the brand get a lift either way because people just like them and want to see what they’re doing.

Does anyone really think Kendall Jenner stops by the Estee Lauder counter at Macy’s to pick up makeup? Probably not. But there are more people in the world following Jenner on Instagram than there are living in Spain, and within a day of Estee Lauder appointing her the face of the brand, its Instagram following shot up by 18%.

I’d add a note of caution. Though I’m sure many people are well-aware that these influencers are being paid by brands for endorsing their products, there are some grey areas here.

Google’s recent use of manual actions around bloggers linking to products in return for freebies may have been harsh in some cases, but it illustrates the importance of clarity in advertising.

For the last 11 years, Millward Brown Digital, the market research division of London agency WPP, has been analyzing financial and market data, in addition to interviews with customers, to determine the world’s most valuable brand.

In 2006, the first-ever BrandZ Top 100 ranking, that brand was Microsoft. Google was ranked seventh, skyrocketing to first place the following year and staying there until 2011. Since then, it’s been back and forth between Apple and Google, which just reclaimed the top spot.

Last year, Apple was valued at nearly $247 billion, up 67% from the previous year, while Google only jumped 9% to $173 billion. Apple’s value has since decreased 8% to $228 billion. Meanwhile, Google has had a resurgence in value, propelling 32% to $229 billion.

Microsoft remained in third place, though the next spot has seen a significant shakeup. Like Apple, IBM’s value decreased 8% year-over-year, dropping from fourth place to tenth. It’s not a significant decline; it’s just that other brands have experienced particularly explosive growth since 2015.

“The brands that thrive, regardless of sector, are those that behave like challengers and and adopt disruptor models and mindsets,” says David Roth, chief executive (CEO), EMEA and Asia, of The Store WPP. “They’re shaking up other categories with innovation that goes beyond new products or technologies, transforming the way a service is delivered, enhancing the consumer experience or changing a format.”

For example, Amazon upped its delivery offerings and started creating its own content, while Facebook began hosting publishers’ original content. Facebook and Amazon – the value of which grew by a respective 44% and 59% – both made the top 10 for the first time. Facebook placed fifth; Amazon, seventh.

“By stretching their brands in innovative ways and expanding into new categories, the strongest brands in the Top 100 are increasing their penetration and their relevance in people’s day-to-day lives,” says Doreen Wang, Millward Brown’s Global Head of BrandZ.

Like Amazon and Facebook, Starbucks saw a big spike. Its value is up 49%, jumping from 28th on the list to 21st, in part because of its recent focus on ecommerce. Rounding out the top 10 were AT&T, Visa, Verizon and McDonald’s, all four of which maintained their spots from last year.

Since then, Google has invested heavily in video and mobile, making Android increasingly more competitive with the iPhone. At its recent I/O conference, the search giant also announced a greater focus on artificial intelligence, an area Apple hasn’t improved much upon since the initial launch of Siri. (Though that may change soon.)

Once again, tech and telecommunications dominated the top of Millward Brown’s list. However, apparel is the fastest-growing industry. Since last year, the sector has grown 14% to $114 billion. Nike was the highest-valued apparel brand, ranking 24th; last year, the sportswear giant placed 28th.

Another bit of history repeating itself was the increasing value of Chinese brands. There was only one Chinese brand listed during the initial study, a number that has gone up significantly over the past few years.

While no Chinese brands made the top 10, there were three in this year’s top 20: Tencent, China Mobile and Alibaba. Three of the list’s seven newcomers – alcohol brand Moutai, insurance company AIA and electronics retailer JD.com – also hail from China.

We all know Amazon is the undisputed king of ecommerce. From November 2014 to November 2015, the company raked in more than $71 billion in online sales, which is more than Walmart, Apple, Macy’s, The Home Depot, Best Buy, Costco, Target, Gap Inc., Williams-Sonoma, Sears and Kohl’s sold. Combined.

What is Amazon doing that the others aren’t?

According to Fractl, a Florida-based content marketing agency which analyzed the marketing spend of these massive retailers, search gets the lion’s share of Amazon’s budget. During that year period, the ecommerce giant spent $8 million on TV and radio, a number that sounds very high in isolation. However, Amazon spent $54 million on print and $1.35 billion on search.

Among the other retailers, only Apple – called the most valuable brand in the world last year – and Etsy prioritize search to such a degree. Apple spent far more on TV and outdoor advertising than Amazon, though search still made up 86 percent of its spend. Search was an even higher percentage for Etsy: 91 percent, with 1.39 million going to search and $90,000 to other digital channels.

The Etsy finding was the most interesting to Lillian Podlog, project manager at Fractl, who noted that Etsy doesn’t have the same juggernaut status as Apple and Amazon.

“With Amazon and Apple, you can ask what came first, their success or where they put their marketing dollars. Maybe at this point, they can do anything, but Etsy has the same tactic and if you look at organic search rankings, it’s doing really well,” she says.

Etsy saw among the highest ROI in the study. For every $1 spent on marketing, the online marketplace saw $1,600 in sales. Additionally, Etsy, along with Apple and Amazon, had a disproportionately high SEMrush rankings compared with the others, which means they saw higher organic traffic.

That’s a common correlation among the brands analyzed by Fractl. Most of those with larger search spends have higher SEMrush rankings.

“So many people use ad blockers, so many people have blindness to display ads. Investing in search, whether its paid or building your SEO, requires you to really think about what kind of content you’re putting on the Internet that would appeal to users and boost your SEO,” says Podlog. “It requires you to be more thoughtful and considerate about what the customer really wants.”

Among the only exceptions to that rule are Williams-Sonoma and The Home Depot. Digital makes up 51 percent of sales – and 57 percent of the marketing budget – for the former. Nearly a quarter of that budget goes to search, but Williams-Sonoma still doesn’t rank particularly high. On the other hand, The Home Depot does, despite only spending 11 percent on search, instead prioritizing TV and radio.

Where do some of the other major players put their money?

• Best Buy puts the majority of its dollars in TV and digital, favoring network channels and display advertising over cable and search.
• Costco, on the other hand, largely eschews TV. Instead, the warehouse retailer allocates 57 percent of its marketing dollars to display and nearly all the rest to magazines and newspapers.
• Macy’s is another one with a heavy print focus. The brand spends $16 million on display and $32 million on search, which sounds like a lot of money, but is just a drop in the bucket by comparison. Macy’s spends 5.5 times as much on TV and more than 8 times as much on print.
  “Macy’s is one of those companies that has an established name and an established consumer base, but if it wants to take some of Amazon’s chunk of online retail, it has to invest more in those other channels,” says Podlog. “Macy’s has been around for so long, but I personally think that unless it changes the shape of its spending, it’s going to suffer.”
• Nordstrom’s priority is similarly on print – $27 million on magazines, compared with $6 million on search, $4 million on display, $5 million on TV and $2 million on outdoor – but the strategy is a bit different from that of Macy’s. While Macy’s spends most of its money on newspapers, Nordstrom goes for magazines, a medium that meshes better with the brand’s luxury focus.
• Netflix, despite being heralded as one of the premier digital disruptors, doesn’t spend nearly as much money on digital advertising as one would assume. The streaming giant spends $1 million each on display and online video, and $17 million on TV with a particularly heavy focus on network. It makes to sense to Podlog, who points out that “people are watching TV, they’re not on Netflix.”
• Target’s marketing budget is probably the most balanced. The retailer spends 46 on TV, 22 on print and 28 percent on digital. The majority of that digital spend is allocated to search, but $23 million is still set aside for online video.

Everybody knows that it’s the year of mobile (again). Everybody knows that smartphones are behind more and more internet searches. But still, not everybody connects the two.

This winter, experience management platform Sitecore and UK market research company Vanson Bourne surveyed brand marketers all over the world about mobile marketing. While 97% of them agreed that a good mobile experience impacts customer loyalty, only 59% have a solid mobile strategy in place.

Part of that is because purchases haven’t caught up just yet. According to Google research, mobile commerce is particularly prevalent in countries like Indonesia, Saudi Arabia, and South Africa, where at least 60% of consumers regularly make purchases with their phones. But in many Western nations – including the US, the UK, Belgium, France and Germany – that figure is less than 10.

Nick Wilsdon, lead SEO for the Vodafone Group, believes there’s a symbiotic relationship between mobile SEO and mobile commerce. He believes that marketers excelling at the former will see more of the latter.

“[Too many marketers] haven’t been thinking about their site through mobile and not testing it enough. They don’t function in mobile; the buttons are too small,” said Wilsdon at Shift London. “The mobile web is broken right now. Very few people get it right, but there are a few champions in the area.”

1. Mobile and SEO

Last year, Google famously changed up its algorithm to favour mobile-friendly sites. The search giant has since launched the Accelerated Mobile Pages (AMP) initiative, which was designed to speed up mobile content.

More than three-quarters of people will abandon a site that doesn’t load in five seconds; 40% will X out after three. “Mobilegeddon” was born with consumer behavior in mind and brands that don’t follow along are penalised.

Still, 39% of the marketers surveyed by Sitecore don’t have mobile optimised websites in place. Wilsdon doesn’t believe they realise the kind of effect SEO has on mobile.

“This impacts massively on SEO because Google will give us a ranking benefit for having a fast website. We’ll then get more exposure and then get more traffic,” said Wilsdon. “It dovetails with everything that happens in performance.”

2. The ascension of apps

In the UK and Ireland, the Domino’s app now accounts for nearly half its orders. Wilsdon believes that case study is something marketers should aspire to, as mobile internet activity is increasingly happening in-app.

As a result, Google has been pushing its fast-loading Progressive Web Apps concept for most of the last year.

“We can cache parts of it and do push notifications, and basically make our webpages act more like apps,” said Wilsdon.

Analyzing data from 52 million Android smartphones, Paris-based Cheetah Ad Platform compared app engagement from around the world. Engaging with an average of 53 apps each month, Brazilians have the world’s most competitive app market.

For marketers looking to replicate Brazil’s app engagement, Wilsdon recommends smart app banners, which bridge the gap between the mobile web and apps; and native code, which bridges the gap between marketers and consumers.

“Native code actually interacts with your phone and knows whether you have the app installed already. This goes into app deep linking, which is a massive game changer for the web, which we can now link to specific functionality in apps from SERPs,” he said.

3. The seamless factor

Vodafone pushes Indian consumers toward the app when it’s time to pay their bills. That reduces the number of steps in process, as the app already knows who they are.

The strategy there fits in with a larger theme of seamlessness. Making the experience easier is ultimately going to increase customer satisfaction. About 90% of people don’t want to create a new login on a website or stay on a mobile site if they get their login wrong on the first try.

Push notifications are another good – but under-utilised, in Wilsdon’s opinion – strategy for retaining customers and making their lives easier. For example, your website can send alerts to users even when their browser isn’t open, reminding them that they have an item in their cart.

“Previously, we thought of mobile as something to bolt onto our sites. That’s not the case anymore. We have to retool the entire way we’re creating content,” said Wilsdon. “The mobile web is open for business; we now have the tools to make it work.”

This was our inaugural Shift event. Our next one will take place in San Francisco this August – see you there!

We’re in a seminal moment, said Google chief executive (CEO) Sundar Pichai kicking off the company’s annual I/O Conference in San Francisco.

Looking back at the past 17(!?) years, Pichai discussed Google’s evolution to the live audience of 7,000. As technology gets more sophisticated, he sees artificial intelligence (AI) playing a huge role in the company’s next 17 years.

“Leveraging our state-of-the-art capabilities in machine learning and AI, we truly want to take the next step in being more assistive to our user. Today, we are announcing the Google Assistant,” said Pichai, one of the only people in the world who’s allowed to use the “L” word on Search Engine Watch. “We think of it as building each user their own individual Google.”

Right now, 20% of Google searches are queried by voice. Google Assistant is the next step in that, combining voice search with the rest of Google’s AI capabilities. For example, if you were standing in front of that giant bean in Chicago, you could ask, “Who designed this?” without any mention of where you are; Google already knows.

What separates Google Assistant from other digital assistants is its various integrations, including Uber, Fandango and OpenTable. While Siri can tell you what time The Jungle Book is playing, you can’t actually purchase tickets through her.

Another new product is Google Home, the search giant’s answer to the Amazon Echo. Like Alexa, Google Home – which is customizable with different fabrics, materials and colors to match your home aesthetic – can play music and TV shows, and control various aspects of your connected home.

“What makes Google Home really shine is that it has search built in,” added Mario Queiroz, vice president of product management at Google. “It draws on 17 years of innovation to answer questions, which are difficult for other assistants to handle.”

Google Home is meant to be a more intelligent version of AI, able to answer both your generic (“How much fat is an avocado?”) and personal (“What time is my flight on Sunday?”) questions. That same level of personalization will be applied to Allo, a messaging app that will be available this summer.

Allo is a bit like the GIF-heavy Peach app (RIP) with Google’s AI built in. The suggested responses will be, rather than canned replies, based on what your past responses have been, to both text and images.

“The more you use Allo, the better the suggestions become. The suggestions will be unique to you,” said Erik Kay, Google’s engineering director.

Other features include a built-in Google Assistant – which allows you to book a restaurant on OpenTable directly in the app while messaging, for instance – and Whisper and Shout, complementary features that amplify your reaction, making it larger or smaller.

Other highlights from the Google I/O keynote include:

• An upcoming video calling app, Duo, will includes a live stream of the person calling, allowing you to potentially gauge their mood. For instance, if my boss Graham was calling me with Duo, I’d be able to see if he looked really angry and ready to yell at me for using the word “leverage” earlier.
• More details of Android N were revealed. Among them are the introduction of the Vulkan graphics API to Google’s mobile platform; a “Clear All” button to simultaneously dismiss all active apps; and split-screen and picture-in-picture modes for multitasking.
• Google is building a virtual reality (VR) platform, Daydream, on top of Android N. Unlike Cardboard, which works with any smartphone, Daydream will only work on new phones with specially-built sensors and screens. The platform will include VR versions of Google properties such as YouTube, StreetView, and Play Movies, in addition to Netflix and Electronic Arts.
• Android Wear, Google’s smart watch, will be updated to include a tiny keyboard, the ability to show data from any application, and automatic activity activation. For example, if you start running, an icon will pop up asking if you want to play your workout playlist on Spotify.
• Google has also announced a new mobile analytics platform, which Sophie Loras has covered in detail here: Google launches Firebox.

Last year, Google shook up the industry by switching up its mobile search algorithm to favor mobile-friendly sites. A fairly self-explanatory term, “mobile-friendly” refers to, well, a site that works on the smaller screen of a mobile device.

Mobilegeddon was a natural response to the natural shift in people’s browsing preferences, which are increasingly moving toward mobile devices. In an uncharacteristically transparent move, Google let everyone know about the update nearly two months ahead of time, even including tips for increased mobile-friendliness: avoiding software like Flash, which isn’t common on mobile devices; text that’s big enough to be read without zooming; links and buttons spaced far enough apart to accommodate fingers.

But while it’s clear what constitutes a mobile-friendly site, there’s still a level of confusion around what makes a mobile-friendly site different from a mobile responsive site, and what makes that one different from a mobile adaptive site.

Friendly vs. Responsive

Mobile-friendly sites aren’t necessarily designed specifically for a mobile device. Rather, they’re versions of sites that work across different devices. Think of a mobile-friendly site as mobile-optimized, whereas a responsive site is mobile-first.

A site that’s mobile responsive changes – or responds – based on the device it’s viewed on. For example, a desktop site may have a multi-column layout, which a mobile-friendly site may have on a smaller scale so users can see everything without having to scroll. But a mobile responsive site will have a single-column layout that translates better to the smaller screen.

See how Spirit Airlines’ mobile website is just a smaller version of the desktop site?

Contrast that with H&M, whose mobile site is completely different. The desktop site’s layout wouldn’t translate to mobile very well. On a smaller screen, those six tabs across the top would either be visually overwhelming or too small to read.

Responsive sites have many of the same characteristics that make a site mobile-friendly, such as having the right kind of navigable spacing. But they differ in key ways. Responsive sites are reliant on mobile operating systems, in addition to having dynamic content that changes depending on where it’s viewed.

In other words, every responsive site is mobile-friendly. But not every mobile site is responsive. If you want to test a site’s responsiveness without having to look it up on multiple devices, simply change the size of your browser to see if the site alters itself.

To keep the Spirit and H&M examples going, I looked at both sites on my browser before making it narrower. I made it so much narrower that it’d be impossible for either site to fit perfectly, but notice how the tabs along the top of H&M’s kept getting closer together so they all fit. And speaking of tabs, yes, I know I hoard them and that I should be using the OneTab extension.

Responsive vs. adaptive

Mobile responsive and mobile adaptive sites are similar in theory, but different in practice. Both change their dimensions based on the browser and device where they’re being viewed.

Responsive sites adjust to any layout. Adaptive sites, on the other hand, only adapt at select points. The webmasters behind those want to ensure that the browser is a certain width, and the content will snap into place, rather than fluidly change sizes. In other words, an adaptive website has several different layouts, which can be deployed based on the size of the browser.

This GIF from Froont, a Latvian startup specializing in responsive web design, illustrates the difference perfectly:

Steve Madden is an example of a brand with an adaptive site. Log onto the retailer’s website from your desktop and change the size of your browser.

Here it is, when my browser is at the normal width:

Here, my browser is a little narrower. See how some of the tabs disappear, but the logo looks the same? 

And now at this new width, the font has readjusted its size. Look at how much bigger the logo is.

Which one is best for me?

At this point, everyone should have a mobile-friendly site. Not everyone necessarily needs a site that’s mobile adaptive or responsive, but you probably should, if a significant portion of your traffic comes from mobile devices.

Adaptive is easier and significantly cheaper to deploy. Since the images are scaled down, rather than resized, adaptive sites often load faster, too.

But if your site is complex, you should think about going the responsive route, particularly if you have ecommerce offerings. Look at H&M’s desktop site; there are so many different things you can click on that it’d risk looking too busy on a smaller screen.

You should also have a mobile responsive site if your website features articles telling people to make their sites mobile responsive, obviously.