30-second summary:

• Knowledge gap stands as the biggest challenge for AI technology adoption and implementation
• Our AI Summit 2020 is a cost-free event that aims to equip marketers with the much needed knowledge to adopt AI, realize AI’s true power, and know how to create strategies that can create huge competitive advantages.
• Brian Solis, IBM Watson Advertising, Adobe and Esri are our headline speakers
• More details on why marketers can’t afford to miss this golden opportunity

Artificial intelligence (AI) has long been looked at as an “industry game-changer” but has merely become jargon than actual hands-on technology.

While it continues to grow rapidly – the AI market is expected to grow from $28.42 billion in 2019 to $40.74 billion in 2020 at a CAGR of 43.39% — we observed that the knowledge gap stands as one of the biggest challenges for AI technology adoption and implementation, and our AI Summit 2020 aims to help businesses address exactly that continuum.

For a better idea, these quick facts perfectly display the AI-related challenges faced:

• According to Gartner, only one in 25 CIOs reported applying AI in their business verticals
• Retailers that implemented machine learning for personalization gained 2X as compared to retailers who did not
• According to a McKinsey, only 8% of respondents across industries said their AI-relevant data are accessible by systems across the organization
• Only 3% of an organization’s data meet the quality standards needed for analytics

About the ClickZ AI Summit 2020

Our AI Virtual Summit on June 25, is a half-day event that aims to equip marketers with the much-needed knowledge to adopt and realize AI’s true power and know how to create strategies that can create huge competitive advantages.

AI is the next dream boat that marketers need to be on in order to stay ahead of the curve. Why?

1. Better customer experiences
2. Lower CPAs
3. More profitable and customer-focused business 

Our event headliners help you become AI confident and AI ready

Leading experts along with cutting edge AI technology providers will enable you to discover the realistic power of AI, what you should be doing/using right now, and explore what’s next.

Confirmed speakers:

Brian Solis

Brian Solis is a world-renowned digital anthropologist and futurist. He is also an award-winning author and global keynote speaker. 

Brian’s research, advisory and presentations humanize the relationship between disruptive innovation and its impact on institutions, markets and societies. 

He not only helps audiences understand what’s happening and why, he visualizes future trends and inspires people to take leading roles in defining the future they want to see.

Brian serves as Global Innovation Evangelist at Salesforce. His work focuses on thought leadership and research that explores digital transformation, innovation and disruption, CX, commerce, and the cognitive enterprise.

Dave Neway

Dave Neway is the head of product marketing at IBM Watson Advertising (formerly The Weather Company’s ad sales business). 

Watson Advertising offers marketers and agencies a suite of media, data, and AI technology solutions to help improve decision-making and reduce costs across key facets of the marketing lifecycle – from media planning through measurement.

In this role, Neway is responsible for ideating the go-to-market strategy for all Watson Advertising offerings. He works closely with the offering management team and key stakeholders to position, price, and present Watson Advertising’s products across media, data and technology categories to the marketplace. 

Previously, Neway was director of sales strategy, where he created, developed, and executed plans to drive business across consumer packaged goods, pharmaceuticals, and financial services.

Tim Waddell

Tim Waddell is Director of Product Marketing for Adobe Experience Platform. 

He has been with Adobe since 2009 working on a variety of projects, but always with a passion for audience activation built on rich customer profiles. Tim brings significant experience in the online and traditional marketing disciplines from both the customer and agency perspectives. 

Prior to Adobe, Tim built and managed the Bing marketing analytics team at Microsoft. He also managed MSN’s commerce team, driving the demand generation program and developed packaging solutions for partners. His online experience began with the launch of Travelocity, managing the advertising and sales efforts.

Robert Yocum

Robert Yocum is Marketing Technologist at Esri, an international supplier of geographic information system software, web GIS and geodatabase management applications.

Robert functions across the Marketing Technology suite to integrate and use tools to advance the capabilities and maturation of the overall Marketing Department. He works with Change Enablement, Data and Analytics, IT, and marketing groups across the enterprise to create, prioritize, and implement new capabilities to advance digital marketing best practices.

To book your seat for the AI Virtual Summit on June 25, sign up free of charge here.

In order to give brands a better understanding of the search experiences their customers are having and how they are impacting brand perception and customer experience, BrandVerity commissioned the “BrandVerity’s Online Consumer Search Trends 2020” research study in Q4 of 2019 to over 1,000 US consumers, balanced against the US population for age, gender, region, and income.

Amongst the many findings, three main themes stood out:

Consumers confused by how search engine results work

Only 37% of consumers understand that search engine results are categorized by a combination of relevance and advertising spend.

The other 63% of consumers believe that Search Engine Results Pages (SERPs) are categorized by either relevance or spend, or they simply “don’t know.”

Additionally, nearly 1-in-3 consumers (31%) say they don’t believe search engines (e.g. Google) do a good job of labeling which links are ads.

Consumers more inclined to click on the result that appears first

Without a clear understanding of how search results are served up, consumers are more inclined to click on the result that appears first, believing it to be the most relevant option.

With 54% of consumers saying they trust websites more that appear at the top of the SERP, this isn’t just an assumption.

Consumers feel misled by the websites they find in the search engine results

51% of consumers say that when searching for information on a product, they sometimes feel misled by one of the websites in the search results.

An additional 1-in-4 report feeling misled “often” or “always.”

Even further, 25% also say they often end up somewhere unexpected that does not provide them with what they were looking for when clicking on a search result.

“Against a backdrop where consumers have increasingly high expectations of the brands they do business with, and are holding them to equally high standards, companies must ensure that the entirety of the experiences they provide meet customer expectations,” said Dave Naffziger CEO of Brandverity.

“As these findings show, a general uncertainty of how search engines work, combined with the significant occurrence of poor online experiences, mean oversight of paid search programs is more important than ever for brands today.”

The infographic, A Small Business Guide to Amazon Advertising, presents a visual summary of advertising options available on the platform and includes some tips that small business can use to get started with launching a campaign.

In this post, we’ll summarize some of the key insights from the guide, including a list of next steps that will help you get ads running on Amazon in no time.

Unless otherwise noted, all statistics and images in this post have been taken, with permission, from the original infographic produced by Businessfinancing.co.uk.

Amazon’s enormous retail reach

Based on gross merchandise value (GMV), Amazon is the second largest ecommerce website in the world (second only to China’s Alibaba) and the largest in the U.S.

It receives over 200 million visits each month and is the first-choice ecommerce destination for many shoppers, with 56% of consumers visiting them before any other website. About 47% of consumers begin their product search on Amazon, versus other search engines such as Google or Bing.

According to a 2018 Poll, nearly 70% of small businesses who sell a product online say that Amazon has had a positive impact on their sales. Advertising on it can help small businesses reach the  online retailer’s vast audience in a variety of ways.

If you’re an existing seller:

• Sponsored products
• Sponsored brands
• Sponsored display ads
• Stores

If you don’t sell directly on the platform:

• Display ads
• Video ads

The infographic breaks down what each ad product looks like and summarize some tips for getting started with your first campaign.

Ad products for existing Amazon sellers

There are roughly one million small businesses currently selling on Amazon. That’s a lot of competition, which is why it’s important for businesses to understand the different ad formats available on the platform and what they’re used for.

Sponsored Product Ads: These ads appear in the search results and product detail pages within Amazon. Advertisers pay on a per-click basis, thus there are no up-front fees required. Sponsored product ads are a good fit for sellers, vendors, and kindle authors who want to promote their merchandise/books.

Example of a sponsored product placement on Amazon—Source: Businessfinancing.co.uk

Sponsored Brand Ads: Brand ads appear on Amazon product pages or within the landing page of your store and are triggered by relevant searches. As with sponsored ads, there are no monthly fees associated with brand ads. Advertisers pay only when a user clicks on the ad.

Example of an Amazon sponsored display placement—Source: Businessfinancing.co.uk

Amazon Stores: An Amazon Store is free to create and acts as a hub where all your products are listed in one place. Stores are suitable for sellers, vendors and agencies. Stores are great to aid with product discovery and branding. They can be designed without any coding using predesigned templates provided by Amazon. Stores are available to sellers enrolled in the Amazon Brand Registry, vendors, and agencies and you do not need to advertise on Amazon to create a store.

Example of an Amazon Store—source: Amazon

What if you’re not an amazon seller?

You can still advertise on Amazon and its associated properties if you’re not currently a seller or vendor on the platform. It offers two ad formats—display ads and video ads—which business can leverage to promote their brand, products, and services.

Display Ads: Display ads (not to be confused with “sponsored display ads) can appear on Amazon, websites operated by them, apps and third-party sites. Display ads can be purchased using their self-service demand-side platform (DSP) or via managed-service option which requires a minimum spend of $35,000. Display ads are priced on a cost-per-thousand (CPM) basis.

Display ads enable businesses to show ads both on and off Amazon, including within apps. When someone clicks on the ad, they can be directed to the product page, your store page, a custom landing page on Amazon.com or an external website.

Video Ads: As with display ads, video ads can link to a product page, external website or landing page. Amazon video ads appear on its owned websites such as IMDb and devices including Fire TV. Video ad pricing varies based on ad format and placement

Example of display and video ads available for non-sellers—Source: Businessfinancing.co.uk

Seven steps to launching your campaign

The infographic outlines—and helps to visualize—a seven-step approach to getting your ads up and running on Amazon quickly.

1. Pick a descriptive campaign name
2. Decide on a monthly ad budget
3. Set an end date for your campaign
4. Choose “automatic targeting” so Amazon can generate keyword and product matches automatically based on user searches
5. Select one product per campaign
6. Select your keywords
7. Understand the available bidding strategies, then choose the one that’s right for you

Amazon offers three bid strategies for advertisers as shown above— Source: Businessfinancing.co.uk

Amazon provides step-by-step instructions (as well as $50 in free clicks) for sellers who want to get started with advertising on the platform. Their advertising page provides all the relevant details.

Create maximum impact with campaign optimization and monitoring

Once your campaign is launched, you should immediately begin to monitor and optimize its performance. The infographic lists several techniques that small businesses can use to help their ads stand out and perform well including adding negative keywords to ensure your ad isn’t triggered for irrelevant searches (e.g., if you sell dog food, you don’t want your ad to show for someone searching for “cat food.”)

Other tips focus on the type of language to include (and not to include) in your ad copy and the best way to leverage different ad types so that they work together (e.g., by keeping display ads running at all times).

The full infographic is available for free here.

Among the key findings:

• Consumers are only getting more active in search: Consumer actions in business listings — driving directions clicks, clicks to call businesses, and more — grew 17% over the past year.
• Search — and searchers — are getting better: Consumer actions in search grew faster (17%) than search impressions of business listings (10%) over the year, suggesting that customers are finding what they want faster. Whether searchers are learning to use more specific queries or search engines are getting better at understanding those queries, customers are spending less time searching and more time engaging with businesses.
• Reviews are on the rise: Consumers are leaving more reviews about businesses. Review count per business location grew 27% over the year. In fact, financial services review volume grew 91% per location, the fastest growth of any industry. Businesses are getting savvier about the importance of reviews as well, responding to reviews 47% more than the year prior.

“Some industries are naturally more popular with consumers during certain seasons, but the need for businesses in every category to be in control of their facts online stays important year-round,” said Zahid Zakaria, Senior Director of Insights and Analytics at Yext. “By ensuring their information is accurate across channels — from the search results on their own website to their listings on third-party platforms — businesses can be prepared to capture the wave of customers who are interested in transacting with them, no matter what month it is.”

Yext analyzed when American consumers clicked online listings for various types of businesses throughout the year. The study found:

January | Resolving to stay healthy: With New Year’s resolutions fresh on their minds, and cold and flu season underway, Americans start the year off with visits to the doctor. In January, healthcare organizations see a 17% jump in clicks to their online listings relative to the previous month.

February | Money on their minds: In February and March, tax season is well underway and searches show it. Searching consumers engage with financial services institutions up to 11% more than the annual average.

March | Open house: Starting in March, consumers looking to ring in the season of renewal with a new home turn to search to find real estate agencies. Listings see a 22% average increase in clicks from February to May, complementing studies indicating that spring is a popular season for house hunting and selling.

April | Telecom phones it in: By April, the wave of consumers picking up the latest high-profile smartphone upgrades from the fall has subsided. During this month, clicks to phone carrier and telecommunications provider listings in search drop 14% compared to the month before.

May | May flowers and horsepower: In May, consumers look to capitalize on Memorial Day sales and revamp their rides in time for summer with an average 18% increase in clicks to automotive service search listings relative to the annual average.

June – July | Fun in the sun: Recreation and entertainment listings online — including theaters, sports venues, nightlife, and more — see a surge of consumer interest during the summer months, reaching an average 35% increase in clicks in July relative to the annual average. Clicks to hotel listings also bump up to 20% above the annual average during this time due to summer travel.

August | Back to school: School is just around the corner in August, and parents and students are not just stocking up on clothes, school supplies, gadgets, and other necessities, but also getting their cars in shape for the morning drop-off line at school. Clicks to listings for stores spike to 18% higher than the annual average. Educational services, like tutors and libraries, see clicks to listings increase 18% as well. Clicks to automotive service listings reach 21% above the annual average.

September | Falling into a Habit: As Americans wrap up their vacations and return to their school and work routines, clicks to recreation and entertainment listings take a noticeable dip (18% below the annual average) in September, falling up to 25% below the annual average in November.

October | Hitting the books: With the school year taking off by October, families get serious about grades again and search for tutors and other educational services. Clicks to listings in the education category see a nearly 10% jump relative to September.

November | Pass the Leftovers: During the month of Thanksgiving, hungry consumers prefer to eat in, with clicks to restaurant listings dropping 13% below the annual average.

December | Home for the holidays: In December, revelers celebrate the holidays with their families and opt to bunk with them over paying for lodging. During this month, clicks to hotel listings in search fall to 26% below the annual average.

December & January | The season of giving — and buying: Americans shopping for holiday gifts in December drive clicks to retail listings 11% more than the annual average. After the holiday shopping season ends in January, those clicks plummet an average of nearly 25% from December as consumers take a break from spending and recoup their savings.

If you are using an API tool like AdRules, you have until September 2020 before it is mandatory.

If you do any advertising on Facebook, you will be affected by this change. It will apply to both new and existing ad campaigns.

If you don’t want a rude awakening on September 1 when CBO activates in Ads Manager and your Facebook campaigns start to behave very differently, you need to start testing campaign budget optimization now.

While nobody likes mandatory, sudden changes, this is not all doom and gloom. There are some considerable upsides to CBO. You will have to give up some control over your campaigns after September first, but with CBO:

1. You’ll have less to manage

If you spend hours adjusting bids every week, or if you pay someone else to adjust bids every week, much of that bid optimization work will be over.

When campaign budget optimization is activated in Ads Manager, Facebook automatically shifts the ad budget to whichever ad set in a campaign is most effective. You get to control the definition of what “effective” means by specifying a goal for each campaign. Goals that are fairly late in your sales funnel, like a purchase or a download, tend to work best with CBO.

Because all that bid management work will be done by the Facebook algorithm, you may be able to hire less expensive people to manage your campaigns or have your team members work on more networks or accounts. Or, if you’ve been doing those bid edits yourself, you may find you suddenly have extra hours free every week. We recommend using those free hours to develop better creative, to study your competitors’ creative, or to set up a more efficient creative testing machine.

2. You’ll get a better return on ad spend (ROAS)

While there were some early reports of CBO not working as well as human-managed campaigns, the algorithm has gotten considerably smarter than when it first launched.

We’ve found that if a campaign is set up properly and the bids are high enough, CBO generally can get better results than a human can get.

CBO will also reduce how often your campaigns are put into “learning mode”. That means you won’t get penalized when Facebook’s algorithm reassesses your campaigns.

But you do need to give campaign budget optimization time to work. The algorithm needs about 50 conversions per ad set, per week, before it accrues enough data to ramp up your campaigns. And speaking of ramping up campaigns if you want to scale your campaigns, CBO is extremely effective. Especially if you keep feeding it new, high-quality audiences.

3. You will still be able to control spending (to an extent) with ad set spending limits

If you set a minimum spend for an ad set, Facebook will dutifully spend at least that amount. And if you set a maximum ad set spending limit, Facebook will not go over that limit.

This is a way to set a “governor” of sorts on your spending. It will force Facebook to run ad sets perhaps longer than it might otherwise have, but if you’re not quite ready to relinquish control, ad set spending limits are a way to ease into this new campaign management approach.

Those of you who also advertise with Google’s App Campaigns may have an edge already. Facebook is in some ways following Google’s lead by requiring advertisers to shift over to automated budget optimization.

You could, potentially, get around CBO by creating dozens or even hundreds of campaigns, each with on single ad set. But that would be working against the algorithm. And besides, CBO works well. There aren’t many good reasons to try to circumvent it. Especially when you use it along with other Facebook best practices and Facebook’s simplified campaign structure recommendation.

Start testing campaign budget optimization now

The benefits of CBO are proven, but you need to start testing now to see how to make it work well for your accounts. We still have a couple of months until the change in Ads Manager, but you may need to run multiple week-long tests to get the hang of this new budgeting strategy.

You may also need to shift how you’ve been defining goals. Using CBO for clicks is a waste of potential. Instead, look towards the end of the buyers’ journey. We like to optimize not just for app installs, but for specific app events like purchases. And not for just two-dollar purchases, we target people who are likely to spend $20 or more.

As you begin to test and measure CBO, don’t get too attached to the results of individual ad sets. Look at the campaign level, as this graphic illustrates:

Also, get ready to bump up your creatives. For CBO to work, it often needs several creative assets for each ad set. Including a few videos and elements for dynamic creatives helps too.

Pay close attention to your audiences, too. Many advertisers have found that CBO works best for them if they create separate campaigns for different audiences like one campaign for cold audiences and another campaign for a “warm” audience, like a retargeting audience.

Get ready for things like “The Breakdown Effect” to make your reporting look a little strange at first. “The Breakdown Effect” occurs when discount pacing (how frequently your ads show) intersects with discount bidding and makes it look like the system is overcharging you for conversions. What’s actually happening is the system is trying to find the most affordable conversions first, then it tries to find more expensive conversions.

If you do a lot of testing, this breakdown effect pattern may be familiar. It’s similar to how one cell of a test can look like a winner at first but as the data accrue, that early winner falls away and another cell is shown to perform better in the long-term.

Closing thoughts

Facebook is evolving. Everyone knows this, but the CBO change in September for Ads Manager is yet one more example of it happening again. And because Facebook’s advertising platform is evolving, advertisers have to evolve with it, too. If you’re still doing Facebook advertising like you were a year ago, you’re losing money and missing out on better ROAS.

Brian Bowman is the CEO of ConsumerAcquisition.com.

With protestors on the streets outside and a number of progressive policies being tabled and ultimately voted down by the board, the meeting was the latest moment in a storied 12+ months of internal issues and public criticism leveled at the search giant.

While pressure on Google to change continues to be on an upward trajectory, it was also something of a disappointing day for advocates of transparency, fairness, and equality both inside and outside of the company.

Let’s take a look at what happened and how this fits into the ongoing narrative of discord at Google and Alphabet.

First, a bit of background

As I reported for Search Engine Watch late last year, there has been growing discontent among Google employees about how the company is operating, with worker’s rights and leaked plans for the company to re-launch a search product (known as Dragonfly) in China both being key concerns.

This came to a head in November when thousands of staff staged a mass walkout from their offices in cities around the globe. The movement sought “to protest sexual harassment, misconduct, lack of transparency, and a workplace that doesn’t work for everyone,” with five demands put in front of directors – only one of which has been implemented so far.

Following the walkout, in late November, staff were moved to speak out publicly once more with an open letter to company leaders to stop the development of the Dragonfly project. More than 500 employees signed the letter which aligned itself with calls by Amnesty International. “We object to technologies that aid the powerful in oppressing the vulnerable, wherever they may be,” it stated.

Workers, community groups, and shareholders are united in demanding #GoogleDoBetter, from human rights to housing. pic.twitter.com/Q4p4AmfCA5

— Google Walkout For Real Change (@GoogleWalkout) June 19, 2019

June 19 protests

The gathering outside the meeting on June 19 included:

• Google employees demonstrating for (among other things) a push to make the search giant abandon non-disclosure agreements and to allow staff more public forms of redress for harassment and discrimination.
• Students For A Free Tibet. In attendance to call upon Google to drop Dragonfly and to take a stand against censorship in China-occupied Tibet.
• Community groups, who were calling upon Google to address the housing shortage in Silicon Valley.

Reports from the shareholder meeting

The resulting protest covered a range of disparate issues. These, too, were reflected inside the shareholder meeting where a number of progressive motions were put forward for the board to consider. These included:

• An end to forced arbitration. Forced arbitration for sexual harassment policy was removed after the walkout in Nov 2018, but it is still imposed for employees seeking to solve other types of disputes.
• A sexual harassment review. Looking at whether the company should adopt and implement additional policies on sexual harassment, and to report its findings.
• Increased equitable employment practices.
• A report on human rights concerns in China.
• Appointing an employee representative to the board of directors.

Ultimately, all of these (and others) were voted down by the board of executives. Google co-founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin – who collectively have 51% of voting power – didn’t attend the meeting, leaving other board members to face a number of difficult questions in the ensuing Q&A.

CEO Sundar Pichai was in attendance but did not respond to any questions directly.

Any positive outcomes?

While progressive outcomes from these protests and calls were seemingly not forthcoming on June 19, employees at Alphabet/Google, their contractors, and supporters are not being silenced by the board’s inaction.

Google has recently announced it would invest one billion dollars toward affordable housing after years of community and employee activism on the issue. Questions may remain as to whether they could be doing more in this area and what exactly this housing will look like, but persistence on the part of those taking direct action does seem to work, if slowly.

The issue of Dragonfly and whether it has been “dropped” has been handled by Google with just enough vagueness to keep some activists satisfied and others still pushing the issue.

In the days following the meeting, Students For A Free Tibet announced that they were viewing Google’s public confirmation that there are “no plans to offer a search engine in China” as a win after 10 months of campaigning.

However statements like these have been said before and, of course, do not assure critics that Google is not assisting a search player in China in some capacity. Not everyone will be convinced that their work is not supporting (or will not support) the surveillance state, even if only indirectly.

Google employees have a loud voice, but minimal power at board level

Conclusively, it seems to me that the biggest issue on seeing progressive change within Alphabet and Google depends on the make-up of the board. While a concentrated few people have a massive amount of supervoting power, and no employee representative is allowed to sit there, we can fully expect progress on employee rights within the business to improve at a frustratingly slow pace.

As for how long Google continues to be vague about its work in the Chinese search market, I imagine there will be many people inside and outside of Alphabet expecting little movement in this area either – unless we do see some significant changes with the make-up of the board and voter powers there.

Follow the Google Walkout Twitter feed for ongoing information about employee action and related issues.

But, in fact, a closer look at the performance of both sites’ leads reveals:

1. This shouldn’t be a surprise, because this has been Walmart’s plan all along, and
2. Despite what the headlines say, this is primarily a win for Walmart despite the large acquisition price.

We’ll tell this story with two simple charts. Apologies in advance for over-doing the aviation metaphors. I couldn’t help myself. As the kids say, “Sorry. Not sorry.”

1. Jet’s transactions are way down

The number of transactions on Jet.com rose to more than 600,000 a month in early 2017 but has been on a precipitous decline since then, shrinking to less than 100,000 a month. They don’t even exhibit the holiday-shopping spikes nearly every other retailer exhibits.

A drop like this doesn’t happen by accident, not in a world where Walmart reports that its ecommerce sales were up 37 percent in Q1. Or, after the ecommerce marketplace as a whole has grown steadily since, well, the start of ecommerce. Or, where spending power among affluent urbanites (Jet.com’s supposed strength) continues to rise as economic bifurcation enters its fourth decade. There is a long list of contextual reasons why a rising tide (tailwinds?) should be lifting Jet.com. Because of this, its loss of altitude is even more surprising and stark.

Source: Jumpshot

2. Jet.com’s ecommerce fuel, paid search, is also way down

Jet.com is one a handful of ecommerce sites, along with Chewy.com and Wayfair.com, to have successfully bought their growth. Largely this means paying for placement on Google’s search engine results pages, and it’s an increasingly effective strategy. Paid click-through rates on Google are up, particularly for companies willing to spend on expensive awareness-building campaigns across media channels. Consumers simply feel more comfortable clicking on those paid links when they recognize the brand.

Paid search kept Jet.com’s internet traffic aloft. And it has tumbled almost in lockstep with Jet.com’s sales. You could argue that Jet.com’s sales may have fallen for any number of reasons. But there’s only one reason why their paid search traffic went from eight million visitors a month to less than one million: Walmart was reallocating its budget elsewhere. Growing sales on Jet.com simply wasn’t a priority for the retail giant.

Source: Jumpshot

The Jet brand and the Jet/Walmart fit remain indistinct

Walmart has pulled back on making Jet a public-facing brand in part because of an ill-defined fit between the two brands. Jet was initially created to reach consumers who cared more about value than convenience. It was designed to be sort of an online Costco, offering very low prices to those willing to pay a membership fee. This would seemingly be a good fit for Walmart, whose growth has come via an unwavering commitment to its brand promise (everyday low prices) and core target (value-oriented non-urban consumers). But over time, Jet morphed into a brand with a reputation of reaching younger, more affluent urbanites – not an existing fit with Walmart, but a potentially complementary one that could help Walmart grow beyond its core.

While either strategy can be reasonable, the Walmart/Jet fit seemed to vacillate between the two, and never really settled on either. Jet has upscale ambitions, but its appeal to affluent consumers may be overstated. In Q1 2019, the top three keyword searches on Jet.com were decidedly mainstream “toilet paper”, “paper towels”, and “Frito-Lay”. It’s not until the fourth keyword search term, “mid-century modern furniture”, that the searches take a more upscale vibe.

Walmart has been toning down its positioning of Jet.com as an urban growth engine, and its discussion of Jet’s role has become increasingly circumscribed. As Walmart put it,

“Last year, we repositioned the Jet site itself. Across most of the country, we saw we could get a much higher return on our marketing investments with Walmart.com, so we’ve dialed up our marketing spend there… However, in specific large cities where Walmart has few or no stores, Jet has become hyper-focused on those urban customers…. The focus has largely been on New York so far, and we’re looking at other cities.”

Walmart’s real motivation in buying Jet.com 

The fact is that this acquisition was never about adding new customers or reaching complementary markets. Instead, it was part tech-buy, part acqui-hire. Walmart wanted technology innovations like Jet.com’s real-time pricing algorithm, which helps increase revenue per customer. And while Walmart announced that Simon Belsham, Jet.com’s current president, will leave later this summer, it still has the person they really wanted: Jet.com’s founder Marc Lore, who will continue to run Walmart’s ecommerce business. Lore is widely considered to have led Walmart’s recent overall ecommerce growth, including improvements in operations, infrastructure, and supply chain.

The Jet.com acquisition remains a win for Walmart

Ultimately it’s hard to argue with results. Walmart’s ecommerce sales are up significantly. Its extensive network of stores bodes well in the omnichannel future. Amazon has extended beyond its affluent base to build extensive middle-class appeal but hasn’t penetrated strongly into Walmart’s base. And while Walmart is a distant second to Amazon online, Walmart is far ahead of the other retailers behind it.

Many headlines will try to position Jet.com’s incorporation into the Walmart mothership as a failure. But a deeper analysis reveals that the acquisition continues to go as Walmart planned, and is largely a win for the Arkansas-based retailer.

Stephen Kraus is the head of digital insights for Jumpshot. Kraus is an expert in consumer insights and digital trends, the author of three books and holds a Ph.D. from Harvard University.

The site, How News Works, states Google’s mission as it relates to disseminating news in a non-biased manner. The site aggregates a variety of information about how Google crawls, indexes, and ranks news stories as well as how news can be personalized for the end user.

How News Works provides links to various resources within the Google news ecosystem all in one place and is part of The Google News Initiative.

What is The Google News Initiative?

The Google News Initiative (GNI) is Google’s effort to work with news industry professionals to “help journalism thrive in the digital age.” The GNI is driven and summarized by the GNI website which provides information about a variety of initiatives and approaches within Google including:

• How to work with Google (e.g., partnership opportunities, training tools, funding opportunities)
• A list of current partnerships and case studies
• A collection of programs and funding opportunities for journalists and news organizations
• A catalog of Google products relevant to journalists

Google attempts to work with the news industry in a variety of ways. For example, it provides funding opportunities to help journalists from around the world.

Google is now accepting applications (through mid-July) from North American and Latin American applicants to help fund projects that “drive digital innovation and develop new business models.” Applicants who meet Google’s specified criteria (and are selected) will be awarded up to $300,000 in funding (for U.S. applicants) or $250,000 (for Latin American applicants) with an additional award of up to 70% of the total project cost.

The GNI website also provides users with a variety of training resources and tools. Journalists can learn how to partner with Google to test and deploy new technologies such as the Washington Post’s participation in Google’s AMP Program (accelerated mobile pages).

AMP is an open source initiative that Google launched in February 2016 with the goal of making mobile web pages faster.

AMP mirrors content on traditional web pages, but uses AMP HTML, an open source format architected in an ultra-light way to reduce latency for readers.

News transparency and accountability

The GNI’s How It Works website reinforces Google’s mission to “elevate trustworthy information.” The site explains how the news algorithm works and links to Google’s news content policies.

The content policy covers Google’s approach to accountability and transparency, its requirements for paid or promotional material, copyright, restricted content, privacy/personalization and more.

This new GNI resource, a subsection of the main GNI website, acts as a starting point for journalists and news organizations to delve into Google’s vast news infrastructure including video news on YouTube.

Since it can be difficult to ascertain if news is trustworthy and accurate, this latest initiative by Google is one way that journalists (and the general public) can gain an understanding of how news is elevated and indexed on Google properties.

Come September, we’ll have to start relying on the existing metrics “Top Impression Share” and “Absolute Top Impression Share” instead.

The change at first glance

It seems to simply and unnecessarily turn one metric into several, adding more complexity to the already vast data pool. However, the change is actually a chance to more accurately gauge the true page position of your text ads. The Average position has long been one of the most misunderstood metrics in the Google Ads ecosystem and can be a common source of confusion between client, agency, and Google teams.

Average position is going down

Average position is often interpreted as a metric that directly denotes the actual position your ad occupied on SERPs (Search Engine Results Pages), but that was never actually the case. Instead, average position denoted where your ad fell relative to other ads.

To illustrate the difference, consider that an ad with an average position of two could just as often be spotted sitting at the bottom of the results page as it could be found at the second overall results spot. The latter being in immediate view of a searcher without scrolling at all, the former often forgotten or dismissed.

In these two separate instances, the ad from Joybird is just as much in average position two as the JustFab ad in the next picture.

What are these “new” metrics?

“Top Impression Share” and “Absolute Top Impression Share” are actually much closer to the perceived intent of the average position.

Absolute Top Impression Share

“Absolute Top Impression Share” is defined as “the percentage of impressions your ad has in the very first position above organic search results”. This makes it ideal for knowing when your ad will be shown to a searcher without having to scroll. This is especially crucial when dealing with limited mobile real estate.

Top Impression Share

Meanwhile, “Top Impression Share” is defined as “the percentage of impressions your ad has above organic search results”. This will still be useful when gauging how your ad is being placed in relation to competitors.

While these new prominence metrics are a breath of fresh air, the jury is still out on just how reliable they are now and how reliable they will continue to be given the continuous testing of new page experiences and vertical-specific ad units (for example, hotel campaigns in Google Ads) along with other specialized knowledge panels.

Wake me up when September ends

With these “new” impression-share-based metrics taking center-stage in place of “Average Position”, there are plenty of misconceptions left to fuel more questions as time goes on, but the move should be fairly smooth given the ample amount of time we’ve been given to make the transition to using “Top Impression Share” and “Absolute Top Impression Share”.

With the wealth of data at our fingertips, now is the perfect time for search advertisers to educate themselves and their clients on the pitfalls of vanity metrics and the importance of focusing on clean, useful data that will actually improve returns.

Blake Lucas is an SEM Coordinator at PMG. He can be found on Twitter as @blake_203.

For more than a year, the debate has raged over accusations that the Chinese military is capitalizing on Google’s research and business activities in China. General Joseph Dunford, chairman of the US Joint Chiefs of Staff, told a Senate committee in March that Google’s work in China indirectly benefits the Chinese military, an accusation soon echoed by President Donald Trump.

Anxiety surrounding Google’s international and institutional affairs is nothing new. Last year, the company faced huge criticism after word leaked that it was building artificial intelligence (AI) tools to analyze drone footage for the Pentagon’s ‘Project Maven’. Executives experienced similar uproar over ‘Project Dragonfly’ in 2018, a secretive effort to develop a censored search engine for the Chinese market. This prompted outcry from employees and politicians who criticized Google for helping China withhold information from its citizens. CEO Sundar Pichai has since pledged not to go forward with the censored search product—at least for the time being.

Google has generally limited its operations in the Chinese market since 2010 when it pulled the majority of its products amidst a battle over censorship. Some branches of operation have been maintained, most of which relate to the distribution of Android software and Google Adverts on third-party websites. Despite this tumultuous history, the company’s latest movements have been speculatively characterized as an attempt to regain favor with Chinese officials in a bid to gain a foothold in the country’s heavily regulated internet market.

A bow to state censorship?

Following calls from China’s market regulator for internet platforms to strengthen their censorship and monitoring of advertisements, it was recently revealed that Google has now banned the distribution of advertisements in China for websites that review anti-censorship software – the very tools that many Chinese people rely on to access Google’s services.

Two companies reviewing virtual private network (VPN) software – tools that allow users to circumvent surveillance and censorship – have reported Google refusing to sell their ads to Chinese users after doing so for over two years.

Representatives from Google have issued a response stating:

“This is not new. […] It is currently Google policy to disallow [sic] promoting VPN services in China due to the local legal restrictions […] We have long-standing policies prohibiting ads in our network for private servers in countries where such servers are illegal. All advertisers have to comply with local laws.”

Though the software is essential for Chinese citizens to use Google’s search engine, email, and cloud services, VPN providers and associated websites are now blocked from promoting themselves through Google ads in the country, despite the fact they do not explicitly violate Chinese law.

Speaking to the Financial Times, Charlie Smith of GreatFire.org, a censorship monitoring organization criticized Google’s blunt action in relation to these advertisers as being too broad. He said:

“…there are legally registered VPNs operating in China, so either Google has not kept up to date with local regulations, or they are overstepping their boundaries.”

As it stands, there is no explicit, all-out ban on VPN providers or review websites in China, though providers do need to obtain a license to operate in the country.

The advertisements in question did not explicitly violate Chinese law, which suggests that Google may be following its own prerogative rather than meeting a legal obligation. What’s more, non-Chinese language ads appear to be unaffected by the restrictions, which suggests that Google has come under pressure from Beijing to block ads aimed specifically at Chinese citizens rather than those targeting foreigners. Spokespeople have yet to answer whether the ban was put in place of the company’s own accord or as a response to requests from Chinese authorities.

Freedom of information

Google’s choice to capitulate to the censorship of advertisements raises questions about the company’s complicity in political restrictions on the freedom of information. Controls such as those in China favor only the information that promotes government interests.

When Google shut down its Chinese search engine nine years ago, it announced it was no longer willing to censor search results, thus devastating its relationship with the country’s officials. Just last year, the company’s official position on content moderation stated its loyalty to political neutrality:

“Google is committed to free expression — supporting the free flow of ideas is core to our mission. […] Giving preference to content of one political ideology over another would fundamentally conflict with our goal of providing services that work for everyone.”

It’s clear that future access to the Chinese market requires complicity with state censorship tools, and these developments suggest that Google is willing to bow down to the government’s demands in order to achieve this. The decision to remove advertisements for legitimate security tools further deprives Chinese users of the ability to find uncensored material and undermines the company’s claim to political neutrality. It raises a particular question: If Google is in the business of expanding access to information, why do they not conceive of their business in these terms in China?

A fragmented Internet

There is more resting on Google’s movements in China than whether it might be putting profits over principles. The company’s relationship with the world’s second-largest economy tells a wider story of what happens in a world where the Internet is split in two at a time when our realities are largely driven by what we read on the web.

China’s escalation of media and communication controls over the past decade has manufactured an Internet and information economy entirely disparate from the model that dictates our lives in the West. Choosing to support this distinction does nothing but widen the digital wedge driving China and Western countries apart, and enables anything but the free flow of ideas. If China and the US continue to live in separate “cyber worlds” and absorb two distinct information realities, how can we expect the two entities to effectively cooperate on the world stage and negotiate political issues outside of internet governance?

Even in an environment where Western users are calling for platforms to limit user freedoms in exchange for security, it is only appropriate to recoil at the idea of a global platform that wilfully bans material in support of an authoritarian regime.

What it means for search marketers

China boasts a thriving digital economy. If you’re looking to grow your business and haven’t yet capitalized on this market, you may be missing out on tens of millions of relevant queries.

If you’re focused on improving organic performance alone, Google’s international decisions will have little impact. Instead, you’ll need to focus on Baidu. One of the world’s largest internet companies, Baidu’s search engine has an index of over 750 million web pages and accounts for well over 70% of Chinese internet search queries. Like Google, Baidu also offers music streaming services, maps, images, data storage and, most importantly for business growth, pay-per-click ads.

If you’re targeting Chinese users through Google Ads, Google’s strategic decisions will be paramount. It’s likely that this ban and those yet to come will affect other Google-owned services like Google Marketing Platform and Google Ad Manager.

The impact of these decisions will depend on the nature of your website, product, or service, as well as your target audience. If you intend to target Chinese users rather than foreign visitors to China, or your business provides a service that might be deemed incompatible with China’s agenda even if it’s not technically illegal,  it may face a similar fate. Though you may be unaffected thus far, it’s essential to stay on top of Google’s relationship with large markets like China to predict potential impediments to your marketing efforts and formulate an effective alternative strategy.

William Chalk is a cybersecurity researcher and digital privacy specialist. He covers these issues for leading tech publications to help support our digital freedoms. He can be found on Twitter @_WilliamChalk.