All Script And Tols For Free: 🔍 Dealing with the data reckoning head-on

Nov 12, 2020

Good morning, search marketers, so long, Webmasters Central.

Hello, Google Search Central. It's official, after 14 years the Webmaster Central brand is 301ing to Search Central. Barry took a look back at how Search Central came to be a key data resource for SEOs, developers and digital marketers.

And speaking of data, it's easy to glaze over at the mention of CCPA and now CPRA, but it's no longer tenable to turn a blind eye and leave privacy management to the legal and ops teams. Greg Sterling spoke with Kristna Podnar and several other marketers about concrete advice on what we should all be doing now to prepare for CPRA.

"Marketers will need to start paying attention to what data they collect, why they collect it, and how they manage that data throughout its lifecycle," says digital policy consultant Kristina Podnar.

"If you haven't already, now is a great time to review all of the cookies and data-sharing functions that exist on your website and catalog what they do. It's likely your legal teams will need to review these sooner rather than later," advises Simon Poulton, VP of digital intelligence at Wpromote.

Of course, there's even more to consider than California's privacy laws. Register to join Greg, Simon, and Abigail Matchett, associate director of enterprise analytics at Bounteous, to delve deeper into data privacy and the implications for targeting and measurement during SMX next month.

I'll also be joining Simon next week, Nov. 17, on a panel hosted by Wpromote to discuss the data reckoning and how to embrace privacy-first marketing. Sign up to join us here.

Ginny Marvin,
Editor-In-Chief

Social Short

Why Pinterest moved beyond CTR to understand ad engagement

Relying on a straight click-through rate metric to understand how ads are resonating has its shortcomings, explained Pinterest engineers in a blog post this week. Those shortcomings include not accounting for ad position bias, users' Save or Hide actions and brand awareness objectives.

Instead, Pinterest explains, it developed a User Metric defined as Weighted Engagement on Ads [Clicks, Saves, Hides, etc.] / Weighted Engagement on Neighboring Organic Content [To account for position bias]. In the table above, the team shows examples of how the "new metric better reflects user engagement," says Pinterest. (Blue is statistically significant positive, red statistically significant negative, grey is neutral.)

Why we care. While the post illustrates how the new metric helps Pinterest better account for user satisfaction with ads as it continually runs new experiments, understanding how platforms consider and account for ad quality (such as Google Ads' Quality Score and Ad Rank), can be very helpful in informing how to interpret your own campaign metrics — and help you optimize your campaigns toward your own goals.

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Search Shorts

Slooowwwwmageddon coming? Nah...

Weird Google update. There has been some weird and strange chatter over the past few days around a possible Google algorithm update but we are not sure how widespread it is and Google has not confirmed anything.

iFrame loophole won't work. Addy Osmani from Google said that iframe loophole to trick Google into thinking your core web vitals scores are better than they are will not work since the Chrome UX report takes it into account.

Slooowwwwmageddon. John Mueller of Google jokes that the page experience update might be code named "Slooowwwwmageddon."

Veterans Day Doodle. Hope you all had a nice Veterans Day yesterday. If you missed it, here is the backstory on the Google Doodle.

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Building connections between siloed channels, technologies and teams

Sponsored by Integrate

Oftentimes, when we visualize the perfect buyer's journey, we're looking at it from a marketer's perspective, imagining what we're trying to achieve with our initiatives. But, ultimately, the definition of the perfect journey is in the eye of the buyer. The buyer doesn't really care about your programs, your channels or what technologies you're using, they're just trying to get enough information to make a purchase decision.

We recently spoke to Integrate CMO Deb Wolf about the perfect buyer's journey and the obstacles marketing teams face when trying to deliver the ideal customer experience. In the lightly-edited conversation, Wolf shares specific tips for building connections between siloed channels, technologies and teams, as well as the reasons why this is so important today.

Read More »