Keeping Customer Trust in an Era of Brand Safety Concerns

It may take years for a brand to earn a customer’s trust, but it only takes minutes to lose it. An example of this is when a brand’s ads appear alongside extremist, hateful, or inappropriate content. Brand safety is not a new issue, but it’s one that’s on the rise — and it’s keeping advertisers awake at night.

In just the past two weeks, major companies all across the globe have pulled advertising spend or significantly limited display advertising because their ads have appeared next to undesirable content such as that containing hate speech, extreme violence, and other extremist content. In February alone, DoubleVerify reported that eight million ads were blocked from appearing on pages it classified as containing hate speech — up threefold from January.

Adobe’s Commitment
As a leader in digital marketing, we believe that we have an obligation to provide our customers with solutions that are secure, transparent, and in accordance with their values. In advertising, Adobe is committed to helping marketers achieve their goals without compromising brand safety, media quality, or transparency.

Digital marketers and advertisers are understandably worried. According to a recent survey conducted by Adobe Digital Insights, 58 percent of marketers report that their concerns about digital ad fraud have increased in comparison to 2016, and one-half of media buyers surveyed identified “media quality” as the biggest challenge facing the industry.

Enhancing Brand Safety Through Third-Party Integrations
With that in mind, today we’re enhancing our brand safety capabilities with the integration of yet another trusted third-party anti-fraud technology — Grapeshot. Grapeshot provides pre-bid filters that scan for objectionable content on a page before an ad is placed there. It joins Adobe’s existing third-party brand safety and fraud integrations with Integral Ad Science, Proximic, and White Ops to offer maximum brand safety for advertisers.

The Full Scope of Adobe’s Preventative Measures
In addition to these integrations, Adobe Media Optimizer demand-side platform (DSP), part of Adobe Advertising Cloud, provides customers with proprietary brand safety features, including automated tools to prevent ads from appearing alongside objectionable content and a manual site-screening process performed by a team of quality assurance specialists.

The full set of preventive measures Adobe provides for its customers’ protection includes:

• Site- and app-level screening performed by a specialized team of experts who review quality and content, excluding any unsafe inventory (e.g., pirated content, malicious content, etc.);
• Contextual targeting that enables advertisers to target only pages containing content that is relevant to their ads as well as exclude those containing certain topics;
• Pre-bid filtering to proactively detect and prevent ads from being delivered on pages with objectionable content before the website or app loads — a crucial point because it proactively protects the brand’s image and prevents their ads from appearing alongside hateful and extremist material; and
• Third-party brand safety and fraud integrations (noted above).

We’re also asking advertisers to put these features to the test by offering Grapeshot’s filters and other brand safety technology integrations at no cost through the end of June 2017. The technology is available on Adobe Advertising Cloud’s DSP across desktop video and display inventory.

Adobe’s focus is to do what’s best for marketers, and as such, our DSP automatically refunds purchase impressions identified as fraudulent by our partner White Ops. But, as Brett Wilson, VP and GM of Advertising for Adobe, notes, “making bot traffic immaterial is only one piece of the puzzle; contextual brand safety has always been equally paramount. We’re proud that the adoption of our brand safety tools is effectively protecting our customers from both.”

About Adobe Advertising Cloud
Adobe Advertising Cloud, which launched at Adobe Summit last month, is the industry’s first end-to-end platform for managing advertising across traditional TV and digital formats. The platform already manages roughly $3.5 billion in annualized ad spend on behalf of more than 1,000 global clients, including Allstate, Ford, Johnson & Johnson, Kraft, Liberty Mutual, L’Oréal, MGM, Nickelodeon, and Southwest Airlines. Learn more about Adobe Advertising Cloud.

The post Keeping Customer Trust in an Era of Brand Safety Concerns appeared first on Digital Marketing Blog by Adobe.

from Digital Marketing Blog by Adobe https://blogs.adobe.com/digitalmarketing/advertising/keeping-customer-trust-in-an-era-of-brand-safety-concerns/

Ask Yoast case study: SEO of a mom blog

Transcend Tags and Deliver Experiences

The number of web pages and marketing tools has exploded. In 2011, there were roughly 100 different web-based marketing technologies and now, just five years later, there are more than 3,800.

This explosion of web-marketing tools has given marketers a plethora of options to deliver compelling experiences, but these marketing tools have also given marketers an unwieldy problem: more products that don’t work well together and more data to wrangle then integrate.

To become an experience business, marketers need rich customer data. And, there’s plenty of it available right from their own web sites. To capture this customer data, businesses use JavaScript tags that allow marketing tools, like Adobe Analytics, to find and store the data they need.

But there’s a catch.

Bottleneck, not a scalable solution.

The more than 3,800 web-marketing tools available has ushered in a new reality. Setting up tags for your online marketing tools and managing them across hundreds of web pages is not something that can be accomplished manually with any degree of effectiveness.

With a traditional tag management solution, you can streamline the process somewhat with templates that simplify the deployment of these tools, however, even this is turning out to be a bottleneck instead of the scalable solution marketers thought it would be.

Data that flows through marketing tools should be integrated, and immediately actionable. But instead, template tag managers place a wedge between marketers and the marketing tools they use by controlling when templates are updated and how they operate. Why should tag managers have ownership over templates that deploy third-party marketing tools? The answer is they shouldn’t.

The next generation of tag management.
It’s time for a new solution to help marketers deliver exceptional experiences with real-time data that is trustworthy and integrated. Adobe Cloud Platform Launch is a next-generation tag management solution that enables brands to orchestrate and activate web-based marketing tools.

Launch by Adobe allows independent software vendors (ISVs) to build, manage and update their own integrations that connect their products to the customer experience. This gives marketers easy access to a vast catalog of client-side technologies to create compelling experiences faster than ever before.

Launch by Adobe will shift the way marketers gather and use data to deliver personalized, real-time experiences by delivering these benefits.

1. Faster time to value by simplified deployment of web apps. Previously, Adobe customers using Dynamic Tag Management had to search for the implementation code of non-Adobe products. With Launch by Adobe, marketers have one place to browse, deploy and configure marketing tools that are both owned and not owned by Adobe.

2. Deliver compelling experiences with web apps that work together. Launch by Adobe lets marketers determine when marketing tools enter – or do not enter the customer experience. But it also allows those marketing tools to take actions together and share data between each other.

Launch by Adobe uses a marketer-friendly rule builder to determine what actions should be taken in each situation. This rule builder integrates the data and functionality of third-party marketing tags and tools because extension authors can embed new capabilities into each part of the rule builder including events, conditions, actions and data elements. Any marketing or advertising technology vendor can write a Launch by Adobe extension and build functionality on Adobe Cloud Platform.

For instance, let’s say a marketer wants to show a specific YouTube video based off anonymous data in Google Analytics and what they do on the webpage from Adobe Analytics. To accomplish this using Launch by Adobe, a marketer would create a rule that states:

If a customer with a product affinity of “technophiles” clicks on the “learn more” tab on a product page, then play a YouTube video that highlights the technical features that make this product great.

Because Launch by Adobe is built on Adobe Cloud Platform, three different non-Adobe marketing tools capitalized on the open nature of it in way that allowed them to add very specific capabilities directly into the Launch by Adobe system. Doing this allowed all three marketing tools to integrate as a single solution to deliver a compelling experience.

3. Get more accurate and consistent information with unified data. It’s not uncommon to have tags for 20 marketing tools on a web page. Each tag is generating data for a specific web app. Perhaps three of those tags are tracking revenue from the page. However, it’s not unusual for each tag to capture revenue in a slightly different way, in which case the three web apps that are using revenue are all using different data.

With Launch by Adobe, you can define up front how your data — revenue in this case — is captured and then point your marketing tools to that same correct data point. In fact, Launch by Adobe listens to every byte of data that flows through it, allowing marketers or analysts to meticulously manage how data is collected, defined and distributed across web apps. Launch by Adobe empowers brands with trustworthy data to fuel the compelling experiences customers crave.

Transcend tags and deliver experiences.
We used to think of tag management as only HTML and JavaScript and that its sole purpose was to get the tag on the page. Today, tag management is no longer about tags — it’s about composing the right data to serve great experiences. Since data is at the heart of tag management, selecting the right solution is critical.

It’s time to upgrade with a solution that’s completely open and extensible. With a flexible, yet sturdy, web foundation that can integrate, unify and organize data, there will be more options to impact and deliver on the top-notch experience your customers crave.

Launch by Adobe will be available later this year. To stay up-to-date on the latest news and release of Launch by Adobe, click the “Stay informed” button on the Launch by Adobe homepage.

The post Transcend Tags and Deliver Experiences appeared first on Digital Marketing Blog by Adobe.

from Digital Marketing Blog by Adobe https://blogs.adobe.com/digitalmarketing/analytics/transcend-tags-and-deliver-experiences/

Contributing to WordPress as a designer

Announcing Adobe Experience Excellence Award (EXPE Awards) Winners

At Adobe, our core values are to be genuine, exceptional, innovative, and involved — and embracing these core values in our daily lives includes highlighting, recognizing, and honoring our customers and partners who are using Adobe tools to bring imagination to amazing customer experiences.

The EXPE Awards recognize and celebrate customers and partners who are using Adobe Experience Manager (AEM) to transform their digital experience, solve problems, create new and unique experiences, and to innovate and engage with their customers at entirely new levels to create true business value. We started this program to build a community that recognizes and celebrates the success of many of our customers’ and partners’ incredible work around innovation and their dedication to customer success using Adobe technologies. The four categories in our 2017 North America EXPE Awards were:

• Excellence in Digital Transformation: Transforming Digital Experience;
• Excellence in Content Marketing and Velocity;
• Excellence in e-Commerce and Transactional Business; and
• Spirit of Experience.

Adobe’s 2017 North America EXPE Awards and Winners
For its inaugural year, we were blown away by the amazing submissions. It was humbling to see all the creative ways Adobe and AEM technologies are being used to deliver on the vision of the experience business. The winners were announced at the AEM Community day at Adobe Summit 2017 in Las Vegas.

For Excellence in Digital Transformation: Transforming Digital Experience — Wyndham Hotels With Accenture
In this category, we honor exceptional achievement in building a strong digital foundation to transform customer experiences. The winner was Wyndham Hotels (@Wyndham) in partnership with Accenture (@Accenture).

Wyndham Hotels partnered with Accenture to transform their digital experience by launching 11 brand websites to a responsive design that was both modern and transformed the guests’ experiences. They consolidated four digital asset management systems (DAMs) into AEM DAM. Then, they integrated Adobe Target and created content for 6,600 properties, resulting in a 40 percent conversion increase on responsive web and a 200 percent conversion increase on their app. Their mobile bookings grew from 8 percent to 25 percent of all bookings.

For Excellence in Content Marketing and Velocity — Coca-Cola With MRM/McCann
In this category, we honor exceptional achievement in delivering real-time dynamic experiences and capitalizing on user-generated content to create unique customer engagements. The winner is Coca-Cola (@CocaCola) in partnership with MRM/McCann (@MRM_McCann). Coca-Cola brought stories and news to life, humanizing the company and finding new ways to engage readers and inspire conversation on topics and passion points of mutual interest. Its company-centric global publishing network includes over 40 international editions of Journey serving 49 countries, a blog, and Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Instagram, and Snapchat accounts. Between 10 and 15 stories are published each week to Journey and the Unbottled blog. Since its inception, more than 4,300 articles; 27,000 videos; and 1,100 blog posts have been published that focused on universally appealing topics, social causes, and company news. Their Global Journey Editorial Network includes 150+ editors, leads, and publishers. From the time of its launch, Journey has had more than 131 million page views, averaging 1.4 million visits per month.

“Through this synthesis of a people-centric focus and stories that make a difference for the business, we work every day to produce stories that not only expand our reader base, but also challenge, delight and inform it. As social media spreads stories, both real and false, on brands every day, Journey represents our collective best foot forward to jump into the conversation — not to own, dominate or embellish — but to simply take part in the global digital dialogue with a voice that is uniquely Coca-Cola’s.” Doug Busk, global group director of Digital Communications & Social Media, The Coca-Cola Company.

For Excellence in e-Commerce and Transactional Business — ATCO With Wipro Ltd
In this category, we honor exceptional achievement in using a 360-degree customer view to anticipate customer needs, capture dynamic transactions, and increase conversion rates. The winner is ATCO group (@ATCO) in partnership with Wipro Ltd (@Wipro).

ATCO Group is a $20 billion enterprise — with approximately 7,000 employees — engaged in structures and logistics, electricity, pipelines and liquids, and retail energy. ATCO partnered with Wipro to achieve a seamless digital experience, regardless of the internal business unit. A customer can explore, learn, and purchase across ATCO’s entire offering. ATCO is creating a single catalog and checkout buy-flow across all business units. Regardless where the initial customer interaction begins, the combined cart not only allows disparate products and services to be added to the same customer’s cart, but also enables that customer to checkout in a seamless, intuitive way.

For Our Spirit of Experience Award — MasterCard
In this category, we honor exceptional achievement in using the platform for public good, inspiring everyone around for the greater good — and our winner is MasterCard (@Mastercard).

One-hundred ninety-three world leaders agreed to 17 global goals for sustainable development. If these goals are completed, it would mean an end to extreme poverty, inequality, and climate change by 2030. MasterCard’s goal is to enable 2.2 billion cardholders to automatically make donations to humanitarian organizations in 200+ markets. They created The Donation Platform, which acts as a global enabler in the humanitarian space by connecting consumers, merchants, banks, and humanitarian organizations and empowering them to collectively fight to support great causes while changing lives for the better. The cardholder knows that making donations — even microdonations — combined with the donations of many others, will make positive differences in people’s lives. By leveraging Adobe Experience Manager and Adobe Analytics at the core of the donation experience-delivery engine, the donation platform — in partnership with merchants, banks, and humanitarian organizations — offers different ways to donate in 200+ markets. The donation platform creates communities that are collectively engaged in supporting great causes. So far, 28,000 Postepay Evolution MasterCard cardholders have signed up to donate each time they shop, contributing to nutritious meals being provided for children in school through the World Food Programme.

In Conclusion
We thank our customers and partners for sharing their great stories and congratulate the winners on their achievements. We look forward to the 2018 EXPE awards and hope to hear from even more customers and partners. We are super excited to see what great heights you achieve.

The post Announcing Adobe Experience Excellence Award (EXPE Awards) Winners appeared first on Digital Marketing Blog by Adobe.

from Digital Marketing Blog by Adobe https://blogs.adobe.com/digitalmarketing/web-experience/announcing-adobe-experience-excellence-award-expe-awards-winners/

Page speed as a ranking factor: what you need to know

Internal search: why and how

Internal search is the search option on your own website. It’s, for instance, the search widget in WordPress and the product search in WooCommerce. Make no mistake: if your website has over twenty pages, your website should most definitely have that internal search option. There are a number of best practices for that search option, and I’d like to go over these, in this post.

Internal search for informational websites

It doesn’t matter if your website is the Wikipedia of Golden Retrievers, or you simply have a blog about your three-year-old. If your website is packed with content, you’d really want to add that internal search option. When someone lands on your website from Google, for the most part, they are looking for a specific piece of information about a certain subject. If they can’t find it immediately after clicking that link in Google, there are only a few options to prevent that user from clicking back to Google immediately. You’d rather prevent such a bounce, as it tells Google that the specific subject isn’t something it has to rank your website for. OK, I’m exaggerating, but if this happens again and again, that will be the result.

If your website provides an easy way to find the desired information with just a tiny bit of extra effort, you’re immediately raising the chances of people staying on your website. An internal search option is a great way to accomplish this.

Characteristics of a good internal search option

Try to think about that search option as a user, not as a website owner or developer. What does that search option require to work for you? I think there are a few characteristics that are essential for any visitor:

• It should be visible. If you want people to use that search option, don’t hide it in your website’s footer. Adding it to either the top of your sidebar, or in your header, would be a much better option.
• It should be clear that it’s a search option. Very important. Just an input field without a heading, submit button or watermark explaining that it’s a search option won’t suffice.

We emphasized that internal search option even more in our 2015 redesign, by just subtly increasing the magnifier icon:

That already made a huge difference. But besides that, we also lifted the internal search option from our sidebar, straight into the right side of the menu. The search option is equally important for us as our shopping cart and all main menu items.

Search result pages for informational websites

The search field is only step one of an internal search option. Step two is the search result page itself. When we do SEO consultancy projects, we check a number of characteristics of a search result page:

• The search keyword is highlighted in the search result pages
  If you want to decide on what result to click, you’d like to scan the results and quickly click one. Your own search result pages are a means to an end, a tool, not a destination itself. Highlighting the keyword used in search (like Google does), simplifies scanning these results a lot.
• The search result pages contain text snippets with the keyword
  It’s really hard to pick a result when only a title is shown on an internal search result page. There’s a reason why Google sometimes ignores your suggested meta description and shows a text snippet of your page with the keyword instead. It helps your visitor. That goes for internal search results as well.
• Search results are ranked by relevancy
  To all you WordPress users out there: WordPress now orders search results by relevance (since 3.7). Make sure to update. That being said, plugins like SearchWP or services like Algolia can still help you improve your internal search function a lot, and make you manage that relevance. In the old days, WordPress results where ordered by date (newest content first), which made absolutely no sense. Serve the most fitting result first.
• Internal search results are not indexed by Google
  Imagine being a search engine, aiming to serve your visitors the desired information as soon as possible. Google Knowledge Graph inserts the answer right into your search result pages. Do you think that search engines like linking to other search result pages? No. Of course not. In addition to that, Google considers these internal search results lower quality pages than your actual informational pages. So it would make absolutely no sense if your search result pages rank above your category pages on the same subject. Your informational content pages are the pages that matter, these are the pages that should be indexed. Therefore we say:  Noindex,follow your internal search result pages.

Valuable data for optimizing your website

There is another major benefit of a good internal search option. It can actually help your keyword research. In Google Analytics, at Behavior › Site Search › Search Terms, you will find all keywords people have used in the internal search option on your website.

Please check your website’s pages for these keywords. Does the right page come up first? A quick check is simply comparing your internal search results to a site search in Google, like:

https://www.google.com/search?q=site:yoast.com+meta+description

That’s a match, and the right page to rank for “meta description” on our website. If another page would have come up first, we should have created a new, cornerstone-like page for that keyword. Use this to your advantage; it’s your visitors telling you what kind of content they expect on your website.

Google Custom Search

Google offers an option to use their search engine for your website as well. This is called Google Custom Search (GCS). With GCS, you can easily add an internal search option to your site. This option shows results like Google would show these for site:yoursite.com queries.

There are options to limit this search to specific parts of your website, or even a specific page. A nice option for online shops is to limit the search results using specific schema.org types like Product. If you add a certain type, all its children automatically get included.

You fill out a very simple form and simply get a JavaScript snippet you can add to your template. After creation, you can even add more details. You can include or exclude images, for example. There is also an option to add Adsense ads, but I’d recommend against using this on your online shop – that will simply redirect visitors to other websites, or even worse, make you pay for clicks on your own ads from your own website…

Internal search for online shops

This is one of two posts on internal search. As I mentioned in the introduction of this post, an internal search is obviously important for online shops as well. In the other post, I discuss the search option for online shops and add my thoughts on how to improve that internal search option.

Read more: ‘Internal search for webshops’ »

Your call

Are you leveraging your internal search option? How have you improved your internal search result pages? I’d love to hear your experiences and additional tips in the comments.

from Yoast • SEO for everyone https://yoast.com/internal-search/