On the 25^th of May 2017, Google’s AlphaGo AI beat the world’s best Go player in a three game match. The highly complex strategy board game is known for its difficulty and huge set of possible moves, which is what makes this victory such an impressive feat for the champion gaming bot.

Increasingly, we’re hearing about the growing capabilities of artificial intelligence, with many of us encountering and interacting with this technology in our everyday lives without even realising it. With audiences becoming more and more attuned to traditional advertising methods, as well as using a huge variety of tools and platforms to consume and distribute information, it has become the marketer’s primary focus to harness the latest technological innovations in order to reach and engage users.  In addition to the demands of consumers, marketers are also looking to exceed the expectations of their clients by using tools and strategies that will allow them to deliver their services more efficiently.

When they’re not busy toppling board game champions, these rapid changes to the marketing landscape are being led by Google, with the tech giant already playing a huge role in shaping the use of digital technology for both businesses and consumers alike. In fact, their CEO Sundar Pichai recently announced a move from ‘mobile-first’ to ‘AI-first’ over the coming years, which gives a strong indication of how instrumental this technology will be in the future of search. The same can also be said of Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg, whose own investment into AI technology and machine learning has been well documented, as have the efforts of many other influential companies and emerging start-ups.

While AI is often discussed in terms of its future relevance, it is important to remember that this technology is already being implemented by companies throughout the world, across a variety of industries. To provide us with an introduction to some of the tools and techniques that are being used, and to predict where this may lead us in the near future, here’s a closer look at how AI is shaping the world of digital marketing:

Ads

AI is already influencing ad creation, targeting and measurement, which is only set to increase over the coming years. One of the most interesting examples of these innovations in recent news was the revelation that Mattersight would be using voice analysis to deliver personalised ads on home assistant devices. According to reports, Mattersight will be using their voice analysis technology in order to deduce speaker personality traits, allowing advertisers to target users based on this information.

In addition to ad targeting, companies are also using AI to gather performance data that will allow them to measure the efficiency of their marketing efforts, which in turn will also contribute to greater accuracy in future campaigns. Google recently outlined how they will use this technology to provide attribution precision to users of their Analytics, DoubleClick and AdWords services, debuting ‘Google Attribution’ at their annual marketing conference. The aim of this service is to give users a clear picture of their marketing performance across devices and interaction points, allowing the contributing sources to gain their deserved recognition, as opposed to attributing all credit to the user’s last click.

While creativity is often the most downplayed aspect of AI innovation, it has actually been used to create visual ads for quite some time now. Back in 2015, M&C Saatchi created what was dubbed as the ‘world’s first’ AI Ad for coffee brand Bahio. This was powered by an algorithm which continuously tested design and copy changes, gradually eliminating elements which failed to engage while reintegrating those which proved successful. In more recent times, the same agency has used IBM Watson to create ad campaigns for Toyota, using behavioural data from Facebook to personalise the content.

The biggest obstacle facing AI ad targeting is the objection to data use, which will be particularly challenging in the European market, due to new European Union laws which will come into place in May 2018.  Companies who use data in what is deemed to be a discriminatory or irresponsible fashion could face huge fines, demonstrating the barriers that technology will face as lawmakers seek to ensure that legislation keeps up-to-date with these advances.

Visual Recognition Tools

While their use in security applications may be the first thing that comes to mind when it comes to visual recognition tools, they are also proving to be incredibly influential in the world of digital marketing, both in terms of user engagement and in data gathering. From live videos to memes, a huge portion of our online interactions take place in the form of images and video content, which means that we must have the tools to enhance these mediums and monitor their impact on audiences.

Visual recognition tools have played a vital role in the development and widespread use of augmented reality applications, which have drastically enhanced the ability of brands to engage their customers and cultivate user generated content. Crucially, these tools bridge the gap between ‘real life’ and digital experiences, providing marketers with greater control and insight into user journeys, and providing unique experiences which encourage addictive use (as is exemplified by the surge of business using Pokemon Go to attract customers in summer 2016).

The most recent example of visual recognition being used to enhance online search is the announcement of the ‘Google Lens’ tool at this year’s I/O conference. Combining image recognition and information about the user’s location, the tool uses the camera feature on Google mobile devices to provide detailed information about these locations or objects. This information ranges from simply identifying an unfamiliar object, to performing more complicated tasks, such as logging into a wifi network using an image of the password sticker on the router.

Aside from the obvious ways in which these tools are able to enhance user engagement, they also provide tech companies with the ability to capture data and further enhance their learning ability. Despite the differences in how Facebook and Google are using visual tools to serve users, their aim to use them in order to understand and respond to user needs is fundamentally the same, as this Variety article points out.

Content Creation

If you regularly read news articles and reports online, it’s highly likely that some of the content you’ve consumed has been composed using artificial intelligence. The most famous of these tools is ‘Wordsmith’, a platform created by Automated Insights which turns data into coherent pieces of content. Wordsmith has been used by several high profile names in the industry, including The Associated Press, who have used it to generate sports coverage and quarterly earning stories, freeing up journalist time and extending their ability to cover multiple events.

To give you an idea of how prominent these tools could soon become, technology research and advisory firm Gartner estimated that by 2018, 20% of business content will be authored by machines, listing reports, press releases and legal documents amongst the range of content that could soon be produced using AI. This is supported by the number of content writing tools that have popped up in the past two years, one of the most recent being PingGo, a start-up which allows users to generate press releases based on answers to journalistic questions on their chosen ‘story’. The company was founded by Sarah Lee, the owner of a PR firm, with the aim of making press coverage more accessible to small businesses and projects that do not have the budget to invest in traditional PR.

Although most content writers are quick to point out that machines lack the ‘humanity’ needed to inject personality into writing tasks which require a high level of emotional sophistication, research shows that audiences are finding the content produced by bots to be increasingly informative and coherent, evidenced by Christer Clerwall’s study ‘Enter the Robot Journalist’. For now, computer-generated content still falls short in terms of its readability and persuasiveness, however, this could drastically improve in the coming years.

Another limitation of current content production technology is its reliance on human input, which is required in order to map out the content and provide the facts needed to produce it. This could change as computer intelligence improves, providing content bots with the ability to understand and produce natural language. Back in 2014, Google’s Ray Kurzweil predicted that computers would be more intelligent than humans by 2029. Considering the progress that has already been made in the past few years, it is not difficult to imagine that bots could become capable of highly sophisticated writing in the not-too-distant future.

While it’s safe to say that AI marketing is still a developing platform in the world of digital communications, it is far from being a distant, futuristic entity that has yet to be harnessed. Brands across the world are using AI throughout their campaigns, while tech companies are piling resources into pioneering the technology needed to facilitate these services for users and businesses alike.

Are you looking to work with a forward-thinking organisation who can provide cutting-edge digital solutions for your business? Get in touch with Designer Websites today to find out more about our bespoke website services.

When attempting to achieve high Google rankings, there are lots of different factors to take into consideration. For most keywords, you won't get anywhere near the first page unless you have a user-friendly website that is technically sound, loads quickly, and contains excellent content that is ultra-relevant to the topic in question and ultra-helpful for your site visitors.

If you've ticked all of those boxes, congratulations, but the bad news is that you're still not guaranteed a prominent position in the SERPs. There's another ranking factor that still carries a huge amount of sway: links.

How search engines use links

To search engines like Google and Bing, links from one website to another are like votes of confidence. If somebody links to you, then as far as Google's bots are concerned, they're effectively saying 'I endorse this website and believe that it is interesting, helpful and/or entertaining'. Even if the link was created because somebody was trashing your company on a forum, the link itself will still pass 'juice' to your website and therefore improve your chances of ranking in search results.

Of course, it's not quite as simple as 'more links = better rankings'. For one thing, some links are worth considerably more than others - you might have a hundred links from obscure blogs and local businesses, but if a competitor gains one link from a well-known, high-authority website (think BBC News, the Financial Times, a government page), they may well blow you out of the water overnight.

Furthermore, certain links can do more harm than good when it comes to your SERP rankings. Google's quality guidelines warn against creating manipulative links - this means that your website may be penalised (i.e. lose its rankings) if:

• You pay for links on other people's websites (adverts should be marked with a 'nofollow' tag so as not to pass link juice)
• You build a lot of links from websites that aren't relevant to yours in any way
• You deliberately create links for the sole purpose of affecting your organic rankings
• You participate in shady link exchange schemes, private blog networks (PBNs), etc.

Your rankings may also be adversely affected if you have a lot of links from spammy and/or low-quality websites. For instance, you probably don't want any online casinos or pornography sites linking to you (although this may not apply if your own website falls into one of these categories).

Why not just create a whole bunch of websites and link to yourself?

Genuine organic links from high-quality websites usually don't come along on their own, and link outreach (contacting other site owners to ask if they'll link to your page from theirs) is a time-consuming task that is by no means guaranteed to get results.

With that in mind, it's not hard to see why some webmasters - and some SEO/marketing agencies - have the following thought:

"Why bother begging other people for links when I could just create a few websites of my own and link to myself?"

Here's an example: if your main website is an online store that sells laptop computers, you might set up a blog on a different domain, write a couple of articles about how to choose the right laptop, and cleverly include a few links to your main site - your 'money' site - in the body of each post. You might then repeat this process a few times so that you end up with a number of different domains all linking to your laptop store.

From one point of view, this is a sound enough strategy. Whereas you can spend hours researching and emailing link prospects that you may never hear back from, it doesn't take long to create a simple site using Blogger or Wordpress, and you're guaranteed a new link at the end of it. But is this really an effective way to bolster your link profile and boost your organic rankings?

We'd argue that no, it isn't. Here are three reasons why:

1. It's potentially manipulative - and thus leaves you open to Google penalties.

At time of writing, there's nothing in Google's guidelines on link schemes and unnatural links that specifically forbids creating new websites and linking them to your main site. However, here's what they do say:

"Any links intended to manipulate PageRank or a site's ranking in Google search results may be considered part of a link scheme and a violation of Google's Webmaster Guidelines. This includes any behaviour that manipulates links to your site or outgoing links from your site."

This statement is deliberately vague - it puts the onus on you, the webmaster, to judge whether your link creation tactics are manipulative or not. If you participate in any questionable linking practices, you're potentially opening yourself up to present and future Google penalties, and as anyone who saw their rankings fall when Penguin and Panda were first brought in will tell you, that's not a risk worth taking.

There is no doubt that the tactic of creating new websites for the express purpose of building PageRank-passing links to your 'money' site could be classed as manipulative. The new sites will likely add no value whatsoever to the web, and the links themselves will probably be a dead giveaway, making it clear that your satellite websites were set up for unnatural SEO purposes and not to serve any particular need.

2. The links will be practically worthless anyway.

Broadly speaking, it's good to have inbound links from a variety of different domains, and it's true that creating a dozen simple Wordpress blogs and giving each one its own unique web address is a quick and easy way to grow your list of linking domains. But here's the thing about links: quantity is less important than quality. As mentioned above, a single link from a high-authority domain is worth more than a hundred links from low-authority websites, and a brand new blog that was created in a hurry and doesn't contain any real content is about as low-authority as it gets.

In other words, you can spend weeks setting up new websites and linking to yourself, but any positive impact on your rankings will be minimal - you're better off spending that time looking for genuine link/collaboration opportunities that will actually benefit your website. (At least then you won't be at risk of getting hit by a thin content penalty!)

But okay - let's assume that you're taking a slightly more considered approach to this. Instead of creating a basic blog page, publishing one or two keyword-stuffed posts containing over-optimised links to your main site, then repeating these two steps ad infinitum, let's imagine that you've taken the time to create a high-quality website that really does add value to the web. You've written a lot of genuinely useful, insightful content; you've given the site an appealing design instead of just using a template; and you've only linked to your 'money' website where it's actually appropriate to do so, perhaps scattering a few other external links throughout the new site for balance. Maybe you've even done such a good job that several other people have linked to your new website, thereby boosting its reputation in the eyes of the search engine bots.

But here's the thing...

3. Why not put all of that effort into your main website?

Creating good content and building a website's reputation is extremely time-consuming, and if you're prepared to do all of the above to ensure that the links on your satellite site(s) will actually have a positive effect, it rather begs the question: why aren't you prepared to do that on your 'money' site?

Instead of using your time and resources to convince Google that your linking site is legitimate, it's surely better to create high-quality content for your main site that will drive more traffic and increase user engagement in the place where it actually affects your company's bottom line.

* * *

One final clarification: what we're not necessarily saying here is that you should never link between two websites that you control. If you own two separate websites, each with its own independent reason to exist, then it's fine to link between them as long as there is a natural reason to do so.

For instance, if you have one website that sells laser printers and another that sells toner cartridges, it may well make sense to link from one to the other - not only will this potentially benefit your Google rankings, it will also provide a better online experience for your users (since someone who buys a printer will naturally want to know where they can buy toner for it in the future).

Worried about your website's link profile? Not sure of the best way to climb the Google rankings? Our SEO specialists can help - contact Designer Websites today to discuss your requirements.

If you have been following the recent political campaigning for the snap election on June the 8^th, you may have read about the recent criticism regarding the Conservatives ‘Dementia Tax’. This policy, which may require the elderly to pay for their care at home with the value of their house, has come under fire by opposing political parties and the public alike.

The policy coined the name ‘dementia tax’ due to the likely-hood it will be the sick and elderly who will face the brunt of this new policy. As many people would also like to leave their home to their families once they pass on, this proposal seems to have struck a chord with many British families.  

In response to the negative press the Conservatives received for this policy, they decided to use Google Ads to advertise their own version of the policy under the title ‘The So-Called ‘Dementia Tax’ – Are You Getting the Truth?’ whenever someone googled the phrase ‘dementia tax’.

Here’s a look at why buying Google Ads for ‘Dementia Tax’ backfired on quite a big scale for the Conservatives.

• Buying the adverts for ‘dementia tax’ legitimised the term Dementia Tax

Despite the general consensus, Dementia Tax is not the actual term for Theresa May’s policy. However, by buying the adverts for the ‘dementia tax’, the term has now become legitimised with around 448,000 exact match results on Google Search.

By legitimising the term, this also provided journalists with every right to run articles with the term ‘dementia tax’ which lead to an onslaught of articles criticising the Conservatives tactics.

A lesson to take away from this if you’re looking to use Google Ads for your business is to ensure you bid for the correct term and provide users with the exact thing they are searching for. The issue with the Conservatives advert was that if someone was searching for ‘dementia tax’, they most likely already knew about the negative press the term was receiving. 

• Google Ads are open to everyone, even your rivals

 Soon after it was discovered that the Conservatives had bought a slot on the front page of the ‘dementia tax’ search, with their article ‘The So-Called ‘Dementia Tax’ – Are You Getting the Truth?’, the Labour Party also bought their own Google Ad for ‘dementia tax’. Their article named ‘The Dementia Tax – Get the Real Facts’ with a meta description ‘The Tories Have Failed to Tackle the Social Care Crisis’.

Not only did this article undermine the Conservatives article, it also made it clear to the public that these were bought adverts. Because it is an advert, it may lead the users to believe they will receive a skewed version of events by clicking on it.

• Google Ads cost money per click

Traditionally, Google Ads are used by businesses that wish to advertise what they’re selling. This is because the sale of their products will even out the cost of the advert.

In the case of the ‘dementia tax’ Google Ad, the conservatives are not gaining any revenue through their Ad and are instead losing money advertising for this term because it is purely just information on the policy.

Another unintended effect of this campaign was that some Twitter users even proclaimed they would click on the ad only to lose the Conservatives money.

• Google makes it clear that an advert is an advert

As can be seen in the pictures above, Google Ads come with a neat little ‘Ad’ box in light green next to the article. This makes it obvious to the user that this search engine result is an advert which has paid to be in the top position. Although it has been found that 64.6% of people click on Google Ads when they are looking to buy an item online, this may not work as well when the advert is for an article.

Many users will have a preference for their source of journalism, and so might bypass the Conservatives ‘dementia-tax’ Google Ad altogether. Advertising about policies is marginally more difficult than advertising a product, and the Conservatives lack of understanding in this department is what led to their downfall with this campaign.

After reading this list of how not to use Google Ads, if you did want some help with your own PPC Advertising our experts are here to help. To request a quote for help with PPC, just click here.

At this year's Google Marketing Next Keynote 2017, Sridhar Ramaswamy, Bhanu Narasimhan, Bill Kee, Karen Yao, Roshan Khan and Jennifer Liu announced a range of new and exciting Google updates which will be provided to the public before the end of the year. Many of these updates strive to make many everyday marketing tasks quicker and more accessible to everyone, alongside working to improve every businesses conversion rates. 

If you happened to miss this year's Google Marketing Next Keynote, we've put together the top 10 useful features and insights we took note of while watching the presentation.  

1. The Introduction of Google Lens

Google lens will now allow you to view the world through Google. Whether it is a restaurant you want to see the reviews for, a flower you don’t know the species of or the password on a wifi router, simply direct your Google lens at it and all the information you need to know will become available. 

2. New Beta AMP Landing Pages

With each second your page needs to load, the bounce rate increases by 20%. Google is introducing the option to have new AMP landing pages wich will speed up your ads vastly, leading to an increased conversion rate. 70% of people search for something before they buy it, so it is in your best interest to ensure your ads are the first thing they see. 

3. Introduction of Location Extensions and Store Visits

Google will soon be introducing location extensions to the general public, which means that when your video advert is displayed, your businesses location, opening times and distance away from the nearest store will appear beneath the video. This will hopefully improve the rate of consumers visiting businesses in person, which can then be tracked through the store visits data Google introduced 2 years ago. 

4. New Tools to Measure Store Sales Will Link Google Ads to Offline Sales

91% of people decide to buy a product after seeing a relevant ad, which is why Google are introducing two new tools which will allow you to see how your ads directly related to offline sales. The first will allow you to import transaction data into AdWords to see store sales and revenue at the campaign level you use for search and shopping campaigns.

The second new tool will allow you to take advantage of Googles 3rd party partnerships to get store sales data. Their partnerships cover 70% of credit and debit card transactions in the US, and paired with the previous store visits Google map data, this new feature will be able to link offline purchases to online ads. 

5. Customer Patterns and Life Events To Link to Google Ad Targeting

New Customer Pattern and Life Event data will help businesses understand where people shop and when life's biggest events take place such as graduation, moving and getting married. This key information will allow businesses to make their ads even more targeted to their key consumers.

6. Follow Your Customers Buying Path with Google Attribution

Instead of all your data being based on last click attribution, Google Analytics will soon let you see precisely what adverts lead the consumer towards buying your product. Therefore, instead of the analytics stating your consumer came through organic traffic, you will now be able to see if they saw an advert for your product 1 week ago, watched a youtube video for your product, had a retargeted ad and then finally searched for your product directly. 

Through unique reach information, you will be able to see exactly how well your adverts performed which will contribute to making more precise marketing decisions in the future. 

7. Google 360 Will Manage All Campaigns in One Place

It has been found that there is a shocking 40% higher bounce rate from mobile landing pages when compared to desktop. Google is working to improve this figure with new landing page features on Google 360. A new landing page tab will include reports about each of your current campaigns, so you can keep an eye on it at all times and pay attention to the pages that are not performing as well as they should be. 

8. Google Adwords and Google Optimize Will Soon Integrate

Adwords will also be integrating with Google Optimize, meaning different variants of your landing pages can be tested on different members of your audience. This A/B split testing is available for use on web pages at the moment, but bringing it to landing pages is sure to provide the most insightful analytics for business.

9. DoubleClick to Introduce DoubleClick Bid Manager

This feature will use machine learning to analyse past campaigns and recommend the right inventory, audiences and budget based on your goals. It will also provide an estimated impression volume and reach, which will be a useful insight for many campaign managers. This is currently available in beta and will be provided to all customers in the coming months. 

10. Google Home To Develop Local Inventory Knowledge 

The Google Assitant is getting smarter and can now tell you precisely where you can find a shop selling the product you are searching for. If a company would like their business information to be available to Google assistant, they must submit their local inventory data to Google. Google Assistant will then be able to provide your consumers with directions, opening times and price of the product consumers search for. With 20% of all searches now being made by voice, this update will be widely useful for many businesses across the globe.

If you'd like to use some of these new features for your business but need some guidance, then you've come to the right place, our development teams and SEO team are already working with these features and can help your business take advantage of them too. Contact us today to request a website optimisation quote. 

Late last year, Google released a free version of Google Optimize on an invite-only basis. However, in April 2017, Google Optimize was released globally to the general public without the need for an invitation. This is big news for website owners because Google Optimize is a free A/B testing platform which allows you to quickly create and test different variants of your web pages to see which versions are most effective.

This will be a great benefit to many businesses as it eliminates the need for hours of tedious coding, testing and analytical analysis. If you're new to this tool, read our handy step-by-step guide to Google Optimize below - remember, if you don't want to use this tool yourself, our SEO experts can perform split tests for you in order to improve your website's performance.

About Google Optimize

Let's say your website isn't doing as well as you'd like and you want to change a few things to see if you can boost your conversion rate. Instead of completely replacing your old web page with a new version, Google Optimize allows you to create an alternate version of your web page and set it to be shown to some of the people who visit it. The rest of the time, the original version of the page will be shown. This A/B testing experiment allows you to see which version of the page works best; all you have to do is tell Google what your 'goal' for that page is (e.g. a purchase or enquiry form submission), and Google Optimize will measure which variant is better at achieving the goal.

To put it simply, Google Optimize allows you to edit the look and content of your pages and test parallel page variants without writing a line of code yourself. Experiments can be set up in minutes, and they will begin gathering data right away.

How to Use Google Optimize

Before you begin using Google Optimize, you need to ensure you have a clear goal in mind for the page you're testing. There is no point editing a page without a reason, so have a look at your website's analytics and look closely for areas that could be improved. Reasons to conduct a Google Optimize test may include:

• Trialling different versions of your contact/enquiry page to see which one converts better
• Changing the look of your homepage in an effort to reduce bounce rate
• Revising the layout of a product page in order to boost sales
• Rewording a blog post or information page to improve reader engagement

One of the best features of Google Optimize is that it is integrated with Google Analytics, making it tremendously easy (assuming you already use Google Analytics) to review the data your experiment generates.

Step 1 - Add the Optimize Snippets to Your Website

In order for Google Optimize to work, you first need to add the Optimize snippets to your website. This is essentially a line of code that must be added to the Google Analytics tracking code that should already be on your website.

You can find your snippet by going to the Container page on your Google Optimize account and clicking ‘Install Optimize Snippet’. From that point, you will be able to click ‘View Snippet’ which will provide you with a modified Analytics tracking code to use.

To run experiments on your website, you need to add the snippet to the HTML code on the pages you want to experiment on. Be sure to place it as early as possible in the source code.

For more information on how to complete this step, just click here. You may need to ask your web developer to add the code for you.

Step 2 - Create an Experiment

Once you have created your Google Optimize account and added the snippet to your website, you will be able to find a blue button that says ‘Create Experiment’ on the Container page. 

The next page allows you to name your experiment and enter the URL of the page you would like to edit. After this step, you can choose which type of experiment you would like to conduct - the options are as follows:

• A/B test (tests different versions of a web page)
• Multivariate test (tests multiple variants of multiple sections on a page - currently in beta)
• Redirect Test (tests different destination URLs - allows you to create two totally different pages with different URLs and see which one is more effective)

For the purpose of this guide, we're going to focus on the A/B test option as this is probably the one you'll use most often.

Step 3 - Test the Variants

This is where the magic happens! At this stage, you will be able to create the different variant(s) of your web page. To get a good understanding of how well a page is working, ensure there is an even split between the variants and the original version. Make sure you set objectives prior to running the experiment to ensure you get as much information out of the test as possible.

After this stage, you can edit your variation with Optimize's visual editor tool. Once you've downloaded the Chrome extension, you can start to edit the text, layout, fonts, colours, and many other parts of your page - basically, implement any change that might make the page more likely to achieve its goal.

Once you have finished retooling your page, you can click 'Save' to go back to the experiment page. You are then free to create another variant or start running the experiment with the variants you've got.

Step 4 - Run the Experiment

Google recommends letting your experiment run for at least 2 weeks before analysing the results, but the longer you run it, the more data you'll gather and the more confident you'll feel when you declare which variant works best. Especially if you’re editing a page that tends to get fewer views than others, it may be best to run your experiment for quite a bit longer than 2 weeks.

When your experiment has ended, you will be provided with data on the level of improvement, the number of sessions, and the probability that each variant will perform better than your original page. As you can imagine, this information is incredibly useful as it enables you to make the best possible decision when it comes to testing the new features of your website.

If you like the sound of using Google Optimize but don't know where to start, we can help you to make the most of this tool's capabilities. Contact us now to request a website optimisation quote >