Marketing Google

As I watched the ball drop on New Year’s Eve, I reflected on where I think we, as marketers, dropped the ball in 2017, and what we could do to improve in the new year. And my mind kept coming back to customer data — namely, how we use it, control it and share it to inspire smarter customer engagement strategies and stimulate business growth.Here are three resolutions I think all marketers should strive to keep in 2018:1. Put your customers first — reallyA lot of you may believe you put your customers first. But if you’re working with siloed data sets that you don’t own and control, you’re actually putting some business requirements first.Far too often, marketers give up control of their customer data to a vendor and hope for the best. But when vendors don’t — or can’t or won’t — return data to a brand’s internal systems, the brand can’t close the loop on attribution, let alone gain visibility into what customers need now and may desire tomorrow.To really understand your customers, all…

An artificial intelligence company has launched what it says is the first autonomous AI tool for determining the “trustworthiness” of a story.Called Unpartial and developed by San Jose, California-based Recognant, the tool is an extension for the Chrome browser. CEO Brandon Wirtz told me that other browsers may be supported at some point.Recognant has described the tool as being a detector of “fake news,” but it’s actually a “trustworthiness” detector. It doesn’t check facts or validate the source, but instead uses generated rules to evaluate the internal validity of a story. It is appropriate only for content of about 300 words or more, which excludes most tweets or Facebook posts.The tool looks at such factors as whether the article’s conclusions are too biased based on the information presented, if the claims are backed up and if the math makes sense. It also considers the correctness of the grammar, the density of facts and the presence of subjective statements.[Read the full arti…

When Google announced that campaign daily budgets could spend up to double their setting, some shrugged and others thought it could cause real problems. A few weeks ago, I asked people on Twitter if they had been impacted by the change and checked in with others who said they’d had issues.It was a mixed bag. Many have had no issues at all. Others, well, it hasn’t been all roses. Here’s what I heard.First, some of the good to neutral responses.“Just like the previous 20 percent incarnation, this has produced no issues (210 accounts in our MCC). It all evens out just fine,” said Brett Dixon, director of DPOM. His agency hasn’t seen any negative impact from the change. Dixon added that some accounts use third-party bid and budget management tools “so that may help with pacing,” but overall he has seen no problems.Giacomo Iotti says the couple of budget overspends he’s seen in accounts yielded good returns, which of course is the ultimate good.Nils Rooijmans said he has seen 200 percent d…

The New Year is upon us, full of personal plans made with the best intentions.It also represents a time for businesses and teams to take stock and plan for the coming year; the difference being that unlike personal plans, business plans cannot remain unfulfilled.Many of you will be looking to 2018 with a renewed vigor for your SEO strategy. Strategies will vary depending on a number of factors including the complexity of the campaign, the length that your team has been working on it and the work completed thus far.However, there is a fundamental checklist that we have here at Yellowball that is applicable to all campaigns:1. Review the previous yearBlue sky thinking and creative ideas for the year ahead are fantastic; fear not, they will come. In the meantime, it is critical that we learn from previous actions by reviewing 2017.If you set goals at the beginning of the year, you can use these as benchmarks to understand your successes, and also pinpoint where the campaign experienced h…