Wikipedia

Posted on December 4, 2021 by admin

Each year we donate to a charity and our team collectively decides on which charity. We like to support organizations who have helped advance the world and deliver on the change for good promise the Internet has and will continue to bring to the world.

Every person on the planet deserves the chance to educate themselves. Wikipedia offers free access to knowledge and wisdom. We cannot think of a better organization to donate to that embodies the power the Internet and makes for a brigther future for mankind.

LinkedIn’s Member Group Targeting Is a One-Two Punch to Facebook & Twitter

Posted on August 24, 2021 by admin

LinkedIn provides unprecedented targeting for businesses. The ability to create audiences by industry, job description, company size are all terrific yet the hidden gem is the ability to be able to target by Member Group.

What is a LinkedIn Member Group? LinkedIn Groups provide a place for professionals in the same industry or with similar interests to share their insights and experiences, ask for guidance, and build valuable connections. You can find a list of LinkedIN member groups here.

For an outdoor equipment e-commerce merchant, we can find ‘rockclimbing’ member group and target video or single image ads to these people. That’s very focused targeting. LinkedIn allows you to then target those who have seen say 75% or 100% of a video you showed them or engaged by clicking with an ad to recieve an ‘In Mail Message Ads’ (think email marketing campaign). We are seeing 30%+ click through rates on LinkedIn Message Ads to audiences that have previously engaged.

That playbook is a one two punch to Facebook and Twitter who don’t offer businesses the return on investment when finding new customers.

Practical AI for Content Optimization

Posted on June 29, 2021 by admin

Artificial intelligence (AI) is for most people a mind bending concept. It’s easy to get wowwed by Amazon’s sensor rich ‘Go’ stores (video below) despite only 29 of them in the USA. Or Elon Musk’s Neuralink demo where 3 litlte pigs are running around with a implant to their skull/ cortext the size of a nickel.

Yet what business owners really want is practical AI they can use to improve sales activity, reduce costs and increase profits. Bear in mind that IBM Watson sees Strong AI as a 50 year timeline!

On that note, perhaps the best use of AI we have seen is Otter.ai which allows for video / audio transcription to text be done which allows simple content optimization at scale. For retailers or businesses sourcing customers from within local areas, automating content production using AI is critical.

While we wait for autonomous vehicles to arrive, perhaps the most pervasive AI is the applications like Calendly which help streamline appointment settings, allowing us all to spend time on more important work than back and forth emails to confirm meeting times.

How 4 Lines of Code Can Change Online Advertising

Posted on May 10, 2021 by admin

With third party cookies being blocked by most browsers and Chrome set to follow with Google rolling out FLoC (Federated Learning of Cohorts) to uphold people’s privacy, WordPress have for the first time since we can remember exercised some of their might.

40% of the worlds websites run on WordPress. Crazy right! And, WordPress just announced plans to disable FLoC using the following four lines of code, which will cause the blogging platform to issue a HTTP request header tells the browser that FLoC should be disabled for the site.

function disable_floc($headers) {
 $headers['Permissions-Policy'] = 'interest-cohort=()';
 return $headers;
 }
 add_filter('wp_headers', 'disable_floc');

Just 4 lines of code is going to severely change online advertising.

LinkedIn Optimization & Lead Generation

Posted on March 18, 2021 by admin

Since LinkedIn was acquired by Microsoft for $26.2 billion in June 2016, we have not seen a great deal of upgrades to the functionality of how the interface for lead generation works. Summarized below are observations from our team members who are working to increase lead generation from Linkedin for multiple clients on a daily basis.

So what is it really like to optimize content on a platform like LinkedIn? We speak regularly with our LinkedIn Account Managers and as many individual LinkedIn Advertisers do not, we wanted to share some of the insights.

1. Single Static Ads that are 300×250 work better more times that a “Sponsored Post”

2. LinkedIn is expensive and doesn’t always convert as well as Google on a cost per lead basis.

3. LinkedIn Matched Audiences are best when they have a database of 100,000. These are audience custom audience segments you can use as targeting selections in your advertising campaigns. Within Matched Audiences, you can upload a list of companies or email contacts via a csv file and then target advertising to them. You can also create a ‘Lookalike’ audience which will target similar people to those in your Audience List.

4. Lead Gen Forms may be created if your Ads account is associated with a LinkedIn Page. You can create Lead Gen Forms by following these steps @ https://www.linkedin.com/help/lms/answer/a427102/create-lead-gen-forms

Here’s a screenshot of a client lead gen campaign so you can see the reporting of the leads and here’s a useful on-demand webinar on lead generation strategies and best practices.

We hope this helps as not everyone gets this information if you’re located outside the United States of America.

Let There Be Light at Apprenticeship.com.au

Posted on December 8, 2020 by admin

Today is the official launch of Apprenticeship.com.au inspired by the words from the Autobiography of Andrew Carnegie ‘Let There Be Light’. I quote from words of Andrew Carnegie:

“I spoke again at Dunfermline, July 27, 1881, when my mother laid the foundation stone there of the first free library building I ever gave. My father was one of five weavers who founded the earliest library in the town by opening their own books to their neighbors. Dunfermline named the building I gave “Carnegie Library.” The architect asked for my coat of arms. I informed him I had none, but suggested that above the door there might be carved arising sun shedding its rays with the motto: “Let there be light.” This he adopted.

From working in a mining pit without light as a kid after emigrating from Scotland at age 12, he built the Pittsburgh Carnegie Steel Company, which he sold to J. P. Morgan in 1901 for $303 million. It became the U.S. Steel Corporation. After selling Carnegie Steel, he surpassed John D. Rockefeller as the richest American for the next several years.

He became a leading philanthropist in the USA and British Empire, with special emphasis on local libraries, world peace, education, and scientific research giving away 90 percent of his fortune.

How Andrew Carnegie Went From $1.20 a Week to $309 Billion ... Then Gave It All Away

Calculating Engagement for Optimization of Content

Posted on November 22, 2020 by admin

Most of us know this flywheel has been used to power energy output (steam, water, etc) from the industrial revolution, maybe earlier. The concept of a flywheel to help deliver energy to a machine (steam train, windmill, turbine, etc) is part of history and science lessons at school.

Yet it has a place in the minds of the information architects in the age of Google and the rotational force of search engine algorithms. Lets unpack what we see here for content optimization and audience engagement.

In July 2020, we re-archictected Help.Sellercloud.com and after several months compared the post go live Google Analytics stats for the past 3 months versus the previous period. There are some impressive stats worth noting.

1. Bounce rate has fallen 5%

2. Pages viewed per session is up 25% (that’s 1 in 4 visitors viewing an extra page on average)

3. Each user is staying on the site for 1 whole extra minute (up 37%)

If you take the total number of users (12,303) and multiply it by 1 min, you get an extra 205 extra hours that users were on the site. So what were they doing?

For many clients, we calculate branding and engagement this way. Google like to see increased engagement and this gets rewarded with higher rankings for all pages.

Google Anti-Trust: Default Settings on ‘Sensitive Content’ Need to Change

Posted on October 24, 2020 by admin

Undeniably, Google Adwords (the pay per click engine) is one of the greatest money machines of all time. In 2019, Google’s ad revenue amounted to almost US$ 134.81 billion. I’ll do the math for you…. it is $256,487 per minute. Not bad right?

So you might argue with this type of volume and velocity with over 5 million advertisers participating in concurrent online auctions for keywords (Google advertisers bid for keywords in real time auctions), that sometimes, somethings can go wrong.

Like when you place a $10 a day budget and Google automatically spend 4x that which happened this week for a client of ours. Or when $1400 in one day was spent on an Ad Group that has $270 daily budget. That was last week for another of our clients. Or this morning when we explained to a software company servicing the K-12 educational sector that the first thing we do for clients inside Google Ads Account is turn OFF all the ads showing on ’sensitive content’ and that it is tragic that Google (#DoNoEvil) make this a default setting in every Adwords account.

Sadly, most folks are not going to go inside ‘Settings’ click on ‘Additional Settings’ where this is buried inside the Google Adwords dashboard. No wonder, most people don’t know it is even their. Here’s the screenshot attached so you too can turn it off.

I hope the US Justice Department via the Anti-Trust Lawsuit against Google filed this week helps Google to do the right thing and make this ‘sensitive content’ setting an opt in and not an opt out default.

Google holds 82% market share on desktop in search engine market in the USA and 88% on mobile – as per page 31 of the Justice Department Complaint Against Google which you can read at https://www.justice.gov/opa/press-release/file/1328941/download. When you have that much market dominance, you can take people’s money in a blind closed auction with zero transparency and show ads on content that advertisers don’t even know where its been shown.

Google Voice – Not quite right just yet

Posted on September 25, 2020 by admin

As an early user of Google Voice since they rolled it out locally to business around the Google Head Office in Mountain View, California in 2010 we like the features of it. While Google Voice isn’t mainstream, “voice optimization” is a topic of ongoing discussion as Google Assistant, Google Home, Alexa and other voice based in car technologies permeate our lives at home, at work and on the go.

That said, the translation of voice to text still has a ways to go. Here’s a prime example. mmmm!