Mindset Segmentation

Organizations need tools for listening. #Mindset personas bring customers to life and enable employees to anticipate customers’ emotional needs.

While marketing segmentation distinguishes people according to their buying behaviors, mindset segmentation identifies people based on their emotional desires and expectations. These psychological personas or archetypes reveal how customers perceive a company’s brand; whether their values are reflected in the company’s values; and how the company’s products fulfill their personal needs for self-esteem or security. 

#Mindset segmentation illuminates the heart and mind of a customer. Communicators then craft messages that are rooted in understanding, as if derived from a personal conversation. It is a process of building rapport, which begins with listening; it is not a process of telling or showing.

Benefits of migrating and fully adopting Universal Analytics

Google has been rolling out Universal Analytics steadily since its launch in 2012 and this year, it announced that the transfer of properties from Classic to Universal Analytics was complete.

But with Google announcing that the next stage would be its retiring of classic GA, if your sites and apps are still using old and outdated tracking codes and libraries (ga.js), you’re going to be missing out on a whole host of features and developments that are only compatible with Universal Analytics.

Highlight of Universal Analytics –

•     The  analytics.jscode snippet is used to collect data from your website. This biggest advantage of JavaScript is that it is more flexible than its predecessor—Google Analytics ga.js JavaScript.
•      The tracking code offered allows you to collect data using any digital device. Taking this further –
•     Track websites – analytics.js JavaScript library
•     Track Mobile Apps – Google Analytics SDKs (v2.x or higher)
•     Track other digital devices such as game consoles & information kiosks – the Measurement Protocol
•     Easy to set up and customize tracking code which assists in cross domain tracking in the most accurate manner.
•     Through the account Admin page, you can control organic search parameters, referral exclusions and even search time exclusions.

Other advanced features include:

User IDs
These allow you to associate multiple sessions (including any activity within those sessions) with the same user by a unique ID

CRM data and Measurement Protocol
Universal Analytics allows for GA Measurement Protocol on external digital devices, such as game consoles and point of sale terminals. Which means developers can send raw user interaction data directly to Google Analytics servers, enabling brands to link and analyse both online and offline behaviour.

Search Term Exclusions
Any traffic that uses pre-defined excluded search terms will be classified as direct traffic, and not organic search traffic. This can be used to block branded or irrelevant keywords from being attributed to organic search channels, resulting in more accurate search engine metrics.

Google Drops Change Location Search Filter From Search Results

Google has quietly dropped the ability to filter your search results by changing your location. In the past, you would be able to click on the “Search Tools” option and set a location. This would give you search results as if you were in that location.

RankBrain: How Google Is Using Artificial Intelligence To Rank Web Pages

The days of a hand-crafted human search algorithm may soon be over. Google has announced RankBrain, a new artificial intelligence that is now processing a “very large fraction” of searches each day. This new system was reported to Bloomberg and has been implemented, in part, to help Google better understand deal with the amount of ambiguous queries that they receive each day.

RankBrain isn’t replacing the current Google Algorithm (currently nicknamed Hummingbird), but instead RankBrain is one of the “hundreds” of signals according to Bloomberg. Previously Google has claimed up to 10,000 signals & sub-signals. It turns out that the RankBrain signal is pretty important too. Greg Corrado, Google senior research scientist, stated that RankBrain is now the 3rd most important signal in matching results to a search query. When asked about the other two Google declined to comment.

The artificial intelligence of RankBrain comes in the form of mathematical entities called vectors that can be understood by computers. When presented with an unfamiliar word, RankBrain will help formulate a guess at what the query was about and filter accordingly. At Search Engine Land we took a deep dive into RankBrain and were given the following Google authored post on machine learning with some examples for those looking to learn more on the topic.

So now you may be asking yourself, When will I see this RankBrain in my results? The answer is that you most likely have already. The given example of a search query that leverages RankBrain is “What’s the title of the consumer at the highest level of a food chain”.

On Search Engine Land it was pointed out that the lengthy queries may be simplifying the search and making more manageable.

At first glance, RankBrain doesn’t appear as much as a signal as it does a refinement. Google confirmed that RankBrain is a signal, but it is also important to understand the complexity that a signal can be. Things like links or words on a page can be signals and signals can be associated with users as well. There are many possibilities as to how RankBrain could work into being a signal, especially if it takes a variety of additional elements into account to help classify the right content for users.

GDN Converts Text Ads to ‘Richer Text’ Image Ads

Google has added an awesome new feature to the Google Display Network(GDN) – it will now automatically convert text ads to image ads. Google explains: “Richer Text is the most brand-safe ad type within our text ads family. This ad type runs on text + image and image only inventory. A logo (from Google+) is paired with this ad layout to add further brand and aesthetic value. Please contact your account manager if you wish to provide an alternate image. Unlike Simple Text, publishers do not have control over the color of this ad type. Instead, the color is derived from the primary and secondary colors of the logo used by the advertisers.”

The following factors are part of the decision to convert a text ad to image:

• CTR
• Conversions per dollar
• Deep conversion rate
• Landing page dwell time

Across the Google Display Network and AdMob, text ads are optimized across three primary ad types: simple text, richer text, and native text. Google wants to choose how your ads render to optimize performance, because better performance for you = more revenue for Google.

Google Shopping

In most products, the manufacturer will provide a Global Trade Item Number (GTIN) to uniquely and completely identify a product in the global marketplace. Providing GTINs in your product data feed increases the likelihood that your offers are matched to the Google Shopping product catalog. This helps relevant, accurate results on Google Shopping; in fact, early experiments indicate that offers matched to the catalog receive up to 40% more user clicks than those that do not.

That’s why, as part of the 2015 update to the Google Shopping Products Feed Specification shared in June,Google refined the guiding principles and requirements around GTINs. Starting September 15, it requires Google Shopping feeds targeting Australia, Brazil, Czech Republic, France, Germany, Italy, Japan, Netherlands, Spain, Switzerland, the United Kingdom or the United States to submit valid ‘gtin’ and ‘brand’ for all products when the ‘brand’ is a designated brand and the ‘condition’ is ‘new’. At that time, disapprovals are done  that do not meet this requirement or are submitted with invalid GTINs.

Integration of Search and Dictation in Google Docs

Big update is voice typing in Docs. This dictation feature is built upon Google's voice-recognition technology and will be available in 40 languages. Users can simply tap and start talking when they access Docs on desktop, or on Android and iOS devices.
Meanwhile, Docs will provide a "see new changes" button to let users see all the edits in a document since the last time they opened it. If users are working on a document with multiple people, their changes will be highlighted in different colors.
Aside from the above nifty enhancements, Google has also created new templates for Docs, Sheets, and Slides, a refreshed user interface for Forms and a new "explore" feature in Sheets that automatically generates charts out of the data in the spreadsheet.