Barry Levine says, “Pega is today joining the growing number of companies that are setting up conversational bot interfaces for their products. The Cambridge, Massachusetts-based firm offers a customer relationship management system and an application development platform, which together can be utilized by client companies to readily construct customer-facing applications for customer management, business process management, case management and other purposes. It is today announcing Intelligent Virtual Assistants, which are AI-powered conversational bot interfaces that clients can use for... [...]

Marcus Miller says, “Your website is the center of your digital marketing world — the place that all digital rivers run toward. And of course, the largest of its traffic sources is generally organic search. Yet all too often, businesses don’t think about SEO until after having a website designed (or redesigned), and these sites are often sadly lacking on the SEO and digital marketing front. They may look shiny, but if the marketing smarts are not cooked in at design time, then you will be running the marketing race with a wooden leg. Or at the very least, faced with going back to the... [...]

Jeff Rajeck says, “All of this talk about rogue YouTube ads, fake Likes on Facebook, and Snapchat vs. Instagram is fascinating, but how much of it is relevant to a marketer’s daily job? To find out, we surveyed hundreds of marketers and asked them which channels they are really using these days. Part of what makes marketing interesting is that the discipline is constantly evolving. Hardly a week goes by without some major change to a consumer service or a new way to use a platform to engage with our audiences. Yet sometimes the pace of change can be overwhelming. It’s often difficult... [...]

Daniel Gilbert says, “Making good things better is… good. Take campaign-level audiences — they’re good, but wouldn’t meta-campaign-level audiences be even better? Sure. To reiterate, campaign level audiences are great. You don’t have quite as fine control as with ad group-level audiences (and it’s annoying you can’t have ad group and campaign audiences together!), but they’re much easier to keep track of, because there are a lot fewer of them. (Plus, there’s a pesky limit of 5 million ad group targeting criteria in an account — which sounds like a lot but is easy to eat... [...]

Barry Schwartz says, “Google released its annual web spam report yesterday, documenting some of the company’s spam-fighting activity in 2016. One of the most eye-catching data points for me was that Google has sent out over 9 million messages related to web spam in 2016; that number was more than double the 4.3 million messages in the 2015 report. The other metric that stood out was that hacked sites continue to rise, this time by 32 percent from 2015 to 2016, but it was a 180 percent increase from 2014 to 2015 in the previous report. Here are some data highlights from this year’s report: 32... [...]

Jeff Rajeck says, “It is always a challenge for brand marketers to optimize campaigns, even in a single channel. Coordinating campaigns across many channels is even harder, though, according to a recent Econsultancy research report, produced in association with IBM Marketing Cloud. When asked whether their organisations ‘could effectively deliver cross-channel marketing’, fewer than one in ten (6%) brand marketers indicated that they could to any great extent. Yet in the same report, marketers also stated that brands should endeavour to improve their cross-channel marketing... [...]

Ben Davis says, “We’ve hated internal email for so long, but only a few businesses have got rid of it altogether. Accepting it as a necessary evil, here are eight ways to reduce the bureaucracy of email, and make office life more bearable and your organisation more efficient. 1. ‘Four sentences’ In a recent correspondence with PR Matt Mirandi, I noticed his email signature, which declared: “Q: Why is this email four sentences or less? A: http://four.sentenc.es” If you follow the link you’ll see the remarkably simple premise – limiting the length... [...]

Greg Finn says, “A slew of helpful new changes have made their way into Bing Ads Editor’s new release, version v11.10. The changes enhance functionality, add features and alleviate issues within the Bing platform. Support of Review Extensions Thankfully, the new version of Bing Ads Editor supports Review Extensions and will be a godsend for paid search managers everywhere. No longer will advertisers be relegated to the web version for review extensions. The upgrade will allow for managing of the third-party reviews, along with implementing shared Review Extensions that can be added to... [...]

Nick Hammond says, “Let me start off with a disclaimer.  I am not a voice technology expert, conversational designer or even adept in the area of Alexa skills. This piece is written from a marketing perspective and will I hope, have relevance for marketeers wanting to know more about opportunities in this area. On Thursday 6th April, I attended a very impressive voice tech session hosted by the Hoxton Mix Collective. The impressive line-up of speakers included – Oscar Meary, co-founder of Opearlo, talking about ‘Alexa Design and Best Practices’ ; Marc Paulina, interaction designer... [...]

Greg Sterling says, “Apple launched app-store Search Ads in October 2016. Since that time they’ve received praise from developers as a high-converting, high-value app discovery tool. Today the company is announcing that Search Ads will become available in the UK, Australia and NZ. The booking UI opens today and ad serving begins on April 25. Developers running campaigns in the US will be able to clone their ads for the new markets. AppsFlyer issued the following assessment about Search Ads’ performance in a report issued earlier this year: [Apple had] the best retention in iOS North... [...]