Barry Levine says, “Last year, testing service Optimizely said it was going beyond A/B as it launched Optimizely X, which it described as the “world’s first experimentation platform.” Today, the San Francisco-based company is reinforcing that identity by announcing it has purchased Experiment Engine, founded in 2014 and based in Austin, Texas. It provides a platform for conducting A/B tests to increase sales. Deal terms were not made public. Optimizely said that the acquisition will allow it to offer better capabilities for managing optimization experiments, with tools for project... [...]

Ben Davis says, “Content generation is increasingly being undertaken using management platforms and dispersed teams of freelancers, rather than traditional fixed role, in-house teams. This trend is evident in a burgeoning gig economy and a rise in technology companies providing HR and content platforms. Over and above AI, these content marketplaces represent the future of content creation. AI for content generation is a long way off Though AI seems to be a trend that is living up to the hype, content generation is one area where its potential impact is perhaps overblown. Yes, deep learning... [...]

Danny Sullivan says, “Google has neither censored nor banned the Infowars site, despite what some headlines out there say. The company did, however, rescind an example that its quality rater contractors received using Infowars and other sites in terms of how to judge page quality generally. Memorandum has a round-up on the news, including a Business Insider take that gets the situation generally right. The news came from Mike Cernovich’s blog, which gets it incorrect with a headline saying “Google Takes Out Major Contract to De-List InfoWars from Its Search Index.” Infowars itself... [...]

Alex Heath says, “The all-star roster of tech veterans that Facebook began assembling one year ago is quietly making progress, steadily expanding the size of its ranks and the hardware prototypes under development. The group, known as Building 8, currently has four simultaneous projects underway, spanning everything from cameras and augmented reality to science fiction-like brain scanning technology, Business Insider has learned. And Facebook is already planning the coming-out party for its impending family of gadgets, laying the groundwork to drum up interest and sell the products when... [...]

Jeremy Fawcett says, “Bank of Scotland, Halifax, Lloyds and Natwest have just announced over 200 branch closures collectively. Natwest says it’s a result of the ‘dramatic shift’ from face-to-face to online and mobile transactions. Nothing new there… 32 of its branches went last year because of ‘increased use of digital banking’ and 300 as far back as 1996, as it rolled out new technology. It has been a 20-year bear market for high street branches and a 20-year bull market for online banking, but it’s still hard to know where we are in the cycle. Especially with the Payment... [...]

Ginny Marvin says, “Quality Score reporting in the AdWords interface leaves much to be desired. Only the current Quality Score is available, and granular details are contained in individual pop-ups that make analysis cumbersome. That could be changing. Avner Pinchover shared a blog post on the Israel version of the Inside AdWords blog with Search Engine Land that describes a series of new columns of Quality Score metrics coming to the AdWords UI. It was posted back on March 10 and seems to have received little attention. It was removed for some reason yesterday. (The archive can be found... [...]

Barry Levine says, “Influencer marketing — where bloggers, YouTube celebrities and others are paid to wax enthusiastic about a new shampoo or whatever — is a Wild West with rapidly moving boundaries. In the US, the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) acts as a tough sheriff trying to cover millions of acres of territory with few helpers, as it orders sponsors here and there to cease and desist when influencers in those sponsors’ campaigns post an endorsement that doesn’t adequately identify itself as sponsored. Recent examples include Lord & Taylor and Warner Brothers, both last... [...]

Ben Davis says, “Econsultancy has published a new report titled The Fundamentals of Email Marketing. Subscribers can download the report in full. Here, I have picked out just a few slivers of wisdom. Some of these points are marketing 101, but with so much new technology on the market, practitioners must keep the fundamentals in mind. 1. SMART objectives and a contact strategy It’s worth going right back to the basics of setting SMART objectives. Email is often the get-out-of-jail-free tactic that marketers use when they’re in need of uplift in sales or conversions. But, as the... [...]

Janet Driscoll says, “Like any marketing channel, SEO is an investment. Whether you’re using in-house resources or hiring an agency to do the work, SEO isn’t free. To make the most of your SEO time (and perhaps direct financial) investment, it’s helpful to have an SEO strategy established to be your road map for execution. However, one of the bigger challenges to creating an SEO strategy is that the search engines (primarily Google) are shifting ranking factors and introducing new updates fairly regularly. Therefore, an SEO strategy has to be a living document, allowing for regular modifications... [...]

Jeff Rajeck says, “Data from ad campaigns has, in some ways, never been so important. Data has become the way marketers know whether the brand messaging is right, what drives customers to purchase and where they should advertise in the future. Fortunately, advertising data has also never been more available. Google, Facebook, and other ad platforms offer hundreds of ways to divide up their reports into segments and countless metrics for us to see how well various segments are performing. So with how important and available ad data is, it is quite puzzling that there is so much fraud in digital... [...]