what does google want? future of digital marketing 2015
TRANSCRIPT
-- President of Western Union, 1876(to Alexander Graham Bell)
This ‘telephone’ has too many shortcomings to be seriously
considered as a means of communication
-- New York Times, 1936
A rocket will never be able to leave the Earth’s atmosphere
-- Microsoft CEO, Steve Balmer, 2007
There’s no chance that the iPhone is going to get any significant market share.
-- Nobel Prize-winning physicist Niels Bohr
It's hard to make predictions, especially about the future
In 2013I talked about:
This query really shouldn’t work
But it does
In 2014I talked about:
VISION: STRONG AI
REALITY: WEAK AI
2015:what we need to change in
our campaigns
brought to you by...
WHAT DOES GOOGLE WANT?
WILL CRITCHLOW, FODM 2015
Results are heavily personalised and contextual
(best shown via voice search - see this blog post)
1
Different “algorithms” for different queries
See Dr. Pete’s presentation
2
Even Google engineersdon’t know why one page
ranks above another(Complex systems)
3
The more techniques mimic human thought, the less explainable they are
Image source: The Analytics Store
TricksRules (set by Google)
Best practices
ML / Panda
TricksRules (set by Google)
Best practices
ML / Panda
Towards AI
We are here
See Kelvin’s excellent presentation for more on this
All this means you need to be TESTING
So. Two kinds of testingGoogle is aiming for
satisfied users
We can test against the users, or against Google
GOOGLEBOT
For users: “CRO”
1
There are some pitfalls
BUT: Google’s proxies for “quality” aren’t perfecte.g. duplicated content can be a great user experience
It’s hard to measure user “happiness”
Satisfied
Delighted
Worn down
For googlebot: “SEO testing”
2
Say with me:Correlation does not imply
…?
...causation. Wait. What?
Further reading for those interested:● Predicting the present with Bayesian
structural time series [PDF]● Inferring causal impact using
Bayesian structural time series [PDF]● CausalImpact R package● Finding the ROI of title tag changes
Consider typical traffic data
Read Ben Este’s blog post for more
We can extract:
Read Ben Estes' blog post for more
Seasonality...
We can extract:
Read Ben Este’s blog post for more
...and trend
We can extract:
Then we can make forecasts(Dotted line = forecast, blue area = confidence interval)
We can detect anomaliesWe use this on our client-only ops platform to spot unexpected changes
Forecast is correct Beats the
forecast
It’s not all roses
It’s hard to make these kinds of changes:
Check out this post from Pinterest’s engineering blog
Haven’t worked out how to test internal linkingWhere the effect propagates throughout the site
But it is powerful
Optimise for actual Google preferences
(rather than guessing how Google will interpret user preferences)
1
Avoid wide scale losses from unsuccessful tests
2
In short:
THANK YOU@willcritchlow
One more thing...
One more thing...
We have an early private beta of a product to do SEO split testing. Come see me afterwards if you are interested
Speaker photo goes here
WILL CRITCHLOW
CEO and Co-Founder, Distilled
@willcritchlow