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4 Ways to Revive Your Website When Organic Traffic Drops

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One of the most important ROIs that marketers track is organic traffic numbers. Apart from sales and conversion rates, this number ultimately defines how well you are connecting with your target audience.

This number will often fluctuate quite a bit throughout the year. For instance, during the busy season (like the holidays), organic traffic numbers may spike. Some companies also experience slower periods where their products or services are not needed as much.

A general rule of thumb is to keep your organic traffic numbers growing by at least 10% year over year.

If your growth rate has been declining or remaining stagnant, it is a sign to act.

Thankfully, growing organic traffic is something that marketers can do – and do quickly – if they use the right strategies.

Here are four things you can do to help grow online traffic and reach wider audiences if your numbers have dropped recently.

1. Ramp up your external link content

If the organic traffic numbers on your website have been dwindling or your rankings have slipped, focus on building external links. Publishing more content on your website may not always help you to drive traffic – but building links can.

Inbound links and the linking domain authority make up nearly 28% of ranking factors for organic search results on Google. By building up your presence on other authoritative sites, you could boost your own site’s ranking while also driving traffic through those links.

To increase your external links, consider pitching content ideas to other related blogs in exchange for outbound links. Contact blogs that reach similar audiences like you and see if they are accepting guest posts. This can also be a great opportunity to give your company or marketing writer better credibility and establish thought leadership.

2. Hunt down new keyword opportunities

Keyword trends are changing all the time. The COVID-19 pandemic is a perfect example of how hundreds of new keyword opportunities can appear over a short period.

For instance, take a look at some of the phrases that exploded in growth from February to April of 2020:

New-Keyword-Opportunities

Image Source

Who would have thought that phrases like how to cut your hair, make bread, or find cute sweatpants would be in the top searches on Google?

While these searches may not be totally relevant to the keywords you tend to target, it is a good time to re-evaluate your keyword lists frequently. There could be ways to incorporate SEO-optimized content or even update your current copy with new keywords.

You can also take this as an opportunity to refine your current targeted keyword list and see if there are some lower-ranking phrases you can start to target. Narrow down your niche content by finding specific search phrases that are relevant, but not highly popular.

If you’re using a keyword research tool like Ahrefs or Ubersuggest, your best bet is usually to go for keywords with a Difficulty of less than 30, and a search volume of more than 100 hits/month.

Remember, these might not be at the top of the list in terms of search volume; however, if the competition is low, it could be worth pursuing.

3. Give new social trends a try

It should come as no shock that the use of social media is at an all-time high. According to recent research from We Are Social, the number of people actively using social media grew by 10% in 2020 – and is expected to continue to rise.

It’s no secret that social media is a major marketing tool. But, you must pay attention to how and why people are using it.

The same study concluded that the average person spends nearly 7 hours a day online. The majority of this time is split between chat apps and social networks – as well as watching videos, shopping, and playing games.

New-Social-Trends-Organic-Traffic-Drops

So, in addition to staying connected with friends and family, most people used social media for distraction. This means that it is not effective to create content solely to convert customers with obvious promotions.

Instead, focus on creating content that captures your audience’s attention and gets them familiar with your brand. Pay attention to the shift in platform usage as well. Video streaming has exploded in recent years, so you may want to expand into additional networks like TikTok or YouTube to engage.

For instance, the San Diego Zoo has been jumping on popular trends and engaging with followers. When the zoo was closed to visitors during COVID-19, this outlet allowed people to stay engaged through viral TikTok trend videos. It also kept the zoo at the forefront of people’s minds, which likely drove in donations and excitement for its re-opening.

Sandiegozoo-Rhinos-Original-Sound-Alec-Towsend

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When traffic numbers or conversions are starting to dwindle, it may be a good time to launch a YouTube channel or focus on more interactive content creation. It’s also a great time to consider testing a rebrand if you want to launch a new “aesthetic” for your social media presence!

4. Consider podcasts

Consider expanding your content library even further by trying content mediums like podcasts or live streams. Overall, podcast listenership has risen by 29% since 2019. Moreover, niche topics are favored among subscribers as the majority of people turn to podcasts for education or entertainment.

Once again, this is a great way to target niche keywords, audiences, and build awareness about the topics your business specializes in. It is highly recommended that you focus on current topics; 60% of podcast listeners use this content to stay up to date.

Listening-Podcast-In-The-United-States-February2019

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Now could be a good time to launch your own if you feel so inclined!

Consider reaching out to other podcasts and pitch them an idea for an interesting collaboration or a reason why you or someone on your team should be featured on their show. Podcasters are always looking for ideas for their next episode.

Not ready for podcasting or want to test the waters before diving in? Other options could be trying your hand at hosting or participating in webinars or social media live streams.

Conclusion

Marketers must be able to adapt and pounce on new opportunities to stay relevant. If your organic traffic numbers have been decreasing lately, it is a sign that your strategies need an update.

The best way to grow your organic traffic numbers is by understanding how to attract customers in the current climate. Now is the perfect time to expand and change – and these are just a few ways you can do it.

What are some other marketing strategies that you have used to grow this year?

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Guest author: Jack Shepler is a Marketing and Search Engine Optimization expert. He founded Ayokay, award-winning marketing, and web design firm in Indianapolis, Indiana that has built brands and increased sales for businesses since 2011. He uses his decades of experience to educate through the Ayokay blog and through public speaking. You can follow him on LinkedIn.

Sourced from Jeff Bullas

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These are the ‘most invasive’ iPhone apps — what to do

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Which apps share the most personal data?

Ever wonder how much of your personal data your favorite iPhone apps use or give away? Thanks to a new study, you can quickly find out — and it may not be a surprise that Instagram and Facebook are among the “worst.”

Among the other “most invasive” apps (we’ll get back to that designation in a bit) are LinkedIn, GrubHub, Uber, Uber Eats, a Swedish shopping app called Klarna and a British train-ticket app called Trainline.

Among the “least” invasive were Microsoft Teams, Netflix, Signal, Telegram, Zoom and app-of-the-moment Clubhouse. None of them collected any data for marketing or advertising purposes for use by themselves or by third parties.

Swiss cloud-storage service pCloud generated these lists by checking out the App Privacy disclosures in the App Store, which Apple began to require in December 2020.

Specifically, pCloud counted how many times an app used personal data for in-house advertising or marketing, or for third-party advertising.

Apple lists the types of data disclosed by apps into 14 categories: Browsing History, Contact Info, Contacts, Diagnostics, Financial Info, Health and Fitness, Identifiers, Location, Purchases, Search History, Sensitive Info, Usage Data, User Content and Other Data.

The worst offenders

The Instagram app, said pCloud, shares 11 out of these 14 categories, or 79%, with third parties for purposes of selling ads. It uses 12 out of 14, or 86%, for its own advertising and marketing.

Instagram’s corporate stablemate Facebook matches that 86% score with its own app regarding in-house advertising and marketing, and comes in at No. 2 in the third-party sharing rankings with a 57% (8 out of 14) score.

(Image credit: pCloud)

The specific categories pCloud listed didn’t quite match up with what we can see in the U.S. version of the App Store — perhaps European privacy rules are creating different results on the other side of the Atlantic.

LinkedIn and Uber Eats shared third place among the apps that shared the most personal data with third parties, scoring 50% each. Just behind them were Trainline, YouTube and YouTube Music with 43% (6 out of 14) apiece.

(Image credit: pCloud)

Among apps that used the most personal data for their own marketing, third place went to Klarna and Grubhub, with 64% (9 out of 14) each; behind those were Uber and Uber Eats, with 57% each.

Even pCloud’s own iPhone app was not blameless. The service didn’t analyze it, but we looked it up in the App Store. The Pcloud app uses four categories of personal data — purchases, contact info, identifiers and usage data — for its own purposes.

That results in an invasiveness scores of 29% for in-house marketing and advertising, enough to place among Lyft, ESPN, Grindr and others. (The pCloud app shared no data with third parties.)

The pCloud blog post also contained a third ranking called “How much data each app is tracking overall.” Instagram and Facebook topped that as well, followed by Uber Eats, Trainline and eBay.

(Image credit: pCloud)

However, pCloud didn’t explain how it got the numbers for that chart, and we couldn’t figure out how. (Instagram scores 67%, less than the average of its other two scores.) We’ve asked pCloud about this, as well as how it determined which apps to analyze, and will update this story when we receive a reply.

How bad is this, and what can I do about it?

Now back to the designation of “invasive.” It’s hard to put clear definitions on privacy issues, because what seems invasive to one person might be completely fine to another person.

For example, I don’t really mind if third parties see what else I may have purchased on Instagram, but it does bother me that Instagram shared my financial information, contact info, contacts and search and browsing histories. You may feel differently.

You also have to bear in mind that these rankings are based entirely on what app developers have chosen to share with Apple. Apps that don’t fully disclose such information may be kicked out of the App Store, but that doesn’t mean they’re all being honest.

We already know that thousands of iPhone apps leak personal information from their back-end cloud servers. It’s a safe bet that many iPhone apps have privacy-leaking errors in their code that they’re not aware of.

Unfortunately, we’ll likely never know how many do because unlike Android, Apple doesn’t let you take apart and check any app’s code for errors or suspicious behavior.

The silver lining is that you can control much of what apps collect and share about you. When you first open an app, it will ask you for several permissions, which you can grant, deny, or grant only while the app is in use. (The third option is probably best.)

You can also go into your iPhone’s Settings app to fine-tune what an app collects about you, but the process isn’t as clear as it is when you first open an app.

Feature Image Credit: easy camera/Shutterstock

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Sourced from tom’s guide

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Yes, Podcast Listenership Is Still on the Rise

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If you’re a longtime Hot Pod reader, you probably know that I hold Edison Research’s annual Infinite Dial study in high regard. The survey-based study of digital media usage has been the longest-running measure of podcast audiences going back to the medium’s earliest days, and as a result, the story they’re able to tell is the one I consider the most reliable.

That said, I didn’t spend as much time covering last year’s edition of the study for what should be obvious reasons by now: It was released at around the same moment that the United States began its descent into the COVID-19 pandemic. Leafing through the report at the time, it didn’t make much sense to me to allocate much attention to the year that had come before when what lay ahead felt so deeply unpredictable.

I don’t need to tell you that a lot has happened over the last twelve months. From a purely podcast standpoint, the wave of lockdowns that began last spring — then ebbed, then flowed, then splayed out into a messy patchwork system — resulted in some initial declines in listenership as the morning commute went away, along with a significant restructuring of work processes and mild consternation over whether there’ll still be a podcast business on the other side of the pandemic.

Eventually, though, podcast consumption rebounded as its structural advantages within the context of pandemic conditions came into sharper view. The medium lent well to remote-production workflows, which in turn attracted more participation from creators and celebrity talent and media companies, which in turn led to the creation of more podcasts and greater recruitment of their respective followings into the medium. Listening behaviors as a whole ended up adapting, moving away from the morning commute and towards more afternoon consumption. The case began to be made that podcasting, more so than many other new media infrastructures, was uniquely suited to meeting the moment. But the question was: To what extent?

The 2021 edition of the Infinite Dial study, published last week, gave an answer: to a considerable extent.

Let’s break the report’s podcast-specific findings out. To begin with, the study recorded gains in the major audience sizing metrics:

➽ 41% of the total U.S. population over the age of twelve, or an estimated 116 million Americans, can now be considered monthly podcast listeners, up from 37% the year before.

➽ 28% of the total U.S. population, or an estimated 80 million Americans, can now be considered habitual weekly podcast listeners, up from 24% the year before.

➽ Meanwhile, podcast familiarity — that is, the extent to which Americans are aware of the medium — continued to grow, present among 78% of the total U.S. population, or an estimated 222 million Americans, up from 75% the year before.

The American podcast audience was also found to have grown more diverse from a gender and ethnicity standpoint, with the study arguing that it has drifted towards a composition that more closely reflects the American population. (One specific finding that leapt out: There were exceptional gains among Hispanic listeners over the past year in particular.)

The report also found that the American podcast audience has deepened their engagement with the medium more generally. This is represented in the finding that weekly U.S. podcast listeners now average eight podcasts per week — typically interpreted as “podcast episodes” — up from six podcasts per week.

A quick note on some methodological progression here: This year’s report also includes a new “average podcast shows in the last week” measure, made distinct from a “podcasts per week” metric. The specific finding on that front: Weekly U.S. podcast listeners averaged 5.1 podcast shows in the last week.

Let’s pause on this beat for a second, because there’s a vast universe of analytical angles baked into this one data point. On a gut level, that feels like a small average number of shows per active podcast consumer especially when held up against an ever-expanding podcast ecosystem, with new shows launching just about every week (or day, or hour). At any rate, it’s worth introducing some level of complexity to that feeling: Not all shows possess a regular weekly publishing cadence, not all shows should be built to compete for everybody’s regular listening slots, and not all niches are adequately covered in the current spread of what’s available. In my mind, there’s room to grow in all directions, and besides, I’d be curious for this ratio of average consumption per user to average production of whole medium to be weighed against other media, whether it’s books, video games, or even the ever-increasing preponderance of products distributed over streaming video services.

Anyway, as always, I highly recommend you go through the report in full, if only to get a better sense of the change over time. But before we move on, I wanted to flag a few other things from other parts of the report.

It should be clear by now that the podcast ecosystem is being fundamentally stitched into other media systems, whether we’re talking about the medium’s competition for listening time against other audio formats (like audiobooks) or how it’s being increasingly absorbed by competition between the large audio streaming platforms.

To that end, here are some of the relevant findings that I’m tucking away in the back of my head:

➽ The report argues that “Spotify has solidified its spot as the largest single-source for online audio, and has played a role in the growth of podcasting (especially with younger listeners).” The platform leads in all the important measures, with Pandora consistently coming in second place.

➽ Audiobook listening seems to be flattening back out. After a spike in the 2019 study (50% of the total U.S. population, up from 44% the year before), that measure now hovers at 45% and 46% of the total U.S. population over the past two studies.

➽ Some interesting findings within the context of in-car media consumption. Of course, the broader point to consider is the fact that folks are driving less during the pandemic, but it’s still interesting to see that AM/FM radio has dropped to 75% of population from 81% of population in the “audio sources currently ever used in the car” measure and that half of the total U.S. population engages in online audio listening in the car through a cell phone, up from 45% of the population the year before.

Finally, shout-out to the new survey questions on Twitch live streaming in there. I know I’ve been watching a hell of a lot more random streams since the pandemic began.

Selected Notes

➽ In case you missed it, I spent two weeks reporting out a feature for Vulture that looked into what happened with Reply All, Gimlet Media, and the union push that took place in the lead up to the podcast company’s acquisition by Spotify in early 2019. That piece dropped last Wednesday.

➽ And as it turns out, I wasn’t the only one poking around. The New York Times and The American Prospect also published pieces on the same day, with the former containing specifics on just how much money various key figures in the Gimlet story made off the sale to Spotify.

➽ Coincidentally, later in the week, the Gimlet Union would secure its first contract with Spotify after two years of bargaining, announcing the deal over its Twitter account early Friday morning. The Ringer Union also secured its own first contract a day later. Parcast, the third content division within Spotify that’s formed a union, is still in the bargaining process.

➽ Entercom, the broadcast radio company that acquired Cadence13 and Pineapple Street, is moving to acquire podcast advertising marketplace startup Podcorn, the Wall Street Journal reports. The deal will value Podcorn at $22.5 million.

➽ CAA is promoting Josh Lindgren as the head of its podcast department. My impression is that this is merely formalizing what Lindgren has already been doing since he joined the talent agency in the summer of 2018. Lindgren’s clients include NPR’s Ari Shapiro, iHeartMedia’s Stuff You Should Know, Jane Marie and Dann Galluci’s Little Everywhere, Maximum Fun, and the Futuro Media Group, among others. Here’s the Variety write-up.

➽ Apple Podcasts is apparently shifting away from “Subscribe” to “Follow,” Podnews found last week. The thinking being — or at least it’s thought to be — that the word “Subscribe” is generally associated with media products that aren’t free.

➽ Keep your eyes peeled on this. From Insider: “Amazon’s ad boss, Alan Moss, told advertisers that the e-commerce giant plans to roll out ads in podcasts.” How and through what means, exactly, remains unclear, but I imagine there’s quite a bit of runway between the Amazon Music platform and the possibility of podcast ad tech-related acquisitions in the months ahead.

➽ Shout-out to the crew over Nieman Lab, who’ve been syndicating RQ1, a new monthly newsletter going over the latest academic research around journalism. A recent issue covered Gabriela Perdomo and Philippe Rodrigues-Rouleau’s paper, “Transparency as Metajournalistic Performance: The New York Times’ Caliphate Podcast and New Ways to Claim Journalistic Authority,” which takes a scalpel to the performance of transparency in Caliphate specifically, but in narrative audio more generally. Really worth the time.

➽ I think this may very well qualify as a first. From the New York Times: “‘Nobody Wants to Be There, Dude’: How a Juror’s Podcast Led to an Appeal.” To fill in the blanks a little bit, the juror is a standup comedian and the podcast has a following of like… a hundred people.

➽ From TechCrunch: “Apple discontinues original HomePod, will focus on mini.”

Feature Image Credit: Eddy Tang/Getty Images/EyeEm

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Sourced from VULTURE

 

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Live Stream Commerce: The Future Social Trend for Ecommerce

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By Tom Beck

Live commerce means using live stream video broadcast on the internet to sell products to viewers. Sellers can live stream on social media, specialist live stream sites or their own eCommerce website, and they often draft in the help of influencers to advertise the product.

Estimates put the market size of live eCommerce at US$60 billion in 2019, with China being the biggest market and the rest of Southeast Asia not far behind. Forrester even predicts that live stream commerce in China will reach US$100 billion by 2023, representing a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 45.7%.

Today, we will explore how live stream eCommerce works, why the live commerce market size is increasing, what challenges live commerce faces to widespread adoption and what the future holds.

How Does Live Commerce Work?

Live shopping is the natural evolution on the internet of home shopping TV channels like QVC and Home Shopping Network. Instead of pre-recorded sales pitches, live stream shopping relies on real-time video delivery. Oftentimes, the brand will approach a famous and popular social media influencer before the live stream event to get them to sell the product for them. Products commonly sold on live stream include cosmetics, clothing and footwear, but also sometimes food and high-end alcoholic beverages.

In China, for instance, where live commerce is most widespread and advanced, the influencers are known as Key Opinion Leaders (KOLs). According to an assessment by Forbes, they work for around 4 hours straight, advertising an average of 12 heavily discounted products every hour, while viewers and buyers can comment and call in to interact with them and ask for more details about the products. Many live streaming shows also include musical elements and celebrity guests to attract more people to watch, so it becomes about more than just shopping, but a whole entertainment experience.

taobao-live

Li Jiaqi, the Lipstick King, is a popular live streaming influencer in China

Where Can I Watch a Live Stream?

Delivery methods for live stream commerce include:

    • Social media. When this is delivered on social media platforms like Facebook, Instagram and WeChat, streaming eCommerce is an aspect of social commerce.

  • Ecommerce websites. Live commerce videos are streamed directly on the retailer’s eCommerce website.

  • Ecommerce marketplaces. Well-known marketplaces such as with Amazon Live and Taobao have their own live streaming capabilities.

  • Live stream websites. Retailers can harness the video technology of specialist live streaming platform services and live commerce apps like TalkShopLive and Brandlive.

  • Real-life events. It’s also possible to organise a live-streamed commerce action at a physical event as Nordic fashion brand Boozt did at the Stockholm Fashion Week 2021.

Why Is Live Stream Commerce Becoming More Popular?

Live commerce is a relatively recent digital shopping experience that is enabled by emerging new online video technology. According to the Gartner Hype Cycle for Digital Commerce 2020, live commerce is near the peak of the first wave of expectation and experimentation, and will take another two years to reach the plateau of widespread adoption by the general public.

Live commerce is increasing in popularity for 4 main reasons:

  • People want personalisation. Live streaming commerce has a more personal feeling than TV shopping thanks to the interactive nature of the comments section on a live stream and the instant reaction the hosts of these videos can give to viewers. It brings back the feeling of buying from a real person as we did in days gone by from sales assistants in store, helping to enhance the customer experience by bringing human warmth back into the impersonal and efficient world of next-day delivery. The desire for a personal, human touch is also partly the product of the fear and isolation of living in a world of lockdown and social distancing in 2020-21.

  • Influencers are cool. People who are into Instagram, TikTok and Twitter want to see their favourite social media celebrities. With influencer marketing, brands tap into this fandom and offer influencers vast sums of money to promote their products, not just on their profiles and in their stories, but in live selling events and sometimes even online auctions.

  • Digital commerce technology is more powerful. None of this would be possible without the increasing trend towards smarter and more accessible technology into customer-facing internet applications. While not all live streaming eCommerce takes place on social media, this is especially true of payment gateways being integrated into social networks like Facebook and YouTube, combining the two forces of live video and digital shopping.

The Challenges Facing Live Commerce

Despite these drivers of audio-visuals in digital commerce, it will still take years for shopping online by live broadcast to become mainstream. Some of the hurdles that have to be overcome are:

    • Consumer readiness. For shoppers used to browsing through product lists and comparing customer reviews as their main form of retail activity, watching live stream videos can seem like an exhausting and time-consuming chore. Having a firm idea of what you want to buy and searching for it directly seems like a much more efficient means of shopping, although it lacks some important aspect of product discovery that live streaming provides. Brands will have to convince shoppers of the benefits of live stream shopping before they try it for the first time, yet alone continue to use it regularly.

    • Choice paralysis. Once live commerce does gain a foothold in the wider world of social commerce and eCommerce, it will face that dreaded anathema of all eCommerce merchants: choice paralysis. If there are thousands of options to choose from when it comes to shopping via live stream, potential customers are just as likely to choose none of them as they are the best one.

    • Customer loyalty. Getting them ‘in the door’, so to speak, is just the beginning. The greater challenge for brands marketing and selling products via live video broadcasts is customer retention. Special discounts and coupons for return customers are just one way of ensuring repeat purchases, but the market will need to innovate new means of bringing people back again for more live streams in the future.

    • Cost of setup. As if these kinds of discounts weren’t enough, products normally sell for a heavily discounted price on live shopping streams anyway. It’s an expensive investment to set up a live stream shopping experience, and to get a reasonable ROI merchants will need to find ways to offset these costs.

“Organizations need to have a strategy to upsell from a few loss-leading products so they can justify the investment.”
[Sandy Shen, Gartner]

  • Willingness to prepare. Not only is it expensive to run a commerce live stream, but it takes a lot of planning resources too. Merchants need to be prepared to invest time, and not just money, into scene preparation, brand awareness and advertising the event to make it a success because if you’re not going to do it well, you might as well not do it at all.

  • Lack of technological integration. While it’s true that the technology for live streaming is improving on Facebook, Amazon and other eCommerce staples, it’s still not well integrated with the experience that people expect of online commerce. Until social media platforms and eCommerce marketplaces can pull together their tech ambitions with the human experiential factor, live social commerce will not take off.

What Is the Future of Live Commerce?

Live stream Photo by Nathan Dumlao on Unsplash

Live streaming shopping content on social media is set to become more meaningful and entertaining

It’s important to note here that in live commerce, as in almost all other eCommerce trends, Chinese shopping habits and technological capabilities are at least 3 years ahead of the rest of the world. Digital payments via the Chinese service provider WePay were available on eCommerce websites and social media platforms long before PayPal was linked to Facebook; shopping on mobile devices, mCommerce, first grew in popularity in China before it did in the West. For an idea of what the future will hold for live streaming commerce, look to the East.

As pointed out by The China Guys, the Chinese experience indicates that the future of live commerce includes:

  • Use by older target markets. There will be greater adoption of live commerce by more audience segments than just young people in the 18-35 bracket, but older shoppers over 35 years old too.

  • Rich video content. Content will strive to be funnier and more meaningful, designed to make consumers feel like they are receiving a more rounded shopping and entertainment experience instead of just a callously calculated sales pitch.

  • More micro-influencers. In order to deliver the most useful and informative content to viewers, brands will rely less on big-name influencers and instead seek out niche experts to attract consumers in their particular field, be it gaming, fine wines or self-help books.

  • Expansion into different verticals. Live streaming will extend to more sectors than just eCommerce sales, but will include health advice and medical consultations, too, as Baidu is planning to do with its live streaming service, Haokan. Think of an industry – any industry, from finance to engineering to government procedures – and chances are its products and services are able to be offered via live video and/or social media.

By Tom Beck

Sourced from smartosc

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Google antitrust suit takes aim at Chrome’s Privacy Sandbox

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By Adi Robertson and Russell Brandom

‘Google is trying to hide its true intentions behind a pretext of privacy,’ say prosecutors

State antitrust watchdogs are targeting Google’s plans to phase out third-party tracking cookies, building on a major lawsuit filed last year. The group of 15 attorneys general, led by Texas, updated its complaint about Google yesterday to include a more detailed case against the search giant, including new claims about Google’s strategic use of the Chrome browser. In particular, the new complaint takes aim at recent privacy updates to Chrome, which could better protect users’ personal data while also entrenching Google’s market position.

Filed in December, the Texas complaint is one of three ongoing antitrust cases against Google. That same month, the Colorado attorney general led a group alleging that the company stifled competition by manipulating search results. A separate case from the Department of Justice is focused on Google’s dominance of the web search marketplace and associated ad business.

Privacy vs. antitrust

Like the original Texas complaint, Tuesday’s updated filing primarily focuses on Google’s technology for targeting ads across the web. The attorneys general argue that Google used its power in search, streaming video, and other markets to stamp out independent advertising platforms, forcing small businesses and media outlets to use its system.

But in the updated complaint, the states apply this argument to Google’s “Privacy Sandbox” — a tool that’s supposed to replace invasive third-party tracking cookies with a more limited system devised by Google.

“Google’s new scheme is, in essence, to wall off the entire portion of the internet that consumers access through Google’s Chrome browser,” the complaint reads. Blocking cookies might broadly be a good thing — other browsers like Firefox and Safari have already done it. But Chrome dominates the browser market, and it’s part of a much larger Google product suite. The suit argues that Google’s plans would require advertisers to use it as a middleman and would make Google’s own advertising system far more attractive.

For years, Google has been gradually scaling back its use of tracking cookies, announcing earlier this month that it will not establish an alternate system for tracking users on the web. But critics of the company — including the Electronic Frontier Foundation — have criticized those efforts as self-serving. Now, state regulators seem to be adopting those criticisms and putting new legal pressure on Google’s efforts to block tracking in Chrome.

“Google is trying to hide its true intentions behind a pretext of privacy,” the suit continues. With Privacy Sandbox, “Google does not actually put a stop to user profiling or targeted advertising — it puts Google’s Chrome browser at the centre of tracking and targeting.”

Reached for comment, Google said the new allegations rested on a misunderstanding of Chrome’s privacy features. “Attorney General Paxton’s latest claims mischaracterize many aspects of our business, including the steps we are taking with the Privacy Sandbox initiative to protect people’s privacy as they browse the web,” a Google representative said. “These efforts have been welcomed by privacy advocates, advertisers and our own rivals as a step forward in preserving user privacy and protecting free content. We will strongly defend ourselves from AG Paxton’s baseless claims in court.”

Update 1:50PM ET: Added statement from Google.

Feature Image Credit: Illustration by Alex Castro / The Verge

By Adi Robertson and Russell Brandom

Sourced from The Verge

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How VW’s polarizing ‘Voltswagen’ prank went over with everyday consumers

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By E.J. Schultz.

Ad Age-Harris Poll shows VW did not help itself, but it did not hurt itself, either

Despite a wave of negative headlines about its April Fools’ Day prank, Volkswagen is not any worse off with everyday consumers—but the automaker also did not help itself by pretending to rename itself “Voltswagen,” according to a new poll.

Fifty-nine percent of consumers who were aware of the stunt said it did not change their opinion of the brand, according to the Ad Age-Harris Poll. Just 20% think better of VW, while 21% said they now hold a worse opinion of the brand.

The poll was conducted April 2-5 among 1,125 U.S. adults ages 18 and older.

While brands have been pulling April Fools’ Day stunts for years, VW’s joke was more elaborate than most. The campaign, which was handled by Johannes Leonardo, played out over several days and was notable for the involvement of top-level VW execs who were quoted in press releases and used their own social media handles to push the notion that the storied auto brand would rebrand itself “Voltswagen” in the U.S. to push its electric vehicle ambitions.

Several mainstream media outlets, including USA Today, Associated Press and CNBC, reported the name change as fact after being assured by sources inside the automaker that it was not a joke. When it was revealed to be untrue, some of these same outlets ran stories that questioned the automaker’s credibility, while conjuring the automaker’s 2015 emissions scandal in which it was caught cheating to evade regulations.

“The use of deceit is really dangerous. If you’re Volkswagen, it’s doubly dangerous,” Erik Gordon, a University of Michigan business professor, told USA Today. “Volkswagen is the last company that should be playing around with deceiving people, even if it’s for two days. It doesn’t play well when you have admitted guilt to having tricked us before.”

But the saga went unnoticed by a majority of consumers, according to the poll, which found that only 21% of consumers had heard about the “Voltswagen” announcement by the time they were polled. Of those who heard of the news, 73% said they were aware that it was an April Fools’ joke (perhaps because the poll was conducted after reports came out that it was a stunt).

The goal of the prank was to raise awareness of VW’s electric vehicle ambitions, which include the ID.4, a compact electric crossover that the automaker is marketing as “the electric car for the people.”

The poll found that 19% of respondents were more likely to buy a VW after learning of the prank, but 69% said it had no impact on their decision. Only 12% stated that it would make them less likely to buy a VW.

The poll reveals a division on whether brands of any kind should participate in April Fools’ Day pranks: 54% said they should not, while 46% said they should. For those who said yes, the most commonly cited reason was “it’s a creative way for brands to advertise.” The naysayers said the pranks “create confusion for customers.”

But younger people are apparently more into the jokes—64% of millennials and 61% of Gen Zers say brands should partake in April Fools’ Day, but only 38% of Gen Xers and 35% of baby boomers agree.

“Holiday promotions can be a powerful and effective tool for brands to engage with customers and build buzz, but not all holidays are created equally,” states Will Johnson, CEO of The Harris Poll. “April Fools’ Day is polarizing because it gets at the heart of the brand-customer relationship—trust. As our research shows, consumers are divided on April Fools’ Day marketing stunts, so brands must carefully weigh the benefits against the risks.”

Feature Image Credit: Stefanie Loos/Bloomberg 

By E.J. Schultz.

E.J. Schultz is the Assistant Managing Editor, Marketing at Ad Age and covers beverage, automotive and sports marketing. He is a former reporter for McClatchy newspapers, including the Fresno Bee, where he covered business and state government and politics, and the Island Packet in South Carolina. He has won awards from the Society of American Business Editors and Writers, the Jesse H. Neal Awards, the Association of Capitol Reporters and Editors, the California Newspaper Publishers Association, the South Carolina Press Association and Investigative Reporters and Editors. A native of Cincinnati, Schultz has an economics degree from Xavier University and a masters in journalism from Northwestern University.

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Gartner: Top 10 data and analytics technology trends for 2021

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The pandemic forced D&A leaders to step up research and analysis to respond effectively to change and uncertainty, the firm says.

While much of the loudest buzz surrounding the impact of COVID-19 was focused on the dramatic shift from on premises to remote work, the pandemic further affected every aspect of the enterprise, which includes data and analytics technology. The uncertainty of what the tech industry would face forced D&A leadership to quickly find tools and processes — and put them in place — so they could identify key trends and prioritize to the company’s best advantage, said Rita Sallam, research vice president at Gartner, in the company’s recently released information.

Gartner has now identified 10 trends as “mission-critical investments that accelerate capabilities to anticipate, shift and respond.” It recommended that D&A leaders review these trends and consider and apply as necessary. Following is a summary from Gartner of the trends:

Trend 1: Smarter, responsible, scalable AI

Artificial intelligence and machine learning are key factors. Businesses must apply new techniques for smarter, less data-hungry, ethically responsible and more resilient AI solutions.  When smarter, more responsible, scalable AI is applied, organizations will be able to “leverage learning algorithms and interpretable systems into shorter time to value and higher business impact,” Gartner’s report said.

Trend 2: Composable data and analytics

Composable data and analytics leverages components from multiple data, analytics and AI solutions to quickly build flexible and user-friendly intelligent applications to help D&A leaders make the correlation between the discovered insights to actions they must execute. Open, containerized analytics architectures make analytics capabilities more composable.

Public or private, data is unquestionably moving to the cloud and composable data, rendering analytics “a more agile way to build analytics applications enabled by cloud marketplaces and low-code and no-code solutions.”

Trend 3: Data fabric is the foundation

D&A leaders use data fabric to help address “higher levels of diversity, distribution, scale and complexity in their organizations’ data assets,” as a result of increased digitization and  “more emancipated” consumers.

Data fabric applies analytics in order to constantly monitor data pipelines; data fabric “uses continuous analytics of data assets to support the design, deployment and utilization of diverse data to reduce time for integration by 30%, deployment by 30% and maintenance by 70%.”

Trend 4: From big to small and wide data

Using historical data for ML and AI models was rendered irrelevant, once changes based on the pandemic had an extreme effect on business. D&A leaders need a greater variety of data for better situational awareness because human and AI decision making grows more complex and demanding.

Therefore, D&A leaders need to choose analytical techniques that can use available data more effectively and they can with more insight that now requires less data.

“Small and wide data approaches provide robust analytics and AI, while reducing organizations’ large data set dependency,” Sallam said in a press release. “Using wide data, organizations attain a richer, more complete situational awareness or 360-degree view, enabling them to apply analytics for better decision making.”

Trend 5: XOps

DataOps, MLOps, ModelOps and PlatformOps, which comprise XOps, are necessary to achieve efficiencies and economies of scale through DevOps and using best practices of reliability, reusability and repeatability. This also reduces duplication of technology and processes and enabling automation.

Operationalization must be addressed initially and not as an afterthought because the latter is why most analytics and AI projects fail.  The report said,  “If D&A leaders operationalize at scale using XOps, they will enable the reproducibility, traceability, integrity and integrability of analytics and AI assets.”

Trend 6: Engineering decision intelligence

D&A leaders can make engineering decisions more accurate, repeatable, transparent and traceable, as decisions grow more automated and augmented. Gartner refers to “engineering decision intelligence,” which applies to a series of decisions  of business processes as well as grouped emergent decisions and consequences.

Trend 7: Data and analytics as a core business function

D&A is now making the shift into a core business function, rather than a secondary activity. D&A now is a shared business asset aligned to business results. Gartner noted that D&A silos break down because of better collaboration between central and federated D&A teams.

Trend 8: Graph relates everything

Graphs form the foundation of most modern data and analytics capabilities and are reliant on the foundation to find relationships between people, places, things, events and locations across a wide variety of data assets. D&A leaders rely on graphs as quick answers to complex business questions, which require contextual awareness and an understanding of the nature of connections and strengths across multiple entities.

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Gartner predicts that by 2025, graph technologies will be used in 80% of data and analytics innovations, up from 10% in 2021, facilitating rapid decision making across the organization.

Trend 9: The rise of the augmented consumer

Today, most business users use predefined dashboards and manual data exploration, but this can lead to incorrect conclusions and flawed decisions and actions. Time spent in predefined dashboards will progressively be replaced when users’ needs can be delivered  with automated, conversational, mobile and dynamically generated insights customized through a predefined dashboard.

“This will shift the analytical power to the information consumer, the augmented consumer, giving them capabilities previously only available to analysts and citizen data scientists,” Sallam said.

Trend 10: Data and analytics at the edge

Support for data, analytics and other technologies are found in edge computing environments, closer to assets in the physical world and outside IT’s purview. Gartner predicts that by 2023, over 50% of the primary responsibility of data and analytics leaders will comprise data created, managed and analyzed in edge environments.

Gartner concluded: “D&A leaders can use this trend to enable greater data management flexibility, speed, governance, and resilience. A diversity of use cases is driving the interest in edge capabilities for D&A, ranging from supporting real-time event analytics to enabling autonomous behavior of things.”

Gartner Data and analytics summit

Gartner analysts offer more analysis on data and analytics trends at the Gartner Data & Analytics Summits 2021, taking place virtually May 4-6 in the Americas, May 18-20 in EMEA, June 8-9 in APAC, June 23-24 in India, and July 12-13 in Japan. Follow news and updates from the conferences on Twitter using #GartnerDA.

This article was originally published on TechRepublic. 

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Google certificate program seeks to boost non-college grads, provide ‘opportunity for everyone’

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By Catie Perry

Could this become an alternative to a 4-year degree?

 

Google offers career certificates that can lead to jobs in growing fields

‘Grow with Google’ Vice President Lisa Gevelber explains Google’s professional certification training program which could lead to opportunities in high-growth fields.

Google’s online job training program is hoping to “create real economic opportunity for everyone,” according to Grow with Google Vice President Lisa Gevelber.

“Eighty million Americans do not have a college degree and we feel like that is a barrier to getting a good job,” she told FOX Business’ “Cavuto: Coast to Coast” Monday.

According to Gevelber, Google career certificates enable people to get the right skills and connect with the right employers for them.

The certificate courses are designed to be taken online at the participant’s own pace, which allows working people to take advantage of the program, according to Grow with Google’s website.

The average course can be completed in fewer than six months and costs roughly $240.

The job fields covered by the program include I.T. support, data analytics, user experience design and project management, all of which are “in demand” and “high-paying” fields, according to Gevelber.

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The program’s site states the average salary for entry-level roles across certificate fields is $63,600.

Google is working with the online learning platform Coursera to offer the certificates and the courses are taught by “experts at Google who have decades of experience,” Gevelber said.

Gevelber believes the most important aspect of the program is Google’s partnerships with employers like Home Depot, Smucker’s, Walmart, Infosys and Better.com.

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By Catie Perry

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What Is ProtonMail, and Why Is It More Private Than Gmail?

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By Tim Brookes

ProtonMail is a secure email service designed to protect your inbox and identity. So how exactly is ProtonMail different from a “regular” email provider like Gmail? And, more importantly: Is it time to make the switch?

What Is ProtonMail?

While all major email services claim to respect your privacy, ProtonMail goes further than most in a bid to protect you. That’s what makes it different from the big email providers like Google’s Gmail and Microsoft’s Outlook.com.

ProtonMail is one of a handful of so-called secure email providers that shun the traditional webmail route of plentiful free storage and integrated services in favour of heightened privacy and security features. Unlike with Gmail, you’ll have to pay to unlock many of these additional bells and whistles. Google profits off its free Gmail service by showing you ads, while ProtonMail doesn’t have any ads.

ProtonMail on MacBook
ProtonMail

Google and Microsoft use standard good security practices like two-factor authentication and securing the connection between your browser and their servers. ProtonMail goes further still by not logging identifying information, storing data on the server in a manner that’s useless to third parties, and better facilitating private conversations between users.

While ProtonMail sounds like an upgrade over Gmail, it does come with some caveats. The free plan is limited—for example, it only offers 500 MB of storage. Many of the features that make Gmail so useful aren’t possible in ProtonMail due to the emphasis on privacy and security. For example, it won’t automatically crawl through your email and add events to your calendar.

Deciding between a traditional provider like Google and a secure provider like ProtonMail is a case of weighing up convenience and privacy. If you want an email service with all the conveniences of Gmail, ProtonMail isn’t it.

ProtonMail Prioritizes Data Protection and Secure Messaging

ProtonMail encrypts all data on the server so that it is rendered useless to anyone without the key to decrypt it. In the case of a security breach, data swiped from ProtonMail’s servers wouldn’t be of any use. Not even ProtonMail can read your email.

This isn’t the case with standard webmail providers like Gmail, which only encrypts data between your browser and its servers. Google will use AI to “read” your email for services like the Google Assistant to make useful suggestions at opportune moments. Gmail can tell what you’re doing and when you’re doing it based on the contents of your inbox, and that’s become a feature that many users rely upon.

ProtonMail Encryption
ProtonMail

In addition to providing encryption on the server, ProtonMail also makes it easy to send encrypted messages between users. All communications between ProtonMail users are automatically end-to-end encrypted so that not even ProtonMail’s employees can read them. ProtonMail also facilitates the use of Pretty Good Privacy, or PGP, which allows you to “lock” email contents so that only recipients with the key can open them.

ProtonMail even allows you to send password-protected, self-destructing messages to users of any webmail platform. In essence, this is a bit of a trick, since the recipient must click on a link to open the message, but it works well enough, and it’s not something that Gmail or Outlook provides.

Using PGP inside of Gmail is possible but difficult, with browser extensions like Mailvelope and FlowCrypt making it easier to manage. Unlike with ProtonMail, which explicitly supports the feature, working with PGP inside of Gmail is much less streamlined and borderline unusable on mobile.

ProtonMail’s Servers Are Located in Switzerland

In addition to not being able to read the email stored on their servers, ProtonMail is based in Switzerland, where privacy laws are notoriously strict. This means that ProtonMail can’t be forced to hand over data to authorities in the U.S. Switzerland is not part of the Five Eyes intelligence-sharing agreement that exists between the U.S., Canada, Australia, the United Kingdom, and New Zealand.

By comparison, Google is located in the U.S. and may be forced by law to turn over information on its users. (And in the U.S., emails are considered “abandoned” after 180 days, so the government can request them without a warrant.) This includes inbox contents, metadata, IP addresses, and more. This information can then be shared with other members of the Five Eyes allegiance.

Swiss flag flown in front of a mountain
Murat Can Kirmizigul/Shutterstock

Because Google stores data in an unencrypted format on their servers, you don’t need decryption keys to make use of it. The entire contents of your inbox could be handed over to authorities and used against you. If Google experiences a data breach and user data is leaked, there’s no safety net in place to prevent that data from being used.

In the case of Gmail, identifying information like your IP address, real name, cell phone number, and locations from which you have logged in are all stored alongside the contents of your inbox.

ProtonMail Knows Very Little About You

ProtonMail doesn’t require that you provide any identifying information to create an account. You only need to supply a username (the email address you will be using) and a password. You can link a recovery email if you want, but you don’t have to.

On top of this, ProtonMail logs very little about its users. No IP addresses are stored, and tracking is not used to follow users from one site to the next. Metadata is discarded so that it’s harder to link an email to a point of origin. ProtonMail attempts to make you as anonymous as possible, though you should never assume complete anonymity online.

Google is the web’s largest advertising company. It’s responsible for a huge amount of the tracking that takes place across the web. Tools like Google Analytics help website owners monitor traffic, while Google’s advertising arm monitors your web usage to provide “relevant” advertising that you’re more likely to click on.

Google also runs many other popular services. Tracking users removes the need to keep logging in when moving from Google Maps to YouTube or from Gmail to Google Drive.

ProtonMail Is Completely Open Source

ProtonMail is open source, too. You can hop on GitHub and download the code for the ProtonMail webmail application. You can deploy it on your own server if you know how—or simply comb through the codebase looking for bugs or potential security flaws. ProtonMail also uses well-established open-source cryptography techniques including AES, RSA, and OpenPGP.

Having an open-source codebase has two main benefits. The first is that the code can be audited by anyone. ProtonMail states that they do not include backdoor access for law enforcement or security agencies to use. Don’t believe it? Download the source code and have a look for yourself.

ProtonMail Inbox
ProtonMail

The other upside to open-source code is that anyone can try and break ProtonMail’s security. This “crowdsourced” approach to security exposes any potential weaknesses in a way that closed-source applications do not.

Google also uses open-source technologies, but the Gmail codebase is ultimately closed. Closed-source code isn’t inherently insecure, but it can’t be tested quite in the same way that open-source code can.

Gmail Sacrifices Privacy for Features

On the flipside, Gmail comes with bags of features not seen in ProtonMail. Gmail can be used on virtually any device using virtually any mail app, including basic iPhone and Android mail apps.

Due to the way that ProtonMail handles encryption, you can’t connect your smartphone’s default mail app to your account and use it as is. To access ProtonMail on mobile, you’ll need to download the Android or iPhone app or log in via the webmail interface.

ProtonMail app for iPhone
ProtonMail

Gmail is also completely free, with a whopping 15GB of space available to anyone who needs it. This space is shared among your other Google services, and you can buy more for relatively little. Google doesn’t wall off features behind paywalls (unless you’re a Business user). Free accounts get everything: corporate-grade spam filters, optional experimental features, mail aliases, the lot.

ProtonMail is fairly limited by comparison. The free account is limited to 500MB of space and 150 messages a day. Features that are free with Gmail, like custom filters and an autoresponder, require a premium €4/month account. You get three labels, three folders, and a single address (no custom domains) for free.

This isn’t necessarily a bad thing, but decades of free webmail and massive space allocations have convinced many of us that email isn’t a service we should be paying for.

Google Account Storage Breakdown

Gmail is also deeply integrated with Google’s other services. Google Assistant can check your inbox for relevant information about upcoming trips or purchases you have made. This enables all manner of interesting and genuinely useful AI-powered features.

ProtonMail is an email service first and foremost, although the company also provides a VPN service and has encrypted calendar and file storage apps in development. There’s no shared pot-of-cloud storage, no machine-learning AI to get your boarding pass ready at the airport gate, and no companion search engine, map, or video-hosting service.

Should You Ditch Gmail for ProtonMail?

By now, you’ve probably already made up your mind about switching to a secure email service like ProtonMail or staying with Gmail. Ultimately, there’s no right answer. Most of Google’s users will never have their data handed over to authorities, and many will happily trade privacy for convenience.

But if you’re looking for an email service that does go the extra mile in protecting you, ProtonMail is a solid option.

Trying to break free from the Big G? Learn what you can do to remove Google from your life.

By Tim Brookes

Tim Brookes is a technology writer with more than a decade of experience. He’s invested in the Apple ecosystem, with experience covering Macs, iPhones, and iPads for publications like Zapier and MakeUseOf. Read Full Bio »

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